I might’ve been influenced too much by people speaking to me (in face-to-face conversation) as if moral realism entails objectivity of moral facts, and maybe also influenced too much by the definitions I’ve seen online. Wikipedia’s “Moral realism” article starts outright with
Moral realism (also ethical realism or moral Platonism) is the position that ethical sentences express propositions that refer to objective features of the world (that is, features independent of subjective opinion), some of which may be true to the extent that they report those features accurately. This makes moral realism a non-nihilist form of ethical cognitivism with an ontological orientation, standing in opposition to all forms of moral anti-realism and moral skepticism, including ethical subjectivism (which denies that moral propositions refer to objective facts),
and the IEP’s article on MR has an entire section, “Moral objectivity”, the beginning of which seems to drive at moral facts and MR relying on a basis beyond (human) mind states. The intro concludes,
Neither subjectivists nor relativists are obliged to deny that there is literal moral knowledge. Of course, according to them, moral truths imply truths about human psychology. Moral realists must maintain that moral truths —and hence moral knowledge—do not depend on facts about our desires and emotions for their truth.
At the same time, the SEP does seem to offer a less narrow definition of MR which allows for moral facts to have a non-objective basis.
I wonder whether I’ve anchored too much on old-fashioned, “classic” MR which does require moral facts to have objective status (whether that’s a mind-independent or human-independent status), while more recent moral realist philosophies are content to relax this constraint. Maybe I’m a moral realist to 21st century philosophers and a moral irrealist to 20th century philosophers!
“Moral facts” (i.e. _facts_ about _morality_) are overall neither objective nor subjective; they’re intersubjective, in that they are shared at least throughout a given community and moral code, and to some extent they’re even shared among most human communities. (Somewhat paradoxically, when talking about the most widely-shared values—precisely those values that are closest to being ‘objective’, if only in an everyday sense! - we don’t even use the term “morals” or “morality” but instead prefer to talk about “ethics”, which in a stricter sense is rather the subject of how different facets of morality might interrelate and balance each other, what it even means to argue about morality, and the practical implications of these things for everyday life.)
Whether “moral facts” are human-independent is an interesting question in itself. I think one could definitely argue that a number of basic moral facts that most human communities share (such as the value of ‘protection’ and ‘thriving’) are in fact also shared by many social animals. If true, this would clearly imply a human-independent status for these moral facts. Perhaps more importantly, it would also point to the need to attribute some sort of moral relevance and personhood at least to the most ‘highly-developed’ social animals, such as the great apes (hominids) and perhaps even dolphins and whales.
I might’ve been influenced too much by people speaking to me (in face-to-face conversation) as if moral realism entails objectivity of moral facts, and maybe also influenced too much by the definitions I’ve seen online. Wikipedia’s “Moral realism” article starts outright with
and the IEP’s article on MR has an entire section, “Moral objectivity”, the beginning of which seems to drive at moral facts and MR relying on a basis beyond (human) mind states. The intro concludes,
At the same time, the SEP does seem to offer a less narrow definition of MR which allows for moral facts to have a non-objective basis.
I wonder whether I’ve anchored too much on old-fashioned, “classic” MR which does require moral facts to have objective status (whether that’s a mind-independent or human-independent status), while more recent moral realist philosophies are content to relax this constraint. Maybe I’m a moral realist to 21st century philosophers and a moral irrealist to 20th century philosophers!
“Moral facts” (i.e. _facts_ about _morality_) are overall neither objective nor subjective; they’re intersubjective, in that they are shared at least throughout a given community and moral code, and to some extent they’re even shared among most human communities. (Somewhat paradoxically, when talking about the most widely-shared values—precisely those values that are closest to being ‘objective’, if only in an everyday sense! - we don’t even use the term “morals” or “morality” but instead prefer to talk about “ethics”, which in a stricter sense is rather the subject of how different facets of morality might interrelate and balance each other, what it even means to argue about morality, and the practical implications of these things for everyday life.)
Whether “moral facts” are human-independent is an interesting question in itself. I think one could definitely argue that a number of basic moral facts that most human communities share (such as the value of ‘protection’ and ‘thriving’) are in fact also shared by many social animals. If true, this would clearly imply a human-independent status for these moral facts. Perhaps more importantly, it would also point to the need to attribute some sort of moral relevance and personhood at least to the most ‘highly-developed’ social animals, such as the great apes (hominids) and perhaps even dolphins and whales.