 Cornell realists hold that the same thing happens in the moral realm. We all hold what is in effect a moral theory. The reasons we come to hold the theory initially are not important, so long as the theory is close enough to the truth. Richard Boyd (1988), for instance, suggests that our background moral theory identifies moral goodness with those properties that are conducive to the satisfaction of human needs, both physical and psychological. Having internalized this theory, we are able to make moral observations. For example, when we see photographs of the prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison during the American occupation of Iraq we certainly recognize that treating persons in the ways depicted frustrates some significant psychological needs. But this will not be our primary reaction. When we view these photographs we spontaneously judge that the treatment of the prisoners was wrong or abusive (where it should be emphasized that the latter involves a strong moral component). This spontaneous moral belief may be dependent upon our background moral views; if we did not accept some moral theory we would not have made it. But, according to the Cornell realists, the belief is still an observation because it is theory-laden rather than being inferred from a theory conjoined with various non-moral observations. It is what happens in science, and as in science, the fact that moral observations are theory-laden does not prevent them from helping to support our moral theory. As in science, explanatory relations are important, e.g., the fact that the prisoners at Abu Ghraib were wrongly treated, where this fact of being wrongly treated is something like the natural fact of their being seriously harmed, is part of the best explanation of our observing that what was done to them was wrong. On this view, neither the moral theory nor the moral observations are epistemologically prior; both are justified in virtue of the coherence of the entire system of moral beliefs.