Moral realism

Moral realism is the view in philosophy that there are objective moral values. Moral realists argue that moral judgments describe moral facts. This combines a cognitivist view about moral judgments (they are belief-like mental states that describe the state of the world), 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.). It contrasts with expressivist or non-cognitivist theories of moral judgment (e.g., Stevenson, Hare, Blackburn, Gibbard, Ayer), error theories of moral judgments (e.g., Mackie), fictionalist theories of moral judgment (e.g., R. Joyce, M. Kalderon) and constructivist or relativist theories of the nature of moral facts (e.g., R. Firth, Rawls, Korsgaard, Harman). Some moral realists include David Brink, John McDowell, Peter Railton, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Michael Smith,  Russ Shafer-Landau,  G.E. Moore, and Thomas Nagel.