Moral Realism and the Existence of Objective Moral Facts

Moral realism is the metaethical view that there exist objective moral facts or truths — facts about what is right, wrong, good, or bad — that hold independently of what any individual or culture believes, desires, or feels about them. On this view, moral judgments such as "torturing innocents for entertainment is wrong" are genuine assertions, capable of being true or false (a thesis called cognitivism), and their truth is not merely a report of the speaker's attitude but a claim about how things stand in a mind-independent moral reality. Moral realism therefore commits itself to at least three theses: cognitivism (moral judgments express beliefs, not mere feelings), a robust notion of truth for those beliefs, and mind-independence (the facts that make moral beliefs true do not reduce to what anyone thinks or feels about them). This combination distinguishes realism sharply from every non-cognitivist theory considered later in this unit — emotivism, prescriptivism, and quasi-realist expressivism — all of which deny, in one way or another, that ordinary moral language is in the business of describing an independent moral reality.