Moral realism
Moral realism is the view in philosophy that there are objective moral values. Moral realists argue that moral judgments describe moral facts. This combines a cognitivist view about moral judgments (they are truth-evaluable mental states that describe the state of the world), a view about the existence of moral facts (they do in fact exist), and a view about the nature of moral facts (they are objective: independent of our cognizing them, or our stance towards them, etc.). It contrasts with expressivist or non-cognitivist theories of moral judgment (e.g., Stevenson, Hare, Blackburn, Gibbard, Ayer), error theories of moral judgments (e.g., Mackie), fictionalist theories of moral judgment (e.g., R. Joyce, M. Kalderon) and constructivist or relativist theories of the nature of moral facts (e.g., R. Firth, Rawls, Korsgaard, Harman).
Some examples of moral realists would be David Brink, John McDowell, Peter Railton, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Michael Smith, Russ Shafer-Landau, G.E. Moore, Ayn Rand, John Finnis, Richard Boyd, Nicholas Sturgeon, and Thomas Nagel. Plato and (arguably) Immanuel Kant could also be considered moral realists. Norman Geras (1985) has argued that Karl Marx was a moral realist.
Moral realism asserts that moral statements express propositions about the actual state of reality, that a statement such as "murder is wrong" is in fact true or false in the same way that the statement "it is raining" or "the Earth revolves around the Sun" is true or false.
Realism is a stronger position than cognitivism; while all realists are cognitivists, not all cognitivists are realists.
The change of relativistic morals over time is called the "Zeitgeist".
Advantages
The advantages of such a theory of ethics are numerous: in particular, moral realism allows the ordinary rules of logic (modus ponens, etc.) to be applied straightforwardly to moral statements. We can say that a moral belief is false or unjustified or contradictory in the same way we would about a factual belief. This is a problem for expressivism, as shown by the Frege-Geach problem.
Another advantage of moral realism is its capacity to resolve moral disagreements: If two moral beliefs contradict one another, realism says that they cannot both be right, and therefore everyone involved ought to be seeking out the right answer to resolve the disagreement. Contrary theories of meta-ethics have trouble even formulating the statement "this moral belief is wrong," and so they cannot resolve disagreements in this way.
Criticisms
Several criticisms have been raised against moral realism: The first is that, while realism can explain how to resolve moral conflicts, it cannot explain how these conflicts arose in the first place. A common response to this argument is that moral conflicts occur when an individual or group simply is not sufficiently educated in the fundamentals of realistic morality, and so are compelled to act in ways that transgress concrete moral boundaries.
Others are critical of moral realism because it postulates the existence of a kind of "moral fact" which is nonmaterial and does not appear to be accessible to the scientific method. Moral truths cannot be observed in the same way as material facts (which are also objective), so it seems odd to count them in the same category. One emotivist counterargument (although emotivism is usually non-cognitivist) alleges that "wrong" actions produce measurable results in the form of negative emotional reactions, either within the individual transgressor, within the person or people most directly affected by the act, or within a (preferably wide) consensus of direct or indirect observers. Others disgregard this objection on the basis that it is only valid if the moral realist concedes to a naturalistic worldview.
References and further reading
- Hume, David (1739). Treatise Concerning Human Nature, edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1888.
- Kant, Immanuel (1785). Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, translated by James W. Ellington. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993.
- Kim, Shin (2006). "Moral Realism", The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fieser & Dowden (eds.). (link)
- Moore, G. E. (1903). Principia Ethica, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Korsgaard, Christine (1996). The Sources of Normativity, New York: Cambridge University Press.
- Norman Geras (1985). "The Controversy about Marx and Justice", New Left Review, 150, pp. 47-85.
- Railton, Peter (1986). "Moral Realism". Philosophical Review, 95, pp. 163-207.
- Sayre-McCord, Geoff (2005). "Moral Realism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2005 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). (link)
- Shafer-Landau, Russ (2003) "Moral Realism: A Defense", Oxford, ISBN 0199259755.
- Sturgeon, Nicholas (1985). "Moral Explanations", in Morality, Reason, and Truth, edited by David Copp and David Zimmerman, Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allanheld, pp. 49-78.