Are Moral Facts Real or Human Inventions?
Philo sits cross-legged on the floor of a sunlit library, holding two open books side by side, debating aloud with herself about whether the sentence 'Cruelty is wrong' is carved into the universe like a law of gravity or scrawled on a chalkboard that humans can erase.
- Explain the central question metaethics asks about the status of moral claims.
- Distinguish moral realism from moral anti-realism using precise terminology.
- Compare three anti-realist or alternative positions — subjectivism, expressivism, and constructivism — and identify what each says moral claims actually express.
- Identify one standard objection to moral realism and one standard objection to moral anti-realism.
- Evaluate a sample moral statement by classifying it according to realist, subjectivist, expressivist, or constructivist frameworks.
Key terms
- Truth-apt
- The property of a statement that makes it the kind of claim capable of being genuinely true or false.
- Moral realism
- The view that moral facts exist objectively and independently of what any person or culture believes.
- Subjectivism
- The anti-realist view that moral claims report the speaker's own feelings or attitudes.
- Expressivism
- The non-cognitivist view that moral statements express attitudes rather than describing facts, and so are not truth-apt.
- Constructivism
- The view that moral truths are constructed through rational agreement under fair conditions rather than discovered.
Cognitivism Versus Non-Cognitivism
A crucial fault line in metaethics runs between cognitivists, who hold that moral statements are truth-apt assertions, and non-cognitivists, who deny this. Realists and subjectivists are both cognitivists: they think 'cruelty is wrong' makes a claim that is true or false, disagreeing only about what makes it so (mind-independent facts versus the speaker's attitudes). Expressivists are non-cognitivists: they hold the sentence is not in the business of describing anything at all but functions like a cheer or a wince. Getting this distinction right prevents the common error of treating expressivism as just another theory about what makes moral claims true.
The Central Challenges on Each Side
Each camp faces a signature objection. Realism must answer the epistemic and metaphysical worry: if moral facts are mind-independent, where do they reside and how could we ever come to know them, since no instrument detects 'wrongness'? Anti-realism faces the disagreement-and-progress worry: if there are no objective moral facts, it becomes hard to say that abolishing slavery was genuine moral progress rather than merely a change in attitudes, and hard to explain why we argue about ethics as if one side could be mistaken. A serious evaluation weighs how well each position answers its own hardest challenge.
Worked examples
Classify the claim 'Genocide is wrong even if every culture endorsed it' across the metaethical positions.
- Apply the mind-independence test: ask whether the claim could be true even if all human attitudes ran the opposite way.
- Run it through realism: realism affirms the claim straightforwardly, since wrongness is a mind-independent fact that universal endorsement could not overturn.
- Run it through subjectivism and expressivism: subjectivism makes the claim depend on the speaker's attitude, and expressivism treats it as a forceful expression rather than a truth-apt assertion, so neither can underwrite its culture-independence.
- Run it through constructivism: a constructivist can affirm the claim if rational agreement under fair conditions would converge on it, locating its truth in idealized reasoning rather than in a mind-independent fact.
Answer: The claim is most naturally affirmed by moral realism as a mind-independent truth; constructivism can endorse it via idealized rational agreement, while subjectivism and expressivism cannot secure its culture-independence.
Activity
Sort each statement into the column that best matches its philosophical position — Moral Realism, Subjectivism, Expressivism, or Constructivism.
Practice
Write one moral sentence and explain how a realist, a subjectivist, and an expressivist would each interpret it.
State the strongest objection to moral realism and the strongest objection to anti-realism in your own words.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Metaethics just studies more ethical issuesMetaethics is a second-order inquiry about the nature and status of moral claims, not about which actions are right.
- Expressivists say moral sentences are falseExpressivists hold moral sentences are not truth-apt at all, so they are neither true nor false.
Check your understanding
Which of the following statements best captures the core claim of moral realism?
A student argues: 'Metaethics and ethics are the same thing — metaethics just studies more ethical issues.' What is wrong with this view?
An expressivist like A.J. Ayer would most likely say that the sentence 'Slavery is unjust' is:
Recap
Metaethics asks what kind of claim a moral statement is, dividing realists who posit mind-independent moral facts from anti-realists such as subjectivists and expressivists, with constructivism occupying contested middle ground and each position answering for its own signature challenge.
Reflect
Could 'cruelty is wrong' be true even if no mind ever existed to think it?