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Moral Realism
First published Mon Oct 3, 2005; substantive revision Tue Feb 3, 2015
Taken at face value, the claim that Nigel has a moral obligation to keep his promise, like the
claim that Nyx is a black cat, purports to report a fact and is true if things are as the claim
purports. Moral realists are those who think that, in these respects, things should be taken at
face value—moral claims do purport to report facts and are true if they get the facts right.
Moreover, they hold, at least some moral claims actually are true. That much is the common
and more or less defining ground of moral realism (although some accounts of moral realism
see it as involving additional commitments, say to the independence of the moral facts from
human thought and practice, or to those facts being objective in some specified way).

As a result, those who reject moral realism are usefully divided into (i) those who think moral
claims do not purport to report facts in light of which they are true or false (noncognitivists)
and (ii) those who think that moral claims do carry this purport but deny that any moral
claims are actually true (error theorists).

It is worth noting that, while moral realists are united in their cognitivism and in their rejection
of error theories, they disagree among themselves not only about which moral claims are
actually true but about what it is about the world that makes those claims true. Moral realism
is not a particular substantive moral view nor does it carry a distinctive metaphysical
commitment over and above the commitment that comes with thinking moral claims can be
true or false and some are true. Still, much of the debate about moral realism revolves
around either what it takes for claims to be true or false at all (with some arguing that moral
claims do not have what it takes) or what it would take specifically for moral claims to be true
(with some arguing that moral claims would require something the world does not provide).

The debate between moral realists and anti-realists assumes, though, that there is a shared
object of inquiry—in this case, a range of claims all involved are willing to recognize as moral
claims—about which two questions can be raised and answered: Do these claims purport to
report facts in light of which they are true or false? Are some of them true? Moral realists
answer ‘yes’ to both, non-cognitivists answer ‘no’ to the first (and, by default, ‘no’ to the
second) while error theorists answer ‘yes’ to the first and ‘no’ to the second. (With the
introduction of “minimalism” about truth and facts, things become a bit more complicated.
See the section on semantics, below.) To note that some other, non-moral, claims do not (or
do) purport to report facts or that none (or some) of them are true, is to change the subject.
That said, it is strikingly hard to nail down with any accuracy just which claims count as
moral and so are at issue in the debate. For the most part, those concerned with whether
moral realism is true are forced to work back and forth between an intuitive grasp of which
claims are at issue and an articulate but controversial account of what they have in common
such that realism either is, or is not, defensible about them.
By all accounts, moral realism can fairly claim to have common sense and initial
appearances on its side. That advantage, however, might be easily outweighed; there are a
number of powerful arguments for holding that it is a mistake to think of moral claims as true.

1. Moral Disagreement
2. Metaphysics
3. Psychology
4. Epistemology
5. Semantics
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1. Moral Disagreement
Perhaps the longest standing argument is found in the extent and depth of moral
disagreement. The mere fact of disagreement does not raise a challenge for moral realism.
Disagreement is to be found in virtually any area, even where no one doubts that the claims
at stake purport to report facts and everyone grants that some claims are true.

But disagreements differ and many believe that the sort of disagreements one finds when it
comes to morality are best explained by supposing one of two things: (i) that moral claims
are not actually in the business of reporting facts, but are rather our way of expressing
emotions, or of controlling others’ behavior, or, at least, of taking a stand for and against
certain things or (ii) that moral claims are in the business of reporting facts, but the required
facts just are not to be found.

Taking the first line, many note that people differ in their emotions, attitudes and interests
and then argue that moral disagreements simply reflect the fact that the moral claims people
embrace are (despite appearances) really devices for expressing or serving their different
emotions, attitudes, and interests.

Taking the second line, others note that claims can genuinely purport to report facts and yet
utterly fail (consider claims about phlogiston or astrological forces or some mythical figure
that others believed existed) and then argue that moral disagreements take the form they do
because the facts that would be required to give them some order and direction are not to be
found.

On either view, the distinctive nature of moral disagreement is seen as well explained by the
supposition that moral realism is false, either because cognitivism is false or because an
error theory is true.

Interestingly, the two lines of argument are not really compatible. If one thinks that moral
claims do not even purport to report facts, one cannot intelligibly hold that the facts such
claims purport to report do not exist. Nonetheless, in important ways, the considerations
each mobilizes might be used to support the other. For instance, someone defending an
error theory might point to the ways in which moral claims are used to express or serve
peoples’ emotions, attitudes, and interests, to explain why people keep arguing as they do
despite there being no moral facts. And someone defending noncognitivism might point to
the practical utility of talking as if there were moral facts to explain why moral claims seem to
purport to report facts even though they do not.

Moreover, almost surely each of these views is getting at something that is importantly right
about some people and their use of what appear to be moral claims. No one doubts that
often peoples’ moral claims do express their emotions, attitudes, and do serve their interests
and it is reasonable to suspect that at least some people have in mind as moral facts a kind
of fact we have reason to think does not exist.

Moral realists are committed to holding, though, that to whatever extent moral claims might
have other uses and might be made by people with indefensible accounts of moral facts,
some moral claims, properly understood, are actually true. To counter the arguments that
appeal to the nature of moral disagreement, moral realists need to show that the
disagreements are actually compatible with their commitments.

An attractive first step is to note, as was done above, that mere disagreement is no
indictment. Indeed, to see the differences among people as disagreements—rather than as
mere differences—it seems as if one needs to hold that they are making claims that
contradict one another and this seems to require that each side see the other as making a
false claim. To the extent there is moral disagreement and not merely difference, moral
realists argue, we need at least to reject noncognitivism (even as we acknowledge that the
views people embrace might be heavily influenced by their emotions, attitudes, and
interests). While this is plausible, noncognitivists can and have replied by distinguishing
cognitive disagreement from other sorts of disagreement and arguing that moral
disagreements are of a sort that does not require cognitivism. Realists cannot simply dismiss
this possibility, though they can legitimately challenge noncognitivists to make good sense of
how moral arguments and disagreements are carried on without surreptitiously appealing to
the participants seeing their claims as purporting to report facts.

In any case, even if the nature of disagreements lends some plausibility to cognitivism, moral
realists need also to respond to the error theorist's contention that the arguments and
disagreements all rest on some false supposition to the effect that there are actually facts of
the sort there would have to be for some of the claims to be true. And, however moral
realists respond, they need to avoid doing so in a way that then makes a mystery of the
widespread moral disagreement (or at least difference) that all acknowledge.

Some moral realists argue that the disagreements, widespread as they are, do not go very
deep—that to a significant degree moral disagreements play out against the background of
shared fundamental principles with the differences of opinion regularly being traceable to
disagreements about the nonmoral facts that matter in light of the moral principles. On their
view, the explanation of moral disagreements will be of a piece with whatever turns out to be
a good explanation of the various nonmoral disagreements people find themselves in.

Other moral realists, though, see the disagreements as sometimes fundamental. On their
view, while moral disagreements might in some cases be traceable to disagreements about
nonmoral matters of fact, this will not always be true. Still, they deny the anti-realist's
contention that the disagreements that remain are well explained by noncognitivism or by an
error theory. Instead, they regularly offer some other explanation of the disagreements. They
point out, for example, that many of the disagreements can be traced to the distorting effects
of the emotions, attitudes, and interests that are inevitably bound up with moral issues. Or
they argue that what appear to be disagreements are really cases in which the people are
talking past each other, each making claims that might well be true once the claims are
properly understood (Harman 1975, Wong 1984). And they often combine these explanatory
strategies holding that the full range of moral disagreements are well explained by some
balanced appeal to all of the considerations just mentioned, treating some disagreements as
not fundamentally moral, others as a reflection of the distorting effects of emotion and
interest, and still others as being due to insufficiently subtle understandings of what people
are actually claiming. If some combination of these explanations works, then the moral
realist is on firm ground in holding that the existence of moral disagreements, such as they
are, is not an argument against moral realism. Of course, if no such explanation works, then
an appeal either to noncognitivism or an error theory (i.e. to some form of anti-realism) may
be the best alternative.

2. Metaphysics
Putting aside the arguments that appeal to moral disagreement, a significant motivation for
anti-realism about morality is found in worries about the metaphysics of moral realism and
especially worries about whether moral realism might be reconciled with (what has come to
be called) naturalism. It is hard, to say the least, to define naturalism in a clear way. Yet the
underlying idea is fairly easy to convey. According to naturalism, the only facts we should
believe in are those countenanced by, or at least compatible with, the results of science. To
find, of some putative fact, that its existence is neither established by, nor even compatible
with science, is to discover, as naturalism would have it, that there is no such fact. If moral
realism requires facts that are incompatible with science (as many think it does) that alone
would constitute a formidable argument against it.

Noncognitivists and error theorists alike have no trouble respecting naturalism while offering
their respective accounts of moral claims. In both cases, their accounts appeal to nothing not
already embraced by naturalism. Of course noncognitivists and error theories disagree in
crucial ways about the nature of moral thought, and noncognitivists and error theorists
disagree among themselves too about which versions of their preferred accounts are better.
But they all are, from the point of view of naturalism, on safe ground.

Moral realists, in contrast, are standardly seen as unable to sustain their accounts without
appealing, in the end, to putative facts that fly in the face of naturalism. This standard view
can be traced to a powerful and influential argument offered by G.E. Moore (1903). As
Moore saw things, being a naturalist about morality required thinking that moral terms could
be defined correctly using terms that refer to natural properties. Thus one might define ‘good’
as ‘pleasant’, thus securing naturalistic credentials for value (so long as pleasure was a
natural property) or one might define ‘good’ as ‘satisfies a desire we desire to have’ or as
‘conforms to the rules in force in our society’ or ‘promotes the species.’ Any one of these
proposed definitions, if true, would establish that the facts required to make claims about
what is good true or false were compatible with naturalism. Yet, Moore argued, no such
definition is true. Against every one, he maintain, a single line of argument was decisive. For
in each case, whatever naturalistic definition of moral terms was on offer, it always made
sense to ask, of things that had the naturalistic property in question, whether those things
were (really) good.
Consider someone who held not merely that pleasure was something good but (as a
definition would have it) that pleasure was goodness—that they were one and the same
property. According to that person, in claiming that something is pleasant one is claiming that
it is good, and vice versa. In that case, though, it would not make sense for people to
acknowledge that something is pleasant and then wonder, nonetheless, whether it was
good. That would be like acknowledging that something is a triangle and then wondering,
nonetheless, whether it has three sides. Yet, Moore maintained, the two cases are not alike.
A person who wonders whether a triangle has three sides shows he does not understand
what it is to be a triangle. His competence with the terms in question is revealed to be
inadequate. In contrast, Moore observed, for any natural property whatsoever it was always
an open question whether things that had that natural property were good. A person who
raised that question did not thereby reveal himself not to be competent with the terms in
question. What this shows, Moore argued, was that moral terms did not refer to natural
properties and so a proper account of moral claims would have to recognize that they
purport to report non-natural facts.

Now of course moral realists can consistently acknowledge this and then argue against
naturalism—perhaps, at least in part, on the grounds that naturalism is incompatible with
acknowledging moral facts. This was, in fact, Moore’s position. Yet one then has the burden
of explaining how moral facts are related to natural facts and the burden of explaining how
we might manage to learn of these non-natural facts. A good deal of the work that has been
done defending moral realism is devoted either to meeting these burdens or to showing that
they do not pose a special problem just for morality. Moral realists of this sort allow that
moral facts are not natural facts, and moral knowledge is not simply of a piece with scientific
knowledge, even as they defend the idea that there are moral facts and (at least in principle)
moral knowledge. They thus reject the idea that science is the measure and test of all things
(Shafer-Landau 2003, Parfit 2011, Scanlon 2014).

Impressed by the plausibility of naturalism, though, many moral realists have tried, in one
way or another, to show that the moral facts they are committed to are either themselves
natural facts or are at least appropriately compatible with such facts (Boyd 1988, Brink 1989,
Railton 1986). If they are right, then naturalism poses no special threat to moral realism.

For a long time, people thought that Moore’s Open Question Argument (as it has come to be
called) established that no version of moral naturalism was defensible. However, recent
developments in the philosophy of language and metaphysics have raised concerns about
Moore’s argument. Of special concern is the fact that the argument seems to rule out
inappropriately the possibility of establishing—on grounds other than semantic
analysis—that two terms actually refer to the same property, substance, or entity.

The problem becomes clear if one thinks of, for instance, the claim that water is H2O. That
water is H2O cannot be discovered simply by appreciating the meanings of the terms
involved, so if a person were to wonder of some water whether it is really H2O he would not
thereby be revealing some incompetence with the terms in question. His question would be,
in the relevant way, an Open Question, even if, in fact, water is H2O. Similarly, some moral
realists argue that value might, in fact, be properly identified with, say, what satisfies desires
we desire to have (to take one proposal Moore considered) even though this cannot be
discovered simply by appreciating the meanings of the terms involved. As a result, a person
might intelligibly wonder whether something that satisfied a desire she desired to have was
actually good. The question might be, in the relevant way, an Open Question, even if, in fact,
value is whatever satisfies a desire we desire to have. Of course the point here is not that
one or another such proposal is true, but that the openness of the Open Question is not
good grounds for supposing such proposals could not be true.

Pursing a different response to Moore's Open Question Argument, others have defended the
possibility of a successful semantic analysis reducing moral claims to claims expressible in
entirely naturalistic terms (Jackson 1998, Finlay 2014). Accordingly, they argue that the
openness Moore points to, such as it is, is compatible with a correct semantic
analysis—albeit not obvious—showing that moral facts are nothing over and above natural
facts.

Once the Open Question is sidelined as being, at least, not decisive, room is left for thinking
a correct account of the moral facts might identify them as natural facts. Just which facts
those might be, and what arguments one might offer for one account rather than another,
remains open, but the idea that we can know ahead of time that there are no good
arguments for such an account is no longer widely accepted.

3. Psychology
Nonetheless, realists and anti-realists alike are usually inclined to hold that Moore’s Open
Question Argument is getting at something important—some feature of moral claims that
makes them not well captured by nonmoral claims.

According to some, that ‘something important’ is that moral claims are essentially bound up
with motivation in a way that nonmoral claims are not (Ayer 1936, Stevenson 1937, Gibbard
1990, Blackburn 1993). Exactly what the connection to motivation is supposed to be is itself
controversial, but one common proposal (motivation internalism) is that a person counts as
sincerely making a moral claim only if she is motivated appropriately. To think of something
that it is good, for instance, goes with being, other things equal, in favor of it in ways that
would provide some motivation (not necessarily decisive) to promote, produce, preserve or
in other ways support it. If someone utterly lacks such motivations and yet claims
nonetheless that she thinks the thing in question is good, there is reason, people note, to
suspect either that she is being disingenuous or that she does not understand what she is
saying. This marks a real contrast with nonmoral claims since the fact that a person makes
some such claim sincerely seems never to entail anything in particular about her
motivations. Whether she is attracted by, repelled by, or simply indifferent to some color is
irrelevant to whether her claim that things have that color are sincere and well understood by
her.

Noncognitivists often appeal to this apparent contrast to argue that moral claims have this
necessary connection to motivation precisely because they do not express beliefs (that
might be true or false) but instead express motivational states of desire, approval, or
commitment (that might be satisfied or frustrated but are neither true nor false). Nonmoral
claims, they maintain, commonly express beliefs and for that reason are rightly seen as
purporting to report facts and as being evaluable as true or false. Yet, because beliefs alone
are motivationally inert, the fact that someone is sincerely making such a claim (that is, is
expressing something she actually believes) is compatible with her having any sort of
motivation, or none at all. In contrast, claims that commonly express desires, preferences,
and commitments do not purport to report facts and are not evaluable as true or false. Yet,
because these are all motivationally loaded, the fact that someone sincerely makes such a
claim (that is, is expressing something she actually feels) is incompatible with her failing to
have the corresponding motivations. As soon as the contrast is in place, noncognitivists
argue, we can well explain the motivational force of sincere moral claims and explain too the
insight behind Moore’s Open Question Argument, by seeing moral claims as not beliefs but
(perhaps a distinctive kind of) desire, preference, or commitment.

Some moral realists respond to this line of argument by rejecting the idea that beliefs are all
motivationally inert (Platts 1979). According to them moral beliefs stand as a counter
example. But it is not the only apparent counter example. Consider, for instance, first person
claims concerning the prospect of pain. If a person claimed that an experience would be
painful and yet had no motivation whatsoever, other things equal, to resist, oppose, or in
some way avoid that experience, there would be reason to suspect either that she is being
disingenuous or that she does not understand what she is saying. That, though, is no reason
to think a sincere claim that some experience would be painful does not express a belief,
purport to report a fact, and open itself to evaluation as true or false. This all suggests, these
realists argue, that moral claims might well carry motivational implications, and that might be
the insight behind Moore’s Open Question Argument, even though those claims express
beliefs and, as a result, purport to report facts and can be evaluated as true or false.

Other moral realists reject the idea that moral claims are as tightly bound up with motivation
as the noncognitivist argument supposes. They point out that, while an absence of
appropriate motivation would raise questions, there might be answers. The person making
the claims might be so depressed or so weak-willed or so evil, that she remains utterly
unmoved even when she sincerely thinks action would secure something valuable. To
suppose this is not possible is to beg the question against those who would grant that beliefs
are motivationally inert while holding that moral claims express beliefs.

Those that take this line can, and often do, go on to argue nonetheless both (i) that there is a
distinctive connection between moral claims and action and (ii) that the connection helps to
explain the insight behind Moore’s Open Question Argument. However, they maintain, the
distinctive connection is either itself a normative connection between the claims and
motivation or else it is a conceptual connection between the claims (or their truth) and which
actions a person has reason to perform (Smith 1994). On the first suggestion, a person
might well fail to be motivated appropriately by the moral claims she sincerely embraces, but
in failing to be appropriately motivated she would thereby count as irrational. On the second
suggestion, again a person might well fail to be motivated appropriately by the moral claims
she sincerely embraces, but either the fact that she sincerely embraces the claims or the
truth of the claims she embraces (if they are true) provide reasons for her to act in certain
ways. All of these views involves rejecting motivational internalism even as they each
maintain that there is a conceptual connection of some sort between moral claims (or their
truth) and action (or the motivation to act). (The resulting views are often characterized as
versions of reason internalism.) Nonmoral claims alone never imply anything in particular
about what people have reason to do or refrain from doing, but moral claims, in contrast, do
have such implications, they argue. On this view, there is a necessary connection between
moral claims and action, but it is between these claims (or their truth) and reason (or
rationality), and is not such that sincerely embracing a moral claim guarantees appropriate
motivation.

None of this is to defend, as realists must, the idea that some of the claims are actually true.
But it does suggest that moral realists can acknowledge a necessary connection between
moral claims and action without abandoning the cognitivism that is central to their position.

Some error theorists do argue that combining cognitivism with motivational internalism
results in an untenable position (Mackie 1977). According to them, the moral facts that would
make motivating beliefs true would themselves have to be, in some way, intrinsically
motivating states of the world. And, they add, there is no reason to think there are such
states. Yet if the motivational internalism one embraces for moral claims has a parallel for
pain claims, then this argument must be wrong (assuming it is true of some experiences that
they are painful). Either motivational internalism does not require intrinsically motivating
states of the world in order for the relevant claims to be true or else we have independent
reason (provided by our awareness of pain) to think there are such states. While there may
well be reason to think there are no moral facts, this argument does not provide it.

4. Epistemology
Suppose, for the sake of the argument, that there are moral facts. Suppose even that the
moral facts are properly thought of as at least compatible with science. One thing Moore’s
Open Question Argument still seems to show is that no appeal to natural facts discovered by
scientific method would establish that the moral facts are one way rather than another. That
something is pleasant, or useful, or satisfies someone’s preference, is perfectly compatible
with thinking that it is neither good nor right nor worth doing. The mere fact that moral facts
might be compatible with natural facts does nothing to support the idea that we could learn
about the moral facts. David Hume seems to have been, in effect, pressing this point long
before Moore, when he argued that no moral conclusion follows non-problematically from
nonmoral premises (Hume 1739). No “ought,” he pointed out, followed from an “is”—without
the help of another (presupposed) “ought.” More generally, there is no valid inference from
nonmoral premises to moral conclusions unless one relies, at least surreptitiously, on a
moral premise. If, then, all that science can establish is what “is” and not what ought to be,
science cannot alone establish moral conclusions.

But from where, then, can we get the moral premises needed? Of course no answer is to be
found in a claim that certain norms are in force or that a powerful being commanded
something since, in both cases, nothing about what ought to be done follows from these
claims without assuming some further moral claim (e.g. that one ought to obey the norms in
force or that one owes allegiance to the powerful being). If at least some fundamental moral
principles were self-evident, or analytic truths, or at least reasonably thought to enjoy
widespread consensus or to be such that eventually all would converge on those principles,
there might be some plausible candidates. Yet the few principles that might be
candidates—one ought to treat people with respect or one ought to promote human welfare
or, other things equal, pleasure is good—are all either so abstract or inspecific in their
implications that they could hardly alone work to justify the full range of moral claims people
are inclined to make.
These considerations highlight a crucial difficulty moral realists face even if one grants the
existence of moral facts: they need some account of how we might justify our moral claims.
Otherwise, whatever the moral facts are, we would have reasonable grounds for worrying
that what we count as evidence for any particular claim is no evidence at all.

In light of this concern, it is worth noting that the challenge posed here for our moral claims
actually plagues a huge range of other claims we take ourselves to be justified in making.
For instance, just as no collection of nonmoral premises will alone entail a moral conclusion,
no collection of nonpsychological premises will alone entail a psychological conclusion, and
no collection of nonbiological premises will alone entail a biological conclusion. In each case
the premises will entail the conclusions only if, at least surreptitiously, psychological or
biological premises, respectively, are introduced. Yet no one supposes that this means we
can never justify claims concerning psychology or biology. That there are these analogues of
course does not establish that we are, in fact, justified in making the moral claims we do. But
they do show that granting the inferential gap between nonmoral claims and moral claims
does not establish that we can have no evidence for the moral claims. And they refocus the
challenge facing moral realists. Under what conditions, and why, are psychological and
biological claims reasonably thought justified? Might similar conditions and considerations
hold for moral claims?

At one time, philosophers thought there was a quick and easy answer to these questions, an
answer that immediately discredited moral claims. That answer was that in psychology and
biology our justifications can and do ultimately ground out in empirical observations, whereas
nothing of the kind is available for moral theory. If true, this would explain in a sharp way why
psychology and biology might have a real claim on our opinions while morality and alchemy
and various crackpot theories do not. The former can be tested against experience and pass
the test, while the latter, while testable, can be seen to fail utterly.

Moral realists have three sorts of reply to the epistemic challenge they face. One is to argue
that a proper appreciation of the ways in which all observation is theory laden leaves no real
contrast between the observations that support psychology and biology and those that are
appealed to supporting moral theories. As proponents of this view would have it, the process
of justifying various scientific theories, which involves moving back and forth between
particular specific claims and more general principles seeking a mutually supporting system,
is matched step for step by when people develop and defend moral theories. In both cases
specific judgments (concerning observations or the badness of a certain act, for instance)
are tentatively accepted and an attempt is made to make sense of them by appeal to more
general principles that explain the judgments. When the more general principles are
available the specific judgments are taken as evidence for the principles and the principles
reciprocate by helping to justify the thought that the specific judgments are accurate. But if
no general principles are available the specific judgments are called into question and the
suspicion is rightly raised that they might be illusory or misleading. Whether they are taken to
be warranted is decided in large part, and rightly, by appealing to other principles that so far
have themselves found support in their fit with still other specific judgments. The process is
of necessity tentative and piecemeal but it is, many argue, nonetheless no different in
science than in morality. All of this is, of course, compatible with thinking the process might
end in failure—alchemy and crackpot theories are prime examples of how the attempt to
sustain a systematic and mutually supporting set of beliefs can fail. But absent special
arguments that morality fails in the way they do, morality no less than psychology and
biology can claim that experience may well provide confirmation for our moral claims
(Sayre-McCord 1996).

Some moral realists, particularists, reject the general picture of systematic justification just
described and yet argue that, when it comes to the role of observation, moral claims are
nonetheless actually on a par with non-moral claims (Dancy 1993). According to them, our
justification for our particular nonmoral observations depends not at all on our having any
sort of articulatable general grounds to offer as support. To suppose otherwise is to succumb
to a misguided picture of when and why people are justified in believing as they do
concerning what they observe. The situation is exactly the same, particularists maintain, with
our moral claims. Here too someone can be perfectly justified in claiming, for instance, that
some particular action was wrong or that some response was obligatory, without having
articulatable general ground to offer as support. Such moral claims might, of course, still
prove to be mistaken, but then the same is true of what people take themselves to have
seen.

Another realist reply to the epistemic challenge is to argue that mathematics and logic, not
science, are the right models of moral theory (Scanlon 2014). Neither mathematics nor logic,
some maintain, rely on experience for their confirmation. They are, instead, supportable a
priori by appeal to the nature of the concepts they involve. On this view, a sound defense of
the principles we need to ground moral arguments can be found in a suitably subtle and
careful bit of conceptual analysis. In light of Moore’s Open Question Argument, those who
advocate an epistemology of conceptual analysis acknowledge that the correct analysis,
whatever it is, is likely not at all obvious. And, they point out, this means that people who are
genuinely competent with the relevant concepts might themselves not recognize the correct
analysis as correct (Jackson 1998). Nonetheless, the analysis might be correct. If there is
some such analysis to be had, and if it is rich enough to provide the sort of substantive
principles needed to underwrite our various particular judgments, realism will have met well
its epistemic burden. Of course putting things this way assumes we have a good
epistemology of conceptual analysis, which might well be called into question. But worries
about conceptual analysis are not specific to morality. And if they prove decisive, then those
worries leave mathematics and logic, no less than morals, in need of some grounding or
other. Whatever might be advanced on behalf of mathematics and logic, many think, should
work as well for morality.

Still another reply, compatible with the first two but relying specifically on neither, shifts
attention from science and from mathematics and logic, to epistemology itself. To think of
any set of considerations that they justify some conclusion is to make a claim concerning the
value (albeit the epistemic as opposed to moral value) of a conclusion. To hold of science, or
mathematics, or logic, that there is a difference between good evidence or good arguments
and bad ones is again to commit oneself evaluatively. This raises an obvious question: under
what conditions, and why, are epistemic claims reasonably thought justified? Whatever
answer one might begin to offer will immediately provide a model for an answer to the
parallel question raised about moral judgments. There is no guarantee, of course, that our
moral judgments will then end up being justified. The epistemic standards epistemology
meets might well not be met by moral theory. But there is good reason to think the kinds of
consideration that are appropriate to judging epistemic principles will be appropriate too
when it comes to judging other normative principles, including those that we might recognize
as moral. This means that any quick dismissal of moral theory as obviously not the sort of
thing that could really be justified are almost surely too quick.

5. Semantics
Moral realists have here been characterized as those who hold that moral claims purport to
report facts, that they are evaluable as true or false in light of whether the facts are as the
claims purport, and that at least some such claims are actually true. Many have thought
there are good reasons—even decisive reasons—for rejecting moral realism so conceived.

Yet, with the development of (what has come to be called) minimalism about talk of truth and
fact, it might seem that this characterization makes being a moral realist easier than it should
be. As minimalism would have it, saying that some claim is true is just a way of (re-)asserting
the claim and carries no commitment beyond that expressed by the original claim. Thus, if
one is willing to claim that “murdering innocent children for fun is wrong” one can comfortably
claim as well that that “murdering innocent children for fun is wrong is true” without thereby
taking on any additional metaphysical baggage. Since even noncognitivists would
presumably be willing to claim that “murdering innocent children for fun is wrong,” they can
acknowledge that the claim is true too and it would be a mistake to see that addition as any
sort of renunciation of their noncognitivism. Having said that “it is true that murdering
innocent children for fun is wrong,” it seems similarly innocuous for the non-cognitivists to
grant that it is a fact. After all, they can argue, to say of some claim that what it says is a fact
is itself just a way of (re-)asserting the claim and it too carries no commitment beyond that
expressed by the original claim. Grammar alone, it seems, renders talk of truth and fact
appropriate and does so without incurring the sort of metaphysical commitments that are
rightly associated with genuine realism (see Gibbard 2003, Dreier 2005).

Putting things this way, though, is misleading. It involves supposing that the noncognitivist
has somehow made out what her position comes to without appealing to a contrast between,
on the one hand, those claims that are properly seen as truth-evaluable and, on the other
hand, those that are not. Traditional noncognitivism embraces this contrast and so traditional
noncognitivists are able to argue intelligibly that moral claims are among those for which
truth is genuinely not at issue. They often, against the background of the contrast, go on to
explain why moral claims nonetheless mimic so well claims that might actually be true and
why we might even talk of them being “true” in a sense (albeit not in the sense in which
claims properly understood as cognitive might be true). If, though, the contrast cannot be
drawn in terms of whether the claims are truth-evaluable, the noncognitivist needs to offer an
alternative account of what marks the difference between the claims concerning which one
should be a noncognitivist and those concerning which one should be a cognitivist. Absent
such a contrast, the noncognitivists have no distinctive thesis.

Error theorists also can find no special comfort in minimalism about truth and fact. After all,
to defend their view, error theorists need to advance grounds for thinking that, while moral
claims are truth-evaluable, none of them are actually true. This requires resisting the
minimalist urge to make truth so cheap that any sort of claim can have it. That is not to say
that an error theorist cannot be a minimalist about truth and fact. But it is to say that the
minimalism does not make her position easier (and it may actually make her position more
difficult) to sustain.
Minimalism is, then, no panacea for moral anti-realists. But it is not poison for them either.
Although minimalism undermines the standard way in which anti-realists mark out their
distinctive territory, there is still room for them to defend some alternative grounds for
drawing the contrast between the areas about which one is a realist and those about which
one is an anti-realist. For instance, one might argue that to be a realist about some area
(morality or whatever) is to hold that the properties distinctive to that area (in this case moral
properties) figure in some fundamental way in our explanations. To be an anti-realist, on this
view, is to hold that such properties do not so figure. Drawing the contrast in this way would
allow an anti-realist still to acknowledge that the properties exist (albeit not as fundamental
explainers) and that claims ascribing them are sometimes true. But it is unclear whether the
main issues that divide those who consider themselves realists from their opponents are
best seen as being about whether moral properties qualify as fundamental explainers.
Alternatively, one might argue that to be a realist about some area is to hold that the truths
expressed by the relevant claims are not mind-dependent. And, the suggestion would be, to
be an anti-realist is to think that if there are such truths, they are mind-dependent. This way
of drawing the contrast risks ruling out as impossible realism about psychology, which seems
draconian. And it would immediately count as anti-realist those metaethical views that treat
moral facts as response dependent or in other ways dependent upon human thought and
practice. So, again, it is unclear whether this contrast lines up properly with the main issues
that have divided realists from anti-realists. Nonetheless, one might rely on either
explanation or mind-independence to mark an important contrast between various
metaethical views. Paying attention to the stand particular views take on explanation and
mind-independence inevitably helps to keep them in focus and works to mark important
questions.

Whatever one thinks of minimalism, of the importance of explanation, and of

mind-independence, moral realism travels with the burden of making sense of the semantics
of moral terms in a way that will support seeing claims that use them as genuinely
truth-evaluable. Various features of the way in which people rely on such claims in their
thought and talk support the idea that they are. At the same time, though, some aspects of
the ways in which children acquire moral terms and the ways in which those terms are
bound up with various emotions pull against seeing the terms as simply on a par with
nonmoral terms. Working through the ways in which moral claims differ from, as well as the
ways in which they are the same as, other claims that people make is essential to getting a
full understanding of our moral thought and practice. Whether such a full understanding will
involve seeing us as having moral beliefs (and not just moral reactions) that might be true, is
not at all clear. Perhaps even less clear is whether and why we might reasonably hold that
some of those beliefs are actually true. Yet it is pretty clear that people do generally regard
their moral claims, and the moral claims of others, as purporting to report facts, and to the
extent they themselves sincerely advance such claims they seem to be regarding at least
some such claims as actually true. The burden is on the anti-realists about morality to argue
that that this involves a mistake of some sort.

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