Moral Realism Revived: Cornell Realism and Naturalist Ethics

Cornell realism, named for the informal cluster of philosophers — chiefly Richard Boyd, Nicholas Sturgeon, and David Brink — associated with Cornell University in the 1980s, revives naturalist moral realism by drawing directly on developments in the philosophy of language and science that had not been available to Moore in 1903. Richard Boyd's landmark paper "How to Be a Moral Realist" (1988) argues that moral properties, such as goodness, are natural properties after all, though not simple ones in Moore's sense: goodness, on Boyd's account, is something like a homeostatic property cluster — a family of natural properties (such as the satisfaction of certain deep human needs, the cultivation of certain virtues, the maintenance of certain social and psychological goods) that tend to occur together and mutually reinforce one another because of underlying causal mechanisms, in a manner directly analogous to how a cluster concept like "health" picks out a homeostatically related family of physiological properties rather than any single, simple natural kind.