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Philosophy vocabulary · Ethics and Moral Philosophy

Moral realism

Meaning in philosophy, with examples

nounAdvanced term

In philosophy, moral realism means: The metaethical view that there are objective moral facts, which hold independently of what any person or culture believes about them.

In Turkish: ahlaki gerçekçilik, ahlaki realizm

How it is used

Opposed by anti-realist views such as relativism, expressivism and error theory. Realists must explain what kind of facts moral facts are and how we come to know them. Someone who holds the view is a moral realist.

Example sentences

  1. According to moral realism, slavery was wrong even when most people accepted it.

  2. Critics of moral realism ask how we could ever perceive a moral fact.

Common collocations

  • robust moral realism
  • defend moral realism
  • moral facts
  • realism and anti-realism
  • metaethicsThe branch of ethics that asks what moral claims mean, whether they can be true or false and how we could know them, rather than which actions are right.
  • relativismThe view that truth, knowledge or moral rightness is not absolute but depends on a culture, a person or a framework.
  • moralityThe principles about right and wrong behavior that people or societies accept, or the quality of an action being morally right or wrong.
  • normativeConcerned with how things ought to be, or with what is good, right or reasonable, rather than with describing how things actually are.

More terms: Ethics and Moral Philosophy

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