Hume's moral realism

David Hume has often been seen as a moral anti-realist of some variety, either denying that moral claims have truth value (non-cognitivism), or claiming that they are all false (error theory), or that conflicting moral claims are equally true (subjectivism). In this work I present extensive support of the claim that Hume is a moral realist, holding that some claims about moral distinctions, literally construed, are literally true. And his is an objectivist theory, i.e. one that has truth conditions for value or virtue claims that make no reference to subjective states of the person(s) judging these claims.;I begin by examining Hume's historical context in some detail, noting that he was involved in a three-way battle among skeptics, rationalists, and sentimentalists. With this context in mind, I proceed to carefully analyze Hume's prescriptive account of moral discourse, as he both describes the phenomena of moral language and also prescribes how such discussion should properly be carried out. Then I delve into Hume's later account of the standard for moral truth, making much of the comparison between moral discourse and color discourse, invoking the language of universality and standard conditions.;Next I explore Hume's empirically discovered strategy for explaining moral judgments, which he uses not only to explain both actual and correct moral judgments, but also to critique incorrect ones. This leads to a discussion of Hume's epistemology in general, and his theory of moral reasoning in particular. According to Hume, it is possible, through argumentation, to convince someone that a certain moral sentiment is proper, even if that person does not feel the sentiment. Overall, my position is that Hume argued for moral claims and made moral judgments that he took to be true, in many contexts and in all stages of his career.