Talk:Moral realism

message: The answer to the question below is that a moral realist is not necessarily committed to the view that moral norms are 'objective' in the sense that a statement expressing that norm is universally true for all moral agents.  Moral Relativists could be moral realists as well. - 27, October 2006
How is this different from moral objectivism? Could the two be merged? Canuck-Errant 10:28, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It seems to me that much of this article is inaccurate, as there are "realist" positions that do not claim full objective status for moral claims. E.g. they may say that such claims are not relative to cultures or individuals and apply to our whole species - but may not be part of an objective reality that any rational spacies must acknowledge. Brink may be an example of someone who takes such a position, though I don't know whether he would accept that he could be described in such a way. If this distinction is drawn, the article needs revision. If the distinction is not drawn, I see no need to have two separate articles. Metamagician3000 11:16, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: This is a general problem on the Wiki pages for moral philosophy.  There are many different ways of mapping and naming the available positions in ethics and we have failed to agree to a set of terms.  You, like myself, grew up on subjectivists and relativists counting as "realists" and the term realism being used as part of a binary with "anti-realism."  However, there is now an increasingly popular set of terms that changes the playing field.  Added to the list is "irrealism," and that is where subjectivists and relativists now fall.  The new paradigm is attractive in that it recognizes the gulf that separates metaethical objectivists from non-objectivists, though it is apt to cause quite a bit of confusion before the dust settles. Postmodern Beatnik 06:36, 25 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: So, my last comment was made while I was making the switch from the old (Sayre-McCord) taxonomy to the new (Richard Joyce) taxonomy, and I must admit I did not fully grasp the changes.  Regardless, the new taxonomy uses three theses to define moral realism and operates in binary with anti-realism/irrealism (they are used synonymously), and is—in my opinion—vastly superior.  As it is already mostly in place both here and at moral skepticism (though I think we also need a moral anti-realism page), I suggest we make the new model of categorizing the possible positions in metaethics our official standard.  We should have some sort of explanation about the terminological history somewhere, however.  Any thoughts? Postmodern Beatnik (talk) 02:28, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

text: The change of relativistic morals over time is called the "Zeitgeist".
is at the bottom of the opening section.  It doesn't seem related to the rest.  Can anyone elaborate it or defend its placement, or should we remove it?--ScottForschler (talk) 17:21, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

message: I object to the illustrative example using the proposition "murder is wrong" to illustrate moral realism. The definition of the word "murder" is "a wrongful killing." This exposes the difficulty with many discussions of moral facts: the definitions for moral facts tend to be circular in nature. Definitions for ordinary facts (like "It is raining") do not tend to have this problem of circularity. If somebody chooses to take on a rewrite of this article I would hope that they could strive to eliminate circular definitions and other problematic discussions within this article.
:1) Realists can supply arguments like "murder is wrong because it causes unnecessary suffering".
:2) Relativists might agree that murder is wrong but be unable to explain why.
:3) Denying that murder is in fact wrong is not relativism, it is nihilism or error theory.
1Z 02:41, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Murder Imports Wrongness

message: I have just added a section on the difference between the robust model of moral realism and the minimal model of moral realism.  My main problem with it is the formatting of the quote from Pekka Väyrynen.  I used a template suggested by WP:MOS, but I am unsure it was the most appropriate way to address the formatting issue. Postmodern Beatnik (talk) 18:16, 1 May 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: This distinction is part of a larger project I am undertaking, regarding disambiguating the terms moral realism, moral objectivism, moral universalism, moral absolutism, and moral relativism. I have started a discussion about this at Talk:Meta-ethics#More_extensive_reorganization; please come by and contribute your thoughts there. -Pfhorrest (talk) 22:56, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Robust/Minimal Moral Realism 

message: It appears that moral realism is closely related to Judeo-Christian ethics and religion in general. It seems noteworthy but should likely be argued further. ADM (talk) 13:30, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Unclear why you think this; religion is only one possible source of moral facts, and hardly the most stable one (indeed, the Meta-ethics article suggests, plausibly, that the divine command theory is really a subjectivist view, in which moral statements only express the whims of a divine being rather than robust facts).  There are many other, more robust, forms of moral realism.  --ScottForschler (talk) 01:14, 24 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Religion

message: C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man is the definitive book that argues for the correctness of moral realism. It's impact has been profound and it probably deserves mention in the article somewhere. --BenMcLean (talk) 19:01, 17 December 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: It's hardly "the definitive book," for it argues for a very specific form of natural law (or intuitionist) theory of "self-evident" moral absolutes; this is only one specific, and a highly contentious, form of moral realism instead of any "definitive" version thereof.  --ScottForschler (talk) 01:15, 24 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[The Abolition of Man]] 

message: There is a video conversation between Peter Railton and Don Loeb about moral realism
that lasts about an hour on http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/13443
Does anyone think that it would be inappropriate to add this as an external link to the article,
or contradict with wikipedia rules? cihan (talk) 02:40, 12 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Conversation with [[Peter Railton]] 

message: I added a section on scientific views related to moral realism.  Several scientists and science writers argue that it is possible to ground ethics in physical reality and processes.--Babank (talk) 22:22, 3 April 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Added Science section 

message: For one, "scientific realism" at the top of the category is completely unrelated to moral realism which is a bad sign in itself, second the content within is not discussed by philosophers of moral realism and it therefore of little worth.  It doesn't include the very few times that science has had implications for moral realism, e.g. the evolutionary argument put forward by Street.  I've edited the article to remove the section but may begin work on arguments for moral realism/criticism in order to include the evolutionary argument, etc. -- Ollyoxenfree (talk) 23:27, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Science and moral realism" is horrid 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on Moral realism. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20080512150623/http://philosophy.ucdavis.edu/pekkav/research/moralrealism.pdf to http://philosophy.ucdavis.edu/pekkav/research/moralrealism.pdf
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 11:53, 5 February 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified (February 2018) 

message: The demand of accecibility is of common knowledge in the field, and so the right solution is to bring back my contribution while noting that a source is required. Amir Segev Sarusi (talk) 09:09, 1 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Please return my referrence lacking addition 

message: Moral platonism is a kind of moral realism, but the lede to this article falsely equates them. I'd wager that most moral realists are not well-described as moral platonists. The source for the alternative name is Shafer-Landau's collection Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Volume 10, which, I checked, does indeed have a discussion of and argument moral platonism - that makes very clear that moral platonism is only a subset of (non-naturalist) moral realism. Naturalist moral realism, as well as various kinds of non-platonistic non-naturalisms, are not moral platonism. I've edited out the "moral Platonism" part of the lede (as well as the reference, whose entire purpose seems to be trying to establish that moral realism is also known as moral platonism - which, I emphasize, is neither supported by the reference nor true). Tikallisti (talk) 09:54, 5 November 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Moral Platonism" 

message: In this edit User:Dellagostino deleted the phrase "of the world" from the short description which read (mirroring the lede) "...ethical sentences express propositions that refer to objective features of the world". His edit summary was: 
In this edit I reverted that with the edit summary 
He emailed me about that, being new here and not understanding talk pages, and with his permission I'm reproducing his email and responding to it here:
: Hey Forrest. I believe that your aligning moral realism with facts about the world is a mischaracterization of moral realism, namely that there are moral facts, which makes no claim about the world. Among other sources, see:
: https://iep.utm.edu/moralrea/
: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-realism/
: Whatever else the Wikipedia article is about, the title is Moral Realism and I encourage you to either update the article title or your account of the concept.
: For the sake of discussion, universal or not, divine command theory is an example of moral realism from which moral facts are not about or derived from the world.
:: As you see in the first subsection of the article, there are (at least) two different senses of the term "moral realism", one of them "robust" and one of them "minimal". Because the "minimal" sense is also synonymous with the term "moral universalism", we've made this article all about the "robust" sense, and left the article Moral universalism to discuss the "minimal" sense. Divine command theory is an example of a theory (along with ideal observer theory, universal prescriptivism, non-descriptive cognitivism, etc) that is "realist" in the "minimal" sense, but not in the "robust" sense that this article is about. --Pfhorrest (talk) 21:57, 6 March 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  "of the world"