“Moral realism” usually just means that moral beliefs can be true or false. That leaves lots options for explaining what the truth conditions of these beliefs are.
Moral realism is often (though not always) taken to, by definition, also include the claim that at least some moral beliefs are true – e.g. here in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A less ambiguous way to refer to just the view that moral beliefs can be true or false is ‘moral cognitivism’, as also mentioned here.
This is to exclude from moral realism the view known as ‘error theory’, which says that moral beliefs are the sorts of things that can have truth values but that all of them are false.
[I’m using “belief” in a loose sense in this comment, on which it is not just true by definition that a belief can be true or false. People using ‘belief’ in the latter sense would describe the noncognitivist view as saying that those things that appear to be moral beliefs in fact aren’t beliefs at all.]
(This is a bit tricky because one might be a moral realist who thinks all our current beliefs are false, but we might get some right at some point. But anyway.)
Moral realism is often (though not always) taken to, by definition, also include the claim that at least some moral beliefs are true – e.g. here in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A less ambiguous way to refer to just the view that moral beliefs can be true or false is ‘moral cognitivism’, as also mentioned here.
This is to exclude from moral realism the view known as ‘error theory’, which says that moral beliefs are the sorts of things that can have truth values but that all of them are false.
[I’m using “belief” in a loose sense in this comment, on which it is not just true by definition that a belief can be true or false. People using ‘belief’ in the latter sense would describe the noncognitivist view as saying that those things that appear to be moral beliefs in fact aren’t beliefs at all.]
Thanks. I’ve edited (1) to exclude error theory.
(This is a bit tricky because one might be a moral realist who thinks all our current beliefs are false, but we might get some right at some point. But anyway.)