ABSTRACT
This chapter describes John McDowell's account of the moral world. McDowell supports a form of moral realism, and argues that the world includes moral features and the features described by the physical sciences. The chapter illustrates the broader post-Kantian account of nature and its connection to the space of reasons, of which moral judgment forms a part. This post-Kantian picture is introduced in Mind and World through a digression on moral judgement. In order to defend a broad view of nature, McDowell has to undermine a narrower "neo-Humean" view in which values, like secondary properties. He defines a secondary quality; it is a property the ascription of which to an object is not adequately understood except as true, if it is true, in virtue of the object's disposition to present a certain sort of perceptual appearance. McDowell argues that there is no reason to doubt that secondary qualities play a role as part of the fabric of the world.
