Comparison
Moral Realism vs Moral Anti-Realism
Are there moral facts that hold independently of what anyone thinks or feels?
Moral realism
Yes. Some moral claims are true independently of any mind, and we can be right or wrong about them.
Read the full entry ›Moral anti-realism
No. There are no mind-independent moral facts; moral claims express attitudes or hold only within a framework.
Read the full entry ›What both accept
Both take moral language and moral disagreement seriously as phenomena to explain, and both accept that people experience moral claims as more than mere preference.
Where they decisively part
Moral realism holds that some moral claims are true in a way that does not depend on any mind, the way 'torturing for fun is wrong' is just true. Anti-realism holds there are no such mind-independent moral facts: moral claims express attitudes, serve social functions, or are true only relative to a framework.
The strongest case for each
Moral realism
It takes at face value the near-universal conviction that some acts, such as gratuitous cruelty, are wrong whatever anyone believes, and it makes sense of moral inquiry, error, and progress as tracking something real.
Moral anti-realism
It needs no mysterious non-natural facts or special faculty to detect them, and it explains cultural variation and the action-guiding, emotional character of moral talk more economically.
The strongest objection to each
Moral realism
It owes an account of what these non-natural facts are and how we could come to know them, and the sheer breadth of moral disagreement is hard to square with a single accessible moral reality.
Moral anti-realism
It strains to preserve the difference between a considered moral judgment and a mere preference, and to explain how moral reasoning and moral progress can be more than a change of fashion.
When they predict differently
They diverge on how to read persistent moral disagreement and moral progress: the realist sees convergence on a truth, the anti-realist sees shifting attitudes or negotiated standards. In ordinary first-order ethics, both can and do argue for the same conclusions.
Primary sources and further reading
- David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739)
- G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (1903)
- J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977)