---
slug: moral_realism
name: Moral Realism
one_liner: "Moral claims are made true or false by frame-independent moral facts, correct for everyone at once — the absolutist, mind-independent-fact pole of the same evaluative-authority axis whose relativizing pole is moral relativism."
type: prime
schema_version: 2
status: density_v2_draft
categories: [epistemic, social, cognitive]
origin_domain: philosophy_metaethics
alternate_origin_domains: [law, science_and_epistemology, religion_and_ethics]
aliases: [ethical_objectivism, moral_objectivism, moral_absolutism, ethical_realism, frame_independent_morality]
related: []
solution_archetypes: []
review_flags:
- "OPERATOR-DERIVED (op-01 dualization, sub-flavor 1c) — the axis dual of `moral_relativism` along the evaluative-authority (frame-indexed vs frame-independent) axis. Discovered in the op-01 full sweep 2026-07-03. Verified absent via search_prime (no exact slug, no lexical_fallback) + slug check; nearest existing prime is the input `moral_relativism` (sf 1.0), with `normativity` as a broader neighbor. STATUS: HOLD — pending owner curation."
- "Created 2026-07-03; STUB ONLY (frontmatter + Core Idea + Notes). Did NOT go through Phase-A triage. SI/SF/similarity grades are PROPOSER ESTIMATES pending triangulation. Body sections (Structural Signature onward) NOT yet written."
- "Phase-C action: re-similarity check vs `moral_relativism`, `normativity`, `objectivity`, and any `realism`/`anti_realism` genus already in corpus, to confirm it does not collapse into a general realism prime or restate moral_relativism's negation. At incorporation draw the dual/sibling edge to `moral_relativism` and a genus edge to whatever realism/normativity parent exists. Per CLAUDE.md, sync one_liner to a v1 draft before merge."
substrate_independence:
  composite_substrate_independence: 2
  domain_breadth: 2
  structural_abstraction: 2
  transfer_evidence: 2
  reasoning: 'This is a framed, largely domain-bound candidate and should score low. The bare structure — evaluative claims are made true by a standard that holds independently of any appraiser''s frame — has a mild abstract skeleton (it is one settlement of the general question "does an evaluative vocabulary track a frame-independent fact or a relation to a frame?"), which is why structural_abstraction is 2 rather than 1. But its content is saturated with moral vocabulary and normative weight; the recognizable instances (objective right/wrong, natural law, moral progress toward truth) are all within ethics, law, and religion, so domain_breadth is 2. There is a genuine but thin structural analogy to other realism debates (mathematical, scientific, aesthetic realism all assert frame-independent facts), which is the only real transfer evidence, and it lives one level up at "realism about X" rather than in moral_realism itself — transfer_evidence 2. Composite 2: a value-laden metaethical position, not a substrate-independent structure.'
similarity_to_nearest_existing_prime:
  slug: moral_relativism
  similarity: 0.72
structural_framed:
  label: framed
  aggregate: 0.95
  criteria: {vocab_travels: 0.9, evaluative_weight: 1.0, institutional_origin: 0.9, human_practice_bound: 0.9, import_vs_recognize: 1.0}
  rationale: 'Every diagnostic reads high. The vocabulary (moral facts, right, wrong, obligation) must travel with the concept and does not survive being stripped to a relation; its whole content is evaluative weight; it originates in the institutional discourse of metaethics and its cognates in law and religion; and recognizing an instance requires importing the moral frame, not reading off a structure. It mirrors `moral_relativism` (sf 1.0) as its pole-opposite, and sits at essentially the same framed extreme.'
phase_b_passes_completed: []
---
# Moral Realism

## Core Idea

Moral realism is the metaethical position that moral claims are made true or false by *moral facts that hold independently of any appraiser's frame* — facts about what is right, wrong, obligatory, or permissible that obtain for everyone at once, not merely relative to a culture, a period, an individual, or a practice. It occupies one pole of a single structural axis, *the source of evaluative authority* — where does the truth-maker for a moral judgment live? — whose opposite pole is `moral_relativism`. The relativist pole says the truth-maker is a *relation between an act and the standards of an indexed frame*, so a judgment can be correct relative to one frame and incorrect relative to another without contradiction. The realist pole says the truth-maker is *frame-independent*: the moral judgment tracks a fact that does not shift when the frame does, so if two frames disagree about a moral claim, at most one of them is right and the disagreement is a genuine error, not a mere difference of index.

The load-bearing commitments are three, and they are exactly the ones the relativist denies. First, *cognitivism plus truth-aptness*: moral claims are the kind of thing that can be true or false, not disguised commands or expressions of attitude. Second, *mind-and-frame independence*: at least some of those claims are made true by a standard that does not depend for its authority on being adopted by any particular observer, culture, or code — the standard is discovered, not conferred. Third, *convergence-under-inquiry as the diagnostic*: because the truth-maker is single and shared, moral inquiry has a target to be right or wrong about, so genuine moral disagreement is resolvable in principle and "moral progress" means moving *toward* a fact rather than merely *changing* frames. The characteristic payoff is that it underwrites cross-frame criticism — one can coherently say another culture's accepted practice is *wrong*, full stop, without smuggling in one's own frame as the covert standard — and it grounds the felt objectivity of core moral judgments. The characteristic cost is the metaphysical and epistemic bill it must pay: it must say what these frame-independent moral facts *are* and how a physical, evolved knower could come to *track* them, a demand relativism sidesteps precisely by refusing frame-independent facts. The prime is the clean statement of that pole and its trade — universal answerability and cross-frame criticism, bought at the price of an account of moral facts and moral knowledge.

Read structurally, moral realism is the *frame-independent settlement* of the general question every evaluative vocabulary faces: does the vocabulary track a fact that holds regardless of the appraiser, or a relation to some indexed standard? That question recurs beyond ethics — mathematical realism asserts frame-independent mathematical facts against conventionalism, scientific realism asserts observer-independent unobservables against instrumentalism, aesthetic realism asserts standards of beauty against pure subjectivity — and moral realism is the ethics-domain instance of the *realist* answer, exactly as moral relativism is the ethics-domain instance of the frame-indexed answer. But the structure that travels lives one level up, at "realism about X"; what is specific to *moral* realism is saturated with moral content, which is why it reads as a framed, value-laden position rather than a bare relational structure.

## Notes

**Provenance.** Produced by the op-01 dualization operator (sub-flavor 1c) as the axis-dual of `moral_relativism` along the evaluative-authority axis (frame-indexed vs frame-independent). It is the established, canonical philosophical opposite of the input prime — a textbook pair-completion — so the convergence signal is definitional rather than a multi-route surprise: the operator did not so much discover a novel structure as complete a lattice pair the corpus already half-contains.

**For owner evaluation (keep/cut).** The case FOR: the corpus already carries `moral_relativism` as a framed prime (sf 1.0), and admitting one pole of a named axis while omitting its explicit opposite leaves a visible lattice gap — the dual is exactly the kind of pair-completion the operator is meant to surface, and moral realism is at least as load-bearing a position in metaethics as relativism. The specific risks the owner must weigh, all flagged in the manifest and by this stub:
  - *Framed / philosophical.* This is a value-laden metaethical **position**, not a substrate-independent structure; SF reads ~0.95 (framed) and SI ~2. If the corpus's bar excludes framed doctrinal positions, moral_relativism itself is the precedent that decides both, and they should be kept or cut together.
  - *Unmarked-default risk.* Moral realism is, for many, the *pre-theoretic default* view — "some things are just wrong." A named prime should capture a distinctive structure, not the absence of relativism; check that it is doing more than negating `moral_relativism`. If its whole content is "moral_relativism is false," it may be better folded as the contrast pole *inside* moral_relativism's "What It Is Not" rather than admitted as a standalone prime.
  - *Genus-may-be-better hold.* The structure that actually travels is **realism-vs-anti-realism about an evaluative/theoretical vocabulary** (mathematical, scientific, aesthetic, moral). The owner may prefer to hold a genus prime (`realism` / `frame_independence_of_truth_makers`) and treat moral_realism, moral_relativism, and their cousins as domain instances under it, rather than admitting the moral pair in isolation. This is the strongest structural alternative to keeping it as-is.
  - *Screen overlap.* Re-check against `normativity` and any existing `objectivity` prime; realism shares the "answerable to a standard" shape with both and could partly collapse.

**At incorporation.** Re-run similarity vs `moral_relativism`, `normativity`, `objectivity`, and any `realism`/`anti_realism` genus in corpus to confirm it neither collapses into a general realism prime nor merely restates the negation of relativism. If kept, draw the explicit dual/sibling edge to `moral_relativism` (mutual, along the evaluative-authority axis) and a genus edge to the realism/normativity parent; if the genus-hold wins, redirect this stub into that parent as an instance. Per CLAUDE.md, write the v1 draft and sync `one_liner` across v1 and v2 in the same commit before merge.
