Non-theistic moral realism

Non-theistic moral realism holds that moral facts — that gratuitous cruelty is wrong, that promises create obligations — are real, objective, mind-independent features of reality, the way mathematical facts are often taken to be, without needing a divine ground to make them so.

Its appeal is preserving full-strength moral objectivity (nothing is merely a matter of opinion or culture) while staying metaphysically minimal — no further commitment to God or any other controversial entity is required. This corpus's own tracked cost for this family of view (see OTC-022 and the subjectivism/relativism research fixture): even granting that such facts are brute, real, and necessary, that alone does not yet show why they are categorically BINDING on an agent who happens not to care about them — the is-ought gap reappears one level down, now as a question about brute moral facts specifically rather than about morality in general.