Moral cognitivism is the view that moral judgments express propositions that can be true or false. Under cognitivism, 'stealing is wrong' asserts a fact about stealing, just as 'snow is white' asserts a fact about snow, making moral disputes matters of truth rather than preference.
Reflect on how moral disagreement feels: we argue as if one of us is mistaken about a fact, not merely expressing different tastes. This intuition drives cognitivism. Compare to disagreements about taste ('chocolate is good') to notice the difference.
From your study of moral language, you know that the question of what moral sentences *mean* is prior to the question of whether they are true. Moral cognitivism is the answer to the meaning question: it holds that moral sentences like "lying is wrong" or "you should keep your promises" are genuine assertions — speech acts that express propositions, which are the kind of things that can be true or false. This might seem obvious (what else would a sentence be doing?), but it is a substantive claim because the alternative — non-cognitivism — holds that moral sentences do not assert propositions at all. On non-cognitivist accounts, "lying is wrong" expresses an attitude (emotivism), issues a command (prescriptivism), or endorses a norm, but does not describe any fact of the matter.
The intuitive case for cognitivism starts with how moral discourse actually functions. When two people disagree about whether capital punishment is just, they behave as if one of them is mistaken — they offer evidence, cite principles, appeal to consistency, and try to change each other's minds. This is the structure of a factual dispute, not a disagreement of taste. Compare: if you say "chocolate ice cream is the best flavor" and I say "no, vanilla is," we recognize there is no objective fact at issue — we are expressing preferences. But "this policy is unjust" does not feel like that. We hold each other accountable for moral claims in ways we do not for taste preferences. Cognitivism takes this phenomenology seriously by treating moral sentences as genuine truth-apt claims.
A critical distinction to keep sharp: cognitivism is *not* the same as moral realism. Cognitivism is a claim about the *form* of moral judgments — they are propositions. Realism is a further claim about the *status* of those propositions — that some of them are objectively true, independent of what anyone thinks or feels. You can be a cognitivist without being a realist: an error theorist like J.L. Mackie held that moral sentences do express genuine propositions (cognitivism), but that all those propositions are false because there are no objective moral facts for them to describe (anti-realism). Cognitivism is therefore the weaker, more minimal commitment — it only says moral claims are truth-evaluable, leaving open whether any of them are actually true.
This distinction has practical consequences for where the philosophical action is. If you accept cognitivism, the next debate is between moral realists (there are objective moral facts, independent of human minds) and anti-realists like error theorists or constructivists (moral truths, if any, are constructed or relative). If you reject cognitivism — if moral sentences do not have truth values at all — then the entire realism debate is moot: there is nothing to be objective about. Getting cognitivism right is therefore the gatekeeper for understanding the rest of metaethics. Every subsequent debate in the field presupposes a stance, implicit or explicit, on whether moral claims are the kind of thing that can be true or false.
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