Philosophy & Meaning
Moral Realism vs. Anti-Realism
A framing problem rather than a single theory: whether moral facts and values exist objectively, independent of what any person or culture believes (realism), or are constructed, relative, or expressions of attitude (anti-realism) — a fault line underlying every other ethics-of-meaning theory.
Proponents
G. E. Moore (realism), J. L. Mackie (anti-realist "error theory"), Derek Parfit (later realist)
Evidence For
Moral realism accounts for the strong, widely shared intuition that some acts — torturing for fun, for instance — are simply wrong, not merely disapproved of.
Evidence Against
Anti-realists point to persistent, deep cross-cultural and historical moral disagreement as evidence against a single objective moral order that all inquirers should, in principle, converge on.
Transmissions
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