Moral realism is the view in
philosophy that there are
objective moral values. Moral realists argue that moral judgments describe moral
facts. This combines a
cognitivist view about moral judgments (they are truth-evaluable mental states that describe the state of the world), a view about the existence of moral facts (they do in fact exist), and a view about the nature of moral facts (they are objective: independent of our cognizing them, or our stance towards them, etc.). It contrasts with
expressivist or
non-cognitivist theories of moral judgment (e.g.,
Stevenson,
Hare,
Blackburn,
Gibbard,
Ayer), error theories of moral judgments (e.g.,
Mackie),
fictionalist theories of moral judgment (e.g., R. Joyce, M. Kalderon) and constructivist or
relativist theories of the nature of moral facts (e.g., R. Firth,
Rawls,
Korsgaard,
Harman).
See more at Wikipedia.org...