[4] A 2009 survey involving 3,226 respondents[5] found that 56% of philosophers accept or lean toward moral realism (28%: anti-realism; 16%: other).
[7] Some notable examples of robust moral realists include David Brink,[8] John McDowell, Peter Railton,[9] Geoffrey Sayre-McCord,[10] Michael Smith, Terence Cuneo,[11] Russ Shafer-Landau,[12] G. E. Moore,[13] John Finnis, Richard Boyd, Nicholas Sturgeon,[14] Thomas Nagel, Derek Parfit, and Peter Singer.
[18] In the minimal sense of realism, R. M. Hare could be considered a realist in his later works, as he is committed to the objectivity of value judgments, even though he denies that moral statements express propositions with truth-values per se.
Moral constructivists like John Rawls and Christine Korsgaard[20] may also be realists in this minimalist sense; the latter describes her own position as procedural realism.
Some readings of evolutionary science such as those of Charles Darwin and James Mark Baldwin have suggested that in so far as an ethics may be associated with survival strategies and natural selection then such behavior may be associated with a moderate position of moral realism equivalent to an ethics of survival.
[21] An example is Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative: "Act only according to that maxim [i.e., rule] whereby you can at the same time will that it become a universal law."
When they fail to describe this mind-independent moral reality, they are false—no matter what anyone believes, hopes, wishes, or feels.
Contrary theories of meta-ethics have trouble even formulating the statement "this moral belief is wrong," and so they cannot resolve disagreements in this way.
This standpoint considers what fully rational, well-informed, and sympathetic agents would agree upon under ideal conditions.
By doing so, he attempts to show that moral facts are not mysterious or disconnected from the rest of the world, but can be understood and studied much like other natural phenomena.
Philippa Foot adopts a moral realist position, criticizing Stevenson's idea that when evaluation is superposed on fact there has been a "committal in a new dimension.
[22]: 96 Foot argues that the virtues, like hands and eyes in the analogy, play so large a part in so many operations that it is implausible to suppose that a committal in a non-naturalist dimension is necessary to demonstrate their goodness.
Philosophers who have supposed that actual action was required if 'good' were to be used in a sincere evaluation have got into difficulties over weakness of will, and they should surely agree that enough has been done if we can show that any man has reason to aim at virtue and avoid vice.
Mackie, is that moral realism postulates the existence of "entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.
Correspondingly, if we were aware of them it would have to be by some faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else.