Cornell realism

Cornell realism is a view in meta-ethics, associated with the work of Richard Boyd, Nicholas Sturgeon, and David Brink, who took his Ph.D. at Cornell University but never taught there. There is no recognized and official statement of Cornell realism (Brink's Moral Realism and the Foundation of Ethics comes close), but several theses are associated with the view.

There are suitably mind-independent and therefore objective moral facts that moral judgments are in the business of describing. This combines a cognitivist view about moral judgments (they are belief-like mental states in the business of describing the way the world is), 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.). This contrasts with expressivist theories of moral judgment (e.g., Stevenson, Hare, Blackburn, Gibbard), error-theoretic/fictionalist denials of the existence of moral facts (e.g., Mackie, Richard Joyce, and Kalderon), and constructivist or relativist theories of the nature of moral facts (e.g., Firth, Rawls, Korsgaard, Harman).

Moral judgements need not have any motivational force at all. A common way of explaining the thesis invokes the claim that amoralists are possible – that there could be someone who makes moral judgements without feeling the slightest corresponding motivation. This gives Cornell realists a simple response to Humean arguments against cognitivism: if moral judgements do not have motivational force in the first place, there is no reason to think they are non-cognitive states. Some, like Brink, add to this motivational externalism an externalism about normative reasons, which denies that there is any necessary connection or relation between what one has reason to do and what one is motivated to do (or would be motivated to do, if one were fully rational and knew all of the facts).

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