“Any first-order, substantive normative theory worth its salt will require attention to the mental states of agents in a variety of quite complex ways. But realism, being a view about the status of such normative theories, insists that the truth of any firstorder normative standard is not a function of what anyone happens to think of it.”
Source : Russ Shafer-Landau (2003). “Moral Realism: A Defence”, p.15, Oxford University Press on Demand