Philosophy Now Forum

The Necessity of Moral Realism
According to M.E. Fox and A.C.F.A. d’Avalos, logic dictates that at least some moral propositions must be true.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/6/The_ ... al_Realism

“Eating people is wrong” is an indicative moral proposition rather than an imperative moral statement such as “you ought not to eat people”. Indicative moral propositions like “eating people is wrong” are meaningful and are truth-assessable. All this means is that the statement “eating people is wrong” is either true or false. All indicative moral propositions, if they are meaningful, are either true or false. Moral realism is the theory that at least one indicative moral propositions is true. If any ethical claim of the form “x is right” or “x is wrong” is true, then ethics is objective. The moral sceptic, however, thinks that his view is more ‘realistic’ than moral realism. He believes that although all meaningful moral ‘is’ claims are either true or false, the truth of the matter is that all moral claims are in fact false. A systematic ‘error’ occurs because the properties to which indicative moral propositions refer do not exist.

An Argument for Moral Realism
The argument we shall advance in this paper is quite simple.
It’s that the meaningfulness of moral language presupposes the objective existence of moral properties.
That is, if moral claims are the sort of statements that can be in the first place either true or false, then it follows that some of them are in fact true. In other words, that moral scepticism is false.

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