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The answer to the question below is that a moral realist is not necessarily committed to the view that moral norms are 'objective' in the sense that a statement expressing that norm is universally true for all moral agents. Moral Relativists could be moral realists as well. - 27, October 2006
How is this different from moral objectivism? Could the two be merged? Canuck-Errant 10:28, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
I confess some puzzlement about placing constructivists (who are often Kantians) like Korsgaard and Rawls (or O'Neill) in the same camp as subjectivists, or in adjoining campus, since it seems to me that constructivists would want to say that there were truth-apt moral propositions the truth of which was preference- or desire-independent--that were, in a word, objective. It seems to me that it might be useful more clearly to distinguish between moral objectivism (with a small 'o'), a position to which constructivists could clearly subscribe, and moral realism, a sub-family of objectivism, to which they couldn't. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.93.180.171 ( talk) 00:08, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
I agree with the above comment; there is an extensive discussion on [1] between myself and Postmodern Beatnik where I have tried to argue that the classifications used here on in the meta-ethics article falsely group both Richard Hare and ethical constructivists with those who believe that there are no objective values. This is a complete misrepresentation of their views. Korsgaard has also argued that positions like hers should be called "procedural realism", which would also arguably include the general views of pragmatists like CS Peice on truth (both scientific and moral), so I don't even think we should concede the word "realism" to only include non-constructivist views. What a few people are calling "realism" here represents only one specific view about what reality is; whether they are right or not, we can't permit a wikipedia article to assume that they are, and to make incorrect inferences about how to characterize contrary positions based on the assumption that this particular view is right.
Indeed, Korsgaard isn't even a non-realist under the strict definitions given in the article; she would agree to all three of the theses listed below. Hare is not one only because he doesn't think that ordinary moral statements are truth-apt; but he insists that there are strict logical criteria for their proper expression, and even that we can be *at least* as certain about the criteria of right or wrong assertions of moral claims as we can about scientific ones (see his article in Moral Knowledge?: New Readings in Moral Epistemology by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong & Mark Timmons on this point). Hence he certainly thinks there are objective values, and therefore would be a moral realist according the first sentence of the present wikipedia article, suggesting some confusion in the article about what the concept of "moral realism" is trying to get at.-- ScottForschler ( talk) 13:26, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
I edited the page to classify Hare, Rawls, and Korsgaard as possible realists. If anyone disagrees, I will ask you to suggest a rewriting of the article's multiple definitions of realism, as (1) commitment to objective values, and (2) commitment to 2 or 3 of the theses listed in the middle. Korsgaard agrees with all three theses; Hare disagrees with thesis 2, but agrees with the others, and also believes in objective values; Rawls I'm less certain about, in part because he disclaimed the attempt to provide a complete moral theory, but was clearly confident that certain results of his constructivist procedure were robustly true moral statements.
Incidentally, I don't understand why this line
is at the bottom of the opening section. It doesn't seem related to the rest. Can anyone elaborate it or defend its placement, or should we remove it?-- ScottForschler ( talk) 17:21, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
I object to the illustrative example using the proposition "murder is wrong" to illustrate moral realism. The definition of the word "murder" is "a wrongful killing." This exposes the difficulty with many discussions of moral facts: the definitions for moral facts tend to be circular in nature. Definitions for ordinary facts (like "It is raining") do not tend to have this problem of circularity. If somebody chooses to take on a rewrite of this article I would hope that they could strive to eliminate circular definitions and other problematic discussions within this article.
in regards to your point number three, denying that murder is wrong isn't REALLY nihilism, it's just bad grammar. saying that "wrongful killing isn't wrong" is sort of a grammatical and linguistic issue. a better example would be to say that someone might hold the belief that killing isn't wrong, and that murder therefore doesn't exist as a concept except in people's imaginations.
It might be, although I think that is a minor point.
1Z
18:22, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
I have just added a section on the difference between the robust model of moral realism and the minimal model of moral realism. My main problem with it is the formatting of the quote from Pekka Väyrynen. I used a template suggested by WP:MOS, but I am unsure it was the most appropriate way to address the formatting issue. Postmodern Beatnik ( talk) 18:16, 1 May 2008 (UTC)
It appears that moral realism is closely related to Judeo-Christian ethics and religion in general. It seems noteworthy but should likely be argued further. ADM ( talk) 13:30, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man is the definitive book that argues for the correctness of moral realism. It's impact has been profound and it probably deserves mention in the article somewhere. -- BenMcLean ( talk) 19:01, 17 December 2009 (UTC)
What are the other kinds then? -- BenMcLean ( talk) 22:15, 1 March 2010 (UTC)
I think these two articles describe the same concept. -- BenMcLean ( talk) 19:04, 17 December 2009 (UTC)
I suggest that it would be more appropriate to consider the merging of naturalist philosophy and natural law. Naturalist philosophy defines ethical terms with natural properties and this is a parallel to natural law which tries to define legal terms and origins by appealing to nature. However even this parallel has shortcomings - Bentham is a moral naturalist, but opposes natural law. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.42.225.63 ( talk) 13:04, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
Section Criticism is unsourced by inline references. Among others the following "criticism" seems very odd to me:
Which is not needed. If empirically, a certain kind of conflicts occur, and then a counter-measure strategy is proved effective, such as by socio-biological statistics, then we have a proper explanation of the counter-measure. Why is the lack of answer to a partially or totally irrelevant question a proper criticism? Is the objection sourceable, or am I correct in suspecting that the statement is not sourceable because it is a miscomprehension (or similar)? The entire Criticism section needs proper inline references, and unvaguing so that all statements are attributed to sources. Rursus dixit. ( mbork3!) 15:12, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
There is a video conversation between Peter Railton and Don Loeb about moral realism that lasts about an hour on http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/13443 Does anyone think that it would be inappropriate to add this as an external link to the article, or contradict with wikipedia rules? cihan ( talk) 02:40, 12 August 2010 (UTC)
I added a section on scientific views related to moral realism. Several scientists and science writers argue that it is possible to ground ethics in physical reality and processes.-- Babank ( talk) 22:22, 3 April 2011 (UTC)
For one, "scientific realism" at the top of the category is completely unrelated to moral realism which is a bad sign in itself, second the content within is not discussed by philosophers of moral realism and it therefore of little worth. It doesn't include the very few times that science has had implications for moral realism, e.g. the evolutionary argument put forward by Street. I've edited the article to remove the section but may begin work on arguments for moral realism/criticism in order to include the evolutionary argument, etc. -- Ollyoxenfree ( talk) 23:27, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
This article has been botched, and I'm afraid this is another example. Richard Boyd is the strongest proponent of scientific and moral realism, and the originator of Cornell Realism. In every sense, moral and scientific realism are the same thing in this view. And it is a terrible mistake that Boyd's "How To Be A Moral Realist" (which, according to Boyd, could just as well be called "how to be a scientific realist") has been left out of here. He's produced dozens of papers, and steadily over the years, people have adopted versions of it. And even this year's Popper Prize (BJP) went to a paper detailing an elaboration of this theory. I'd also add Philip Kitcher (John Dewey Professor at Columbia) to this article. Qphilo ( talk) 00:16, 17 January 2017 (UTC)
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The demand of accecibility is of common knowledge in the field, and so the right solution is to bring back my contribution while noting that a source is required. Amir Segev Sarusi ( talk) 09:09, 1 December 2019 (UTC)
Moral platonism is a kind of moral realism, but the lede to this article falsely equates them. I'd wager that most moral realists are not well-described as moral platonists. The source for the alternative name is Shafer-Landau's collection Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Volume 10, which, I checked, does indeed have a discussion of and argument moral platonism - that makes very clear that moral platonism is only a subset of (non-naturalist) moral realism. Naturalist moral realism, as well as various kinds of non-platonistic non-naturalisms, are not moral platonism. I've edited out the "moral Platonism" part of the lede (as well as the reference, whose entire purpose seems to be trying to establish that moral realism is also known as moral platonism - which, I emphasize, is neither supported by the reference nor true). Tikallisti ( talk) 09:54, 5 November 2020 (UTC)
In
this edit
User:Dellagostino deleted the phrase "of the world" from the short description which read (mirroring the lede) "...ethical sentences express propositions that refer to objective features of the world". His edit summary was: 'Position that ethical sentences express propositions that refer to objective features of the world' implies that such features are natural, when moral realism applies to divine command theory and other worldly phenomena. similar to mathematical propositions, moral facts are true or false independent of any particular world."
In
this edit I reverted that with the edit summary divine command theory isn't a form of the robust moral realism this article is about, it's just a kind of moral universalism; similarly, other universalist views like non-descriptive cognitivism are not "realist" in this sense because they don't take moral claims to describe facts about the world
He emailed me about that, being new here and not understanding talk pages, and with his permission I'm reproducing his email and responding to it here: