Moral Realism
Moral realism is a metaethical view committed to robust objectivity in ethics. No single description is likely to capture all realist views, but a reasonably accurate rule is to understand moral realism as the conjunction of three theses:
The semantic thesis: The primary semantic role of moral predicates (such as "right" and "wrong") is to refer to moral properties (such as rightness and wrongness), so that moral statements (such as "honesty is good" and "slavery is unjust") purport to represent moral facts, and express propositions that are true or false (or approximately true, largely false, and so on).
The alethic thesis: Some moral propositions are in fact true.
The metaphysical thesis: Moral propositions are true when actions and other objects of moral assessment have the relevant moral properties (so that the relevant moral facts obtain), where these facts and properties are robust: their metaphysical status, whatever it is, is not relevantly different from that of (certain types of) ordinary non-moral facts and properties.
To deny any one of these three theses is to embrace some form of moral irrealism. Many philosophers consider moral realism the default position because it appears best to capture many central features of ordinary moral thought: the assertoric surface character of ordinary moral discourse, the phenomenology of moral experience, our claim to have moral knowledge, and the possibility (and nature) of genuine moral error, progress, and disagreement even among sincere, open-minded, and well-informed people (Dancy 1986, Brink 1989, Shafer-Landau 2003).
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