Are ethical statements objectively true?
Do ethical statements provide
information about anything other than human opinions and attitudes?
- Ethical realists think that human beings discover ethical truths that already have an independent existence.
- Ethical non-realists think that human beings invent ethical truths.
The problem for ethical realists is
that people follow many different ethical codes and moral beliefs. So if there
are real ethical truths out there (wherever!) then human beings don't seem to
be very good at discovering them.
One form of ethical realism teaches
that ethical properties exist independently of human beings, and that ethical
statements give knowledge about the objective world.
To put it another way; the ethical
properties of the world and the things in it exist and remain the same,
regardless of what people think or feel - or whether people think or feel about
them at all.
On the face of it, it [ethical realism]
means the view that moral qualities such as wrongness, and likewise moral facts
such as the fact that an act was wrong, exist in rerum natura, so that, if one
says that a certain act was wrong, one is saying that there existed, somehow,
somewhere, this quality of wrongness, and that it had to exist there if that
act were to be wrong.
- R. M Hare, Essays in Ethical Theory, 1989
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