The IEP article on moral realism says that noncognitivist realism is logically possible, but goes on to assess the one attempt at such a position (Bruce Waller's) thusly:
Waller’s divide-and-conquer strategy entitles him to either cognitivist moral realism at the level of assumed values, or noncognitivist antirealism at the megaethical level. So Waller’s “noncognitivist realism” fails as a noncognitivist realist position. We may then conclude that cognitivism (or, descriptivism) is necessary for moral realism. Cognitivism, the view that moral judgments are cognitive states like ordinary beliefs (with its two corollaries, namely, descriptivism and their truth-aptness), could facilitate the realist/antirealist debate, but cognitivism alone is not sufficient in facilitating the discussion, not solely in its terms anyway.
So how exactly can we cash out the alleged logical possibility, here? Can we use realism about questions, particularly moral questions, to achieve this goal? (By "realism about questions" I mean something akin to realism about propositions.) So to say: we might take moral questions to be real abstract objects, to which our empirical use of our capacity to ask questions can correspond in a way akin to how assertions are meant to correspond to facts, but we don't take the answers to these questions to be cognitivism-friendly fact(oid)s? For example, we might have an imperative, "Do x," and then, "Why do x?" which is not identical to, "Why will x be done?" or, "Why is x being done?" (or even, "Why was x done?"). An empirically-present question of ours like, "Why do the right thing?" would correspond to an abstract question of the counterpart type, then, maybe.
I don't know about that, though: an answer to such a why-question is still an assertion, an assertion that some j = why do whatever is to be done (even the right thing in general), and this assertibility factor seems to me equivalent to cognitivism. But so is there some sort of erotetic logic/semantics that satisfies the claimed logical possibility of noncognitivist moral realism?
