ABSTRACT
Defining “realism” is difficult. Here I take realism about morality to have two aspects. The first is epistemic: moral realists are not skeptics. They think we can and sometimes do have true moral beliefs. The second is metaphysical. Moral realists think moral facts are somehow objective, independent of our moral opinions, attitudes, concepts, and so on. The notion of “mind independence” is tricky in social domains. Our attitudes matter causally in the social world: whether an action is objectively harmful can depend partly on agents’ responses to the action. But if harms are objective (in the realist’s sense), then whether an agent is harmed is not constituted by their, or anyone’s, opinions on that matter. In metaethics, this idea has been captured by Russ Shafer-Landau’s phrase: moral facts are “stance independent” (Shafer-Landau 2003). I will later suggest that moral facts are facts about social interactions that support stable cooperation. If this is true, then moral realism, as I will understand it, is the view that moral facts depend on facts about what we are like and how we live together but are not constituted by individual or collective opinions on what those facts are. The chapter from here on explores the relationship between moral realism, so understood, and our best hypotheses about the evolution of moral cognition.
