ABSTRACT
Value Realism holds that there are evaluative facts that are objective, or stance-independent, in the sense that they exist independently of what we think or feel about them. On this view, facts such as pain being bad, knowledge being desirable, or helping others being admirable are as objective as facts postulated by the natural as well as the social and human sciences. But what would evaluative facts be? What, if anything, distinguishes evaluative facts from other kinds of facts? Is the value realist just adding more grim facts to our ontology or are evaluative facts distinct? If evaluative facts are distinct, what is the difference with natural facts? A useful way to frame the problem is to ask what values are, if one were to follow Hilary Putnam (2002) and accept that the fact/value dichotomy is a failure. Clearly, this question needs to be answered if we want to assess Value Realism.
