ABSTRACT
The moral realist view I want to examine takes off from a semantic thesis, a thesis about the proper form of a semantic account of moral discourse. This thesis has two components: the first is that moral discourse is descriptive in character, that moral judgments are assertoric in force; the second is an identification of the correct semantic treatment of descriptive discourses as the now-familiar truth-theoretic treatment. The first component seems already to commit us to holding that a moral judgment and its negation are incompatible, cannot both be true. Taking the two components together we obtain the thought that giving the truth-conditions of a particular moral sentence is a way of giving the meaning of that sentence. To such a semantic thesis the moral realist adds a claim about the world: namely, that it is such that it is how a number of non-negative moral sentences claim it is. This claim about reality thus licenses use of moral discourse without revision in our understanding of that discourse as descriptive. Finally, a fuUblown moral realist view emerges with the addition of two claims about the applicability of the notion of truth to moral discourse: the first is that if a moral judgment is true, if it hits its target, that is so in virtue of an independently existing moral reality; the second is that the realistic truth-conditions of a moral sentence, the conditions that determine its meaning, can transcend the recognitional capacities of those who can use and understand that sentence.
