ABSTRACT
A moral realist is someone who believes in the reality of what he calls morality, which he takes some moral skeptic to have doubted. Since "moral skeptics" are not all cut from the same cloth, this means that there are many different varieties of "moral realism", some inconsistent with others. The precise form that moral realism takes depends on the particular variety of moral skepticism to which it is thought to be the answer. The chief difficulty in appraising Plato's doctrine is to understand its central concept. The oldest and purest version of moral realism is moral absolutism, or all morally right actions have something in common—namely, a "property" of goodness, or rectitude, as the case may be. Plato invented this theory, which he held in opposition to sophist belief that good and bad are relative to persons, justice and injustice to societies. The chief difficulty in appraising Plato's doctrine is to understand its central concept.
