Moral Realism and Anti-Realism: Moral Naturalism

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Philosophy Essay
People are normally annoyed when someone fails to live up to the promises they make to them. When one makes a promise, it is hard to say whether they are morally obliged or not to live up to them. The moral view on this issue would depend on which side of moral divide one is in. There are moral realists and moral anti-realists and they normally disagree in some respects. However, there is lack of evidence to support either of them. In this essay, I argue that objective moral values exist contrary to the views of moral anti-realists.
Moral Realism and Anti-Realism
Moral realism holds the view that moral facts and values exist and that they are independent of how we perceive them. These moral values and facts are objective and are immune to the attitudes that we have towards them. Because it is possible to determine if these moral facts are true or false, they represent some features in the world. Moral facts in essence describe the world. There are certain accepted moral codes that would apply to any culture. When someone says, “it is wrong to steal”, it is possible to verify the statement objectively with respect to it being incorrect or correct. Moral realists would say that stealing is a non-moral property and accounts for the non-moral statement. In the view of moral realists, there must be things that make moral sentences true.
Moral anti-realism holds the view that there are never any objective moral values; therefore, there are no true moral sentences because they never describe how the world is. Moral anti-realists normally deny the existence of moral truths and that if they do exist, then their existence depends on the mind and is never independent or objective. As explained in Metaethics Readings (33), the shifting paradigm in the views on gay relationships is not based on what is normally accepted by the whole population. According to the authors, back in the year 2012, a majority of people, over 53% considered gay marriages to be morally wrong. As of the year 2014, close to 58% of the American population believed that gay relationships were not that morally wrong. The authors note that even the Bible, though considered as the go-to book for moral lessons, is not always morally right. What hampers the decision making of the anti-realists is that sometimes, they might let their feelings cloud their judgment. On most occasions, Moral anti-realists are often tempted to ignore reason and go with their feelings, hence ignoring the importance of thinking morally.
Moral Naturalism
In moral naturalism, the assumption is that ethical sentences can either be true or false but it should be possible to express the meanings of these sentences as “natural properties” without using the known ethical terms such as right. Therefore, it should be possible to define moral concepts in terms of “facts about the world”. Naturalism holds the view that how right an action is depends on how much happiness individuals can derive from it. According to Bentham (353), moral actions are only right when they produce happiness, good, pleasure, or any kind of benefit. The view of moral naturalism is attractive. Specifically, it enables people to make sen...