“Moral realism” is a family of theories of morality united by the idea that there are moral facts--facts about what is right or wrong or good or bad--and that morality is not simply a matter of personal preferences, emotions, attitudes, or sociological conventions. The fundamental thought underlying moral realism can be expressed as a parity thesis. There are many kinds of facts, including physical, psychological, mathematical, temporal, and moral facts. So understood, moral realism can be...

We all have ethical beliefs. We may believe, for example, that torture is wrong, that compassion is a virtue, and that it is rational to promote what one values. These beliefs are normative; they concern what we ought or ought not to do, or what is valuable or worthy of our choosing, or what a society must try to guarantee. The problem of normativity is to explain what the normativity of these beliefs comes to. What is it for an ethical claim, an ethical judgment...