moral realism

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the metaethical position that moral facts are objective features of reality that exist independently of what any individual or culture believes about them, and that moral claims are capable of being literally true or false in the same way as factual claims about the physical world; moral realists hold that statements like torture is wrong express genuine truths rather than merely personal preferences or cultural conventions; varieties of moral realism include naturalism (moral facts are natural facts), non-naturalism (moral facts are a distinct category of objective facts), and Cornell realism; the challenge for moral realism is explaining how moral facts fit into a naturalistic worldview and how human beings came to have reliable access to them through evolution and ordinary experience