Are Moral Facts Real or Human Inventions?

Welcome to metaethics — the branch of philosophy that steps back from first-order questions like 'Is lying wrong?' and asks something deeper: what KIND of claim are we even making when we say something is wrong? Before we go further, one key term: a statement is truth-apt if it is the kind of claim that can genuinely be true or false — a real assertion about how things are. Whether moral statements are truth-apt is one of the deepest disputes in metaethics. Moral realism holds that moral statements can be objectively true or false, independently of what any person, culture, or society thinks. On this view, 'Torturing innocent people for fun is wrong' is not merely an opinion — it is a fact about the world, as mind-independent as 'Water is H₂O.' Philosophers like G.E. Moore and, more recently, Russ Shafer-Landau defend versions of realism. One challenge realists face is explaining WHERE these moral facts live — they are not observable through a microscope, so how do we know them? Moral anti-realism is an umbrella term for any view that denies objective, mind-independent moral facts. Several sub-positions exist: • Subjectivism: moral claims report the speaker's feelings or attitudes. 'Cruelty is wrong' means 'I disapprove of cruelty.' The claim can vary from person to person and be true for one and false for another. • Expressivism (a.k.a. non-cognitivism): moral statements are not truth-apt at all — they do not describe anything, not even inner feelings. They express an attitude, like a cheer or a grimace. 'Cruelty is wrong' is closer to 'Boo, cruelty!' than to a factual assertion. A.J. Ayer and Simon Blackburn developed versions of this view. • Constructivism: moral truths are constructed through rational agreement among people under fair conditions. John Rawls and Christine Korsgaard are associated with this approach. The facts depend on human reasoning processes rather than being discovered independently of us. Constructivism is often grouped with anti-realism for this reason, though many philosophers treat it as a distinct third position sitting between full realism and anti-realism — Rawls himself explicitly avoided committing to a metaethical camp. A key test: does the moral statement describe a fact that is independent of all human minds? Realism says yes. Anti-realism says no — or at least, not fully. Constructivism occupies contested ground: moral facts are real in a sense, but they are built by us through reason, not found 'out there' in the universe. Here is a hint for the activity: ask yourself whether each sample statement is the kind of thing that could be true even if every human in history had believed the opposite.