Most Philosophers Believe in Objective Morality

62% of professional philosophers are moral realists — including most of the atheists.

“Sorry sir, but I haven’t figured out how to ground morality yet!”

Most people assume that academic philosophers, the people professionally tasked to think hardest about ethics, tend toward moral relativism: Serious, rigorous, scientifically-minded inquiry dissolves moral objectivity rather than supporting it.

The data tells a different story. In the most comprehensive survey of professional philosophers ever conducted — the 2020 PhilPapers Survey of nearly 2,000 philosophers worldwide — 62% accept or lean toward moral realism. Only 26% accept or lean toward anti-realism. Among atheist philosophers specifically, 59% are moral realists. The people who have thought most carefully about whether morality is objective have mostly concluded that it is.

Moral Realism: Some moral claims are objectively true.

Moral Anti-realism: No moral claims are objectively true.

This feels surprising. But it shouldn’t. Moral realism isn’t a minority position; it’s the working assumption of most major ethical theories, secular and otherwise.

What’s more interesting than the numbers is what lies behind them: Philosophers across very different traditions have very different accounts of what moral truth is and what it’s grounded in. And after a tour through contemporary moral realisms, we’ll be in a position to ask a question that's on many people’s minds:

Does secular moral philosophy have the resources to ground moral truth?

I. A Field Guide to Moral Realism

Moral realism wasn’t always the default assumption in academic philosophy. For much of the twentieth century, under the influence of logical positivism, moral claims were widely treated as expressions of attitude or preference rather than genuine truths. (Podcaster Alex O’Connor has been defending this recently.)

If any mid-century analytic philosophers were moral realists, they were embarrassed to admit it.

But that changed. Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating since, philosophers across the Kantian, consequentialist, virtue-theoretic, and intuitionist traditions have developed and defended sophisticated forms of moral realism. The embarrassment lifted, and it hasn’t returned.

Each of these ethical theories has its own answer to the question of where the truth of moral propositions comes from — but they all agree that there is moral truth.

1. Kantian, Deontological, and Contractualist Realism

The Kantian tradition locates moral reality in rational agency itself. The grounding isn’t external — not derived from tradition, cultural consensus, or revealed authority — but internal: what reason demands of any agent who reasons and acts at all.

Kant’s central claim is that to be a rational agent is already to be bound by certain requirements. The categorical imperative — act only according to principles you could consistently will to be universal laws — isn’t a command imposed from outside. It’s what rationality requires of itself. Don’t lie, because universalizing lying would destroy the very practice of communication it depends on. Don’t treat people merely as instruments for your ends, because rational agency — the property that grounds your own claim to be treated with dignity — must be recognized wherever it appears. The moral law is autonomous: self-legislated by reason rather than imposed by any external authority.

This tradition runs through much of twentieth-century analytic ethics. John Rawls built his influential account of political justice on Kantian foundations; Christine Korsgaard argues that rational agency commits us to valuing not just ourselves but humanity as such; T.M. Scanlon proposes that an action is wrong if it violates principles that no one could reasonably reject as a basis for mutual governance. These are different elaborations, but they share a conviction: moral obligations bind any rational agent regardless of what that agent happens to want, and their authority comes from reason itself rather than from any external source.

Strictly speaking, some of these positions are classified as constructivism rather than realism — moral obligations constituted by rational procedures rather than discovered in a mind-independent realm. But the practical upshot is the same: there are objective moral truths, they aren’t arbitrary, and what counts as a reasonable basis for the ground-rules of society isn’t up to us to stipulate — it’s what moral inquiry attempts to discover.

2. Consequentialist Realism

Consequentialism, the contemporary descendant of utilitarianism, locates moral reality in facts about welfare and suffering — facts that are, as it were, built into the nature of conscious experience. Suffering is bad. Not arbitrarily, not merely by convention, but as a feature of what suffering is. If that’s true, then there is a genuine moral reason to reduce it that doesn’t depend on anyone’s prior commitments.

Mill, Bentham, and their descendants (like Derek Parfit) hold that there are objective facts about welfare and flourishing, and that moral claims track those facts. Sam Harris argued this in The Moral Landscape, that science can in principle determine human values precisely because moral facts are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures. My dissertation advisor Scott Berman argues a version of this, tracing it all the way back to Socrates.

Likewise, when Peter Singer argues that we have strong obligations to address global poverty and animal suffering, he isn't expressing a preference. He’s making a claim he takes to be true: that suffering matters regardless of whether anyone happens to care about it, and that we are therefore genuinely obligated to reduce it. “Suffering is bad” isn’t just a slogan. It’s a moral claim with the same kind of authority as a scientific claim — answerable to evidence, capable of being right or wrong, binding on anyone who takes it seriously.

Singer’s case is particularly striking because of its trajectory. For much of his career he was a moral anti-realist, working within a prescriptivist framework that treated moral claims as expressions of universal prescriptions rather than objective truths. He spent years trying to find a satisfying account of moral obligation within that framework and eventually concluded he couldn’t. What changed his mind was encountering arguments for moral objectivism that explained why we have genuine reasons not to harm others that don’t collapse into self-interest.

Singer now describes himself as a “non-naturalist objectivist,” comparing the status of moral truths to mathematical truths. The most famous living secular utilitarian, an atheist who built his career on arguments about animal rights and global poverty, spent decades as a moral anti-realist and then changed his mind.

And not because he had figured out how to ground objective morality, but because the arguments for moral objectivity were strong enough on their own terms.

3. Virtue Ethics

Contemporary virtue ethics arose in its contemporary form partly as a response to the metaethical challenge itself. In 1958, Elizabeth Anscombe — a devout Catholic philosopher — published her paper “Modern Moral Philosophy,” identifying a structural problem with modern ethics: the thin moral vocabulary that dominated Kantian, consequentialist, and intuitionist writing — obligation, duty, “right,” “wrong” — had been borrowed from a theological framework, without which it didn’t make sense.

Anscombe’s prescription was not to find a new foundation for these formal, moral concepts but to abandon them in favor of a different, and more ancient vocabulary: virtue. Ask not “what is obligatory?” but “what is courageous? What is just? What does a good human life look like?”

The shift matters because virtue terms — cruel, generous, cowardly, just — are what philosophers call “thick ethical concepts”: terms that fuse descriptive and evaluative content in a way that can’t be cleanly separated. They don’t generate the same metaethical pressure as thin concepts like “right” and “wrong.” They are already operative in how we see each other and respond to what happens around us — embedded in practices of moral attention, moral formation, and moral judgment that predate any philosophical theory. They don’t need to be derived from a prior foundation; they already have a grip on us.

Virtue ethicists diverge on the explanation of that grip. Some — like Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Candace Vogler (my MA Thesis advisor) — ground it in facts about human nature and flourishing: a virtue is what enables a human being to live well as the kind of creature we are. Others — like John McDowell — are skeptical of that move and emphasize instead the independent validity of thick moral concepts themselves, which function in our moral practices and our perceptions of what situations demand without needing a further grounding in nature or reason.

What both share is the conviction that this vocabulary represents genuine moral knowledge. “He was cruel” is not merely an expression of attitude. It is a true or false claim about a real feature of what happened. Virtue ethics is a form of moral realism — but one that reaches it differently, by shifting the terrain of moral discourse rather than by supplying a new foundation for the old terrain. And it was, in a quietly remarkable turn, a theistic philosopher who encouraged secular ethics to make that shift.

4. Natural and Non-Natural Realism

All of the traditions surveyed above share a realist commitment — the conviction that moral claims can be true or false, that there are genuine moral facts. But this raises a deeper question that runs beneath all of them: what kind of facts are moral facts? How do they fit into the natural world?

These are metaethical questions, and they don’t belong to any single ethical tradition — they cut across all of them. They are, in some ways, the most fundamental questions of all.

Metaethics: the philosophical study of the nature and status of moral claims themselves — not which actions are right or wrong, but whether moral claims can be true or false, what makes them so, and how moral facts fit into our broader picture of reality.

Two positions in the contemporary literature represent the main realist metaethical options.

Cornell Realism, developed by Richard Boyd and Nicholas Sturgeon, argues that moral properties are natural but irreducible — not reducible to simpler physical properties, but real features of the world that do genuine causal-explanatory work. The wrongness of an action explains our moral responses to it, much as the acidity of a substance explains its chemical behavior. Moral properties are part of the natural order; they just aren’t simple or eliminable parts of it. Many consequentialists and virtue ethicists are also naturalists about moral properties, in this vein.

Robust Non-naturalism, defended by Russ Shafer-Landau and — most ambitiously — by Derek Parfit, holds that moral properties are real but non-natural, more like mathematical properties than physical ones. Parfit’s argument, developed over decades of work, is that the truths of ethics are as objective as the truths of mathematics, and that recognizing this is among the most important things philosophy can do. (Note that Parfit is a consequentialist, but his metaethics is a non-naturalist realism.)

Iris Murdoch’s Moral Platonism belongs in this company, though she arrives at the same conviction from a very different direction. In The Sovereignty of Good she argues that goodness is objectively real and irreducible — something to be perceived through careful moral attention rather than constructed by theory. She takes Plato seriously as a moral phenomenologist: goodness is something we perceive and are humbled by, not something we construct. Her insistence that moral reality exceeds and resists our self-interested constructions of it puts her firmly in the non-naturalist family.

These traditions disagree about what kind of properties moral properties are. But they agree that moral properties are real.

There are moral truths, and we do not construct, but rather discover them.

5. Common Sense Intuitionism and the Moral Realism of Ordinary Life

A final school of thought takes a more immanent route to moral realism. Moral reality, on this view, isn’t waiting to be derived from rational principles or natural facts about human flourishing. It is already latent in ordinary human life, in how we engage with one another before we ever formulate an ethical theory.

The intuitionist tradition begins with W.D. Ross’s early-twentieth-century argument that we have self-evident moral duties — to keep promises, avoid harm, help others — that careful reflection simply recognizes. Contemporary philosophers like Russ Shafer-Landau and Michael Huemer have developed this into rigorous positions: moral intuitions are genuine evidence about moral reality, not merely feelings to be explained away, but the primary data that any ethical theory must answer to.

Another version of this approach runs through a different lineage — one that owes more to Wittgenstein than to the British intuitionists, and that is less concerned with cataloguing self-evident principles than with describing and preserving the fabric of our moral practices.

P.F. Strawson’s landmark paper “Freedom and Resentment” made the foundational move. The reactive attitudes — resentment, gratitude, indignation, love — are not theoretical commitments we adopt after assessing philosophical arguments. They are constitutive of what it means to be in genuine human relationships at all. The participant stance, in which we engage with each other as agents who can wrong and be wronged, who can be held responsible, is prior to and more fundamental than any theoretical stance the philosopher might adopt toward it. Moral reality shows up in how we already live.

John McDowell has developed a related account of moral perception, united with virtue ethics. McDowell argues that the virtuous person simply perceives what a situation morally requires, the way a perceptually competent person simply sees what’s there. Moral knowledge isn’t the application of a theory but a form of perception, cultivated through experience and moral formation, that tracks genuine features of the world. The demand for a theoretical grounding of moral knowledge from outside moral practice is itself a philosophical mistake — generated by a picture of mind and world we should resist rather than satisfy.

What unites Strawson and McDowell is the conviction that moral reality isn’t waiting to be discovered behind or beneath ordinary human experience. It is already present within it, in the texture of our relationships, our reactive attitudes, our practices of holding each other responsible and caring for each other’s good. Philosophy’s job is not to ground this reality from outside but to describe it accurately and resist the temptations that would explain it away.

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What’s striking about this landscape isn’t the disagreements — and there are real ones — but the convergence underneath them. Philosophers working from very different starting points, with very different tools, keep arriving at the same basic conviction: that ethics is a domain of genuine truth, not preference. That convergence is itself evidence worth taking seriously. It’s what unites the 62% of professional philosophers who think that morality is objective.

II. What About the Anti-Realists?

But what about the 26% who don’t? The anti-realist minority is worth understanding on its own terms — because it looks rather different up close than the assumption of secular nihilism would predict.

The minority of philosophers who lean toward anti-realism aren’t nihilists in any ordinary sense. Most of them hold strong normative views — they think factory farming is wrong, that we owe serious obligations to the global poor, that racial justice matters. In many cases their anti-realism is a technical metaethical position about the ultimate grounding of moral claims rather than a license for “anything goes.” The philosopher Simon Blackburn, the most influential contemporary expressivist, has spent much of his career arguing that his view “earns the right” to say that torture is really wrong and that moral progress is real. Anti-realism in the seminar room often looks remarkably like realism in daily life.

The anti-realist positions — expressivism, error theory, relativism — are serious philosophical views with careful and sophisticated defenders. But the point stands: they are the minority position. The assumption that rigorous secular thinking leads away from moral objectivity gets things almost exactly backwards.

III. Does Moral Realism Require an Account of Morality’s Grounding?

The traditions surveyed above — Kantian, consequentialist, virtue-theoretic, intuitionist — disagree substantially with each other. They disagree about what makes actions right or wrong, what we owe each other, whether consequences or character or duties should take center stage, and what kind of entities moral facts ultimately are. But they share a prior conviction: that ethics is a domain of genuine truth, not mere preference. That some things really are right and wrong, regardless of what anyone happens to think about them. That shared conviction is moral realism.

But a reader might look at this landscape and conclude that the grounding question — what ultimately makes moral facts true — remains deeply contested. And they’d be right. Each tradition offers a different answer: reason, facts about welfare, human nature, non-natural properties, the fabric of ordinary moral practice. None has achieved consensus.

But here’s what’s striking: these philosophers don’t arrive at moral realism after settling the grounding question. They arrive at it before, and from different directions, with different answers, and sometimes with no settled answer at all. The conviction that some things really are right and wrong doesn’t wait on a resolved account of what makes them so. You can be firmly convinced that gratuitous cruelty is genuinely wrong without having settled whether that’s because of natural facts about flourishing, the structure of rational agency, non-natural properties analogous to mathematical ones, or something else entirely.

This matters because the most common challenge to secular moral realism — how can you ground objective morality given a naturalistic worldview? — is about how moral truths are grounded, not whether there are any. But the question of the grounding of moral reality doesn’t even arise unless there is a moral reality.

The common challenge assumes that secular philosophy cannot adequately ground moral realism. That may or may not be correct. But it cannot be assumed — not after surveying the range of serious philosophical attempts to do exactly that. The grounding question is the shared hard problem of ethics, and no single answer — secular or otherwise — commands consensus. But that is where serious moral inquiry begins, not a sign that it has failed.

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The assumption that rigorous secular thinking leads away from moral objectivity is empirically false. Most philosophers who have thought hardest about this have concluded that some things really are right and wrong.

But as we have seen, whether morality is real is the less contested question. The more interesting one is what that reality is ultimately grounded in.

Moral realists have offered several answers. But the conversation is far from over.