In this chapter, I shall describe McDowell's account of the moral world. Roughly, McDowell supports a form of moral realism. He argues that the world includes moral features as well as the features described by the physical sciences. More precisely, he characterizes his aim rather as defending “anti-anti-realism” (McDowell 1998b: viii). The distinction between realism and anti-anti-realism will become clear in this chapter.

The moral world is not, however, pictured as completely independent of us, or of subjectivity. Moral features do not “belong, mysteriously, in a reality that is wholly independent of our subjectivity and set over against it” (ibid.: 159). But this interrelation between us and the moral world – a relation McDowell likens to that between siblings rather than parent and offspring – is not a form of projectivism, where the appearance of a moral world is really the result of projecting human reactions, as though spreading the mind on to the external world. Thus his account attempts to tread a middle ground between the radical independence and the complete dependence of the moral world on moral subjects. As I shall describe in Section I, this middle ground is made a little clearer by an analogy with secondary qualities. Moral judgements are likened to judgements about secondary qualities, which, according to McDowell, have to be characterized via subjective responses to them but nevertheless can form part of the fabric of the world. But this distinction between primary and secondary qualities interpreted as sensory qualities is not without criticism.