Cornell realism is a view in meta-ethics

Meta-ethics

In philosophy, meta-ethics is the branch of ethics that seeks to understand the nature of ethical properties, statements, attitudes, and judgments. Meta-ethics is one of the three branches of ethics generally recognized by philosophers, the others being normative ethics and applied ethics. Ethical...

, associated with the work of Richard Boyd

Richard Boyd

Richard Newell Boyd is an American philosopher who has spent most of his career at Cornell University, though he also taught briefly at Harvard University, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the University of California, Berkeley...

, Nicholas Sturgeon, and David Brink, who took his Ph.D. at Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

 but never taught there. There is no recognized and official statement of Cornell realism (Brink's Moral Realism and the Foundation of Ethics comes close), but several theses are associated with the view.

Moral realism

There are suitably mind-independent

Philosophical realism

Contemporary philosophical realism is the belief that our reality, or some aspect of it, is ontologically independent of our conceptual schemes, linguistic practices, beliefs, etc....

 and therefore objective moral facts that moral judgments are in the business of describing. This combines a cognitivist

Cognitivism (ethics)

Cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences express propositions and can therefore be true or false , which noncognitivists deny...

 view about moral judgments (they are belief-like mental states in the business of describing the way the world is), a view about the existence of moral facts (they do in fact exist), and a view about the nature of moral facts (they are objective: independent of our cognizing them, or our stance towards them, etc.). This contrasts with expressivist

Expressivism

Expressivism in meta-ethics is a theory about the meaning of moral language. According to expressivism, sentences that employ moral terms–for example, “It is wrong to torture an innocent human being”–are not descriptive or fact-stating; moral terms such as “wrong,” “good,” or “just” do not refer...

 theories of moral judgment (e.g., Stevenson, Hare

R. M. Hare

Richard Mervyn Hare was an English moral philosopher who held the post of White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford from 1966 until 1983. He subsequently taught for a number of years at the University of Florida...

, Blackburn

Simon Blackburn

Simon Blackburn is a British academic philosopher known for his work in quasi-realism and his efforts to popularise philosophy. He recently retired as professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge, but remains a distinguished research professor of philosophy at the University of North...

, Gibbard

Allan Gibbard

Allan Gibbard is the Richard B. Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Allan Gibbard has made several contributions to contemporary ethical theory, in particular metaethics...

), error-theoretic/fictionalist

Fictionalism

Fictionalism is a methodological theory in philosophy that suggests that statements of a certain sort should not be taken to be literally true, but merely as a useful fiction...

  denials of the existence of moral facts (e.g., Mackie

J. L. Mackie

John Leslie Mackie was an Australian philosopher, originally from Sydney. He made significant contributions to the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language, and is perhaps best known for his views on meta-ethics, especially his defence of moral skepticism.He authored six...

, Richard Joyce

Richard Joyce (philosopher)

Richard Joyce is a British-Australian moral philosopher, known for his contributions to the field of meta-ethics. Joyce is a prominent moral anti-realist / moral skeptic and is known in particular for his defence of both moral fictionalism and moral error theory.He received a PhD from Princeton...

, and Kalderon), and constructivist or relativist

Moral relativism

Moral relativism may be any of several descriptive, meta-ethical, or normative positions. Each of them is concerned with the differences in moral judgments across different people and cultures:...

 theories of the nature of moral facts (e.g., Firth, Rawls

John Rawls

John Bordley Rawls was an American philosopher and a leading figure in moral and political philosophy. He held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard University....

, Korsgaard

Christine Korsgaard

Christine Marion Korsgaard is an American philosopher and academic whose main scholarly interests are in moral philosophy and its history; the relation of issues in moral philosophy to issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the theory of personal identity; the theory of personal...

, Harman

Gilbert Harman

Gilbert Harman is a contemporary American philosopher, teaching at Princeton University, who has published widely in linguistics, semantics, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, ethics, moral psychology, epistemology, statistical learning theory, and metaphysics. He and George Miller...

).

Motivational externalism

Moral judgements need not have any motivational force at all. A common way of explaining the thesis invokes the claim that amoralists are possible – that there could be someone who makes moral judgements without feeling the slightest corresponding motivation. This gives Cornell realists a simple response to Humean arguments against cognitivism: if moral judgements do not have motivational force in the first place, there is no reason to think they are non-cognitive states

Non-cognitivism

Non-cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences do not express propositions and thus cannot be true or false...

. Some, like Brink, add to this motivational externalism an externalism about normative reasons, holding that you can be under a moral requirement without having any normative reason to comply.

Naturalistic non-reductionism about metaphysics

Moral facts are natural facts. They fall within the province of the natural and social sciences. But while they are not supernatural (as in divine command theory

Divine command theory

Divine command theory is the meta-ethical view about the semantics or meaning of ethical sentences, which claims that ethical sentences express propositions, some of which are true, about the attitudes of God...

) and they are not non-natural (as in Moore's Principia Ethica

Principia Ethica

Principia Ethica is a monograph by philosopher G. E. Moore, first published in 1903. It is one of the standard texts of modern ethics, and introduced the term naturalistic fallacy.-External links:* of Principia Ethica....

or Mackie's picture of a realist world), they cannot be reduced to non-moral natural facts. That is, while moral facts are natural facts and supervene on non-moral natural facts, they cannot be identified with non-moral natural facts (see, e.g., Miller's An Introduction to Contemporary Metaethics).

Non-reductionism about semantics

There is no reductive connection between moral terms and concepts and natural terms and concepts. This gives Cornell realists a simple response to the charge that you cannot have naturalism without naturalistic fallacy

Naturalistic fallacy

The naturalistic fallacy is often claimed to be a formal fallacy. It was described and named by British philosopher G. E. Moore in his 1903 book Principia Ethica...

: namely, that metaphysical reduction doesn't imply semantic reduction. This usually goes with a Kripke-Putnam semantic story: moral terms and concepts pick out certain natural properties in virtue of those properties standing in an appropriate causal (social-historical) relation to our tokenings of the terms and concepts.