Moral pluralism and universal ethics: reconstructing the dialogue between constructivist and realist metaethical frameworks

The paper develops a philosophical analysis of how the long-standing dispute between constructivist and realist metaethical frameworks can be reconstructed in a way that preserves moral pluralism without abandoning the aspiration to universal ethical claims. The research employs a mixed-method critical-analytical approach that integrates a structured synthesis of peer-reviewed literature published between 2014 and 2024, comparative analysis of the empirical research on folk moral objectivism, and conceptual decomposition of the foundational arguments that define the contemporary metaethical landscape. The central finding is that the realism- constructivism opposition, when carefully decomposed, separates into three analytically distinct dimensions — ontological, epistemological, and justificatory — and that the apparent intractability of the dispute is largely a consequence of treating these three dimensions as a single unified disagreement. The empirical record on folk moral objectivism, which documents that ordinary moral cognition is internally pluralistic rather than uniformly realist or constructivist, supports the analytical claim that no single metaethical framework can capture the full structure of moral thought without sacrificing important features that the alternative framework preserves. The original contribution of this article is the introduction of an integrative analytical framework — designated the framework of three-dimensional metaethical reconstruction — that distinguishes the ontological, epistemological, and justificatory dimensions of the realism- constructivism dispute and demonstrates that a substantively pluralist metaethics can be coherent if and only if it accepts realist commitments at one dimension, constructivist commitments at another, and a hybrid position at the third. The paper closes with implications for normative ethics, political philosophy, and the broader project of universal ethical theorising under conditions of cultural and ideological diversity. Methodological limitations include the necessary abstractness of conceptual reconstruction and the predominantly Anglophone scope of the source literature.