Within contemporary metaethics, it is widely held that there is a “presumption of realism” in moral thought and discourse. Anti-realist views, like error theory and expressivism, may have certain theoretical considerations speaking in their favor, but our pretheoretical stance with respect to morality clearly favors objectivist metaethical views. This article argues against this widely held view. It does so by drawing from recent discussions about so-called “subjective attitude verbs” in linguistics and philosophy of language. Unlike pretheoretically objective predicates (e.g., “is made of wood”, “is 185 cm tall”), moral predicates embed felicitously under subjective attitude verbs like the English “find”. Moreover, it is argued that the widespread notion that moral discourse bears all the marks of fact-stating discourse is rooted in a blinkered focus on examples from English. Cross-linguistic considerations suggest that subjective attitude verbs are actually the default terms by which we ascribe moral views to people. Impressions to the contrary in English have to do with some unfortunate quirks of the term “think”.

在当代元伦理学中，人们普遍认为道德思想和话语中存在“现实主义假设”。反实在论观点，如错误理论和表现主义，可能有某些有利于它们的理论考虑，但我们在道德方面的前理论立场显然有利于客观主义元伦理学观点。本文反对这种广泛持有的观点。它是通过借鉴最近关于语言学和语言哲学中所谓的“主观态度动词”的讨论来实现的。与理论前的客观谓词（例如，“由木头制成”、“高 185 厘米”）不同，道德谓词恰当地嵌入在主观态度动词（如英语“find”）之下。此外，有人认为，道德话语具有事实陈述话语的所有标志的普遍观念植根于对英语例子的狭隘关注。跨语言的考虑表明，主观态度动词实际上是我们向人们赋予道德观点的默认术语。英语中相反的印象与“思考”一词的一些不幸的怪癖有关。