Editing Metaethics (section)

==== Moral realism ====
[[Moral realism]] (in the ''robust'' sense; see [[moral universalism]] for the minimalist sense) holds that such propositions are about ''robust'' or mind-independent facts, that is, not facts about any person or group's subjective opinion, but about objective features of the world. Metaethical theories are commonly categorized as either a form of realism or as one of three forms of "[[anti-realism]]" regarding moral facts: [[ethical subjectivism]], [[error theory]], or [[non-cognitivism]]. Realism comes in two main varieties:

# ''[[Ethical naturalism]]'' holds that there are objective moral properties and that these properties are [[reductionism|reducible]] or stand in some metaphysical relation (such as [[supervenience]]) to entirely non-ethical properties. Most ethical naturalists hold that we have [[empiricism|empirical]] knowledge of moral truths. Ethical naturalism was implicitly assumed by many [[modern philosophy|modern]] ethical theorists, particularly [[utilitarianism|utilitarians]].
# ''[[Ethical non-naturalism]]'', as put forward by [[G. E. Moore]], holds that there are objective and ''irreducible'' moral properties (such as the property of 'goodness'), and that we sometimes have [[ethical intuitionism|intuitive]] or otherwise ''[[A priori and a posteriori|a priori]]'' awareness of moral properties or of moral truths. Moore's [[open question argument]] against what he considered the [[naturalistic fallacy]] was largely responsible for the birth of metaethical research in contemporary [[analytic philosophy]].