Why is it called 'robust' realism?

The label, popularized by David Enoch, marks a realism that takes moral facts to be fully objective and irreducible — as ontologically serious as scientific facts — as opposed to more deflationary or naturalist forms of realism.

Robust Moral Realism — ScholarGate Atlas

Definition

Robust moral realism is the conjunction of moral realism (there are objective, stance-independent moral facts) with non-naturalism (those facts are not reducible to or identical with natural, descriptive facts) and a denial that moral facts are response-dependent.

Scope

Robust moral realism, also called non-naturalist realism, holds both that moral facts exist objectively and that they form an irreducible, sui generis class. This topic covers its core commitments, its principal defenders, and the metaphysical and epistemological objections it must answer — especially worries about explanatory dispensability, supervenience, and moral knowledge.

Core questions

What distinguishes non-natural moral facts from natural facts?
How can irreducible moral facts supervene on natural facts without being reducible to them?
If moral facts are causally inert, how can we have knowledge of them?
Are non-natural moral facts explanatorily indispensable?

Key concepts

non-naturalism
supervenience
stance-independence
open-question argument
explanatory indispensability

Key theories

Non-naturalist realism: Moral properties are real and objective but constitute a distinct, non-natural category, defended via the open-question argument and the autonomy of ethics.
Indispensability-based robust realism: Belief in irreducible normative truths is justified because such truths are indispensable to deliberation and practical reasoning, analogous to indispensability arguments in the philosophy of mathematics.

History

Robust realism descends from G. E. Moore's non-naturalism in Principia Ethica (1903) and the intuitionism of Ross and Prichard. After decades of eclipse under expressivism and naturalism, it was revived in the early twenty-first century by Shafer-Landau, Enoch, and Parfit, who reframed it with new responses to the queerness and epistemological objections.

Debates

The supervenience challenge: Critics ask how non-natural moral facts can supervene necessarily on natural facts without being reducible to them; non-naturalists respond that supervenience is a synthetic necessary connection, not evidence of identity.
Explanatory dispensability: Naturalists argue that non-natural moral facts do no explanatory work and so should be denied by Occam's razor; Enoch replies that they are indispensable to deliberation rather than to causal explanation.

Key figures

G. E. Moore
Russ Shafer-Landau
David Enoch
Derek Parfit

Seminal works

moore1903
shaferlandau2003
enoch2011
parfit2011

Frequently asked questions

Why is it called 'robust' realism?: The label, popularized by David Enoch, marks a realism that takes moral facts to be fully objective and irreducible — as ontologically serious as scientific facts — as opposed to more deflationary or naturalist forms of realism.

Robust Moral Realism