12-24-2025, 12:14 PM
I'm an undergraduate philosophy major currently wrestling with the arguments for and against moral realism in my metaethics seminar, and while I find the intuitive pull of realism compelling, I'm struggling to satisfactorily answer the epistemological challenge of how we can have reliable knowledge of objective moral facts if they exist. We've read Mackie's argument from queerness and various responses, but I'm particularly hung up on the disagreement problem; if moral facts are objective, why is there such persistent and seemingly intractable cross-cultural and intra-cultural disagreement on fundamental issues, unlike the progressive convergence we see in sciences like physics? For those who have studied this deeply, what are the strongest contemporary defenses of moral realism that directly address these epistemic and metaphysical concerns, and are there any compelling hybrid theories that posit objective moral constraints without committing to a full-blown non-naturalist ontology?