Would moral facts give us reasons for action?

Moral realism is the view that there are moral facts. A moral realist believes that moral statements attempt to describe the world, and they are therefore the sorts of statements that can be true or false (this is called cognitivism). Moral realists not only believe that it is possible for moral statements to be true, but they also believe that some of them are true.

According to the correspondance theory of truth, a proposition is true if there is a fact (a fact is a state of affairs), that corresponds to it and makes it true. For example, the sentence "I am sitting on a chair" is true if and only if I am sitting on a chair.

If we accept the correspondence theory of truth, it seems that for moral realism to be true, there needs to be such a thing as a moral fact. There need to be facts in the world which somehow make some moral statements true.

But these facts would be different to other sorts of facts. Unlike the fact that I am sitting on a chair, a moral fact would give us reasons to act in a certain way. If it is a fact that it is wrong to torture babies for fun, then we have a reason to not torture babies for fun. Maybe if we don't know the moral fact, we don't have a reason to refrain from the action. But certainly if it is true that torturing babies for fun is morally wrong, and if I know that it is true, then I have a reason to refrain from torturing babies for fun.

Maybe I don't care that it is wrong to torture babies for fun, so even though I believe that it is wrong, I do it anyway. In that case, don't I still have a reason not to torture babies for fun, even if I ignore that reason or it fails to motivate me? It seems that if moral realism is true and moral facts exist, those facts, or at least the knowledge of those facts, would always give us reasons to act in certain ways (even if they didn't actually motivate us to act in certain ways). Believing that something is wrong is almost like being told "don't do that!" Whether you choose to obey your moral belief, or whether it moves you in any way, is another matter; your moral belief still tells you to act in a certain way.

If there are moral facts, they have reason-giving qualities. This differentiates them from other sorts of facts, such as the fact that I am sitting on a chair, which do not direct our action in the same way.

Do people agree with this? Would moral facts give us reasons for action?

Moral realists seem to be faced with the difficulty of explaining how such strange, reason-giving facts would fit in with our world. I intend to argue that this difficulty is a reason to be sceptical about moral realism. It seems that it would be easier to deny the existence of moral facts than to explain their strange, reason-giving qualities. It may still be true that there are moral facts, even if they are strange things; but an anti-realist picture of morality is arguably less strange, and it should therefore be taken very seriously.