Moral Realism
Moral facts hold independently of our attitudes.
What it claims
Moral realism combines three theses: moral sentences describe facts (cognitivism), some of them are actually true (non-error-theory), and their truth does not depend on our desires, attitudes, or agreements (mind-independence). Moore attacked attempts to reduce goodness to a natural property with the open question argument, founding non-naturalist realism. Naturalist realists such as Boyd, by contrast, treat moral properties as homeostatic clusters of properties that satisfy human needs, on the analogy of scientific natural kinds.
Nearby positions
Goes together with
Key thinkers
G. E. Moore · Derek Parfit · Russ Shafer-Landau · David Enoch · Richard Boyd