ABSTRACT
In the past two decades John McDowell has, with admirable consistency, sought to establish a position in moral philosophy programmatically entitled “moral realism.” Although this expression had previously been used for theories that treated moral values as objective components of the world-that is to say, as strictly independent of our perceptions, beliefs, and practices1-McDowell’s moral realism has a quite different character. According to McDowell, moral reality is disclosed to us in its full objectivity only in connection with rule-governed behavior, which can be conceived as a “second nature” of human beings owing to the fact that it arises from the socialization and education (Bildung) of our first nature.2 The idea of such a “second nature”—suggested in ways that are hard to disentangle by Aristotle, Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Gadamer-is supported by a subtle moral phenomenology that is meant to show how far we are able to perceive moral facts in the same direct way as we perceive colors, odors, and other secondary qualities. The phenomenology seeks to determine whether the moral characteristics of persons or the moral qualities of an action concern phenomena that are not extraneous additions to a reality but are rather experienced directly within the framework of our everyday practices.3 Thanks to our second nature, it is empirical experience-our sensory receptivity, as McDowell puts it-that enables us to take in the qualitative constitution of the world. Hence this version of moral realism amounts to the idea that our moral beliefs and judgments reflect not the intersubjective efforts of human beings but rather the demands of reality itself.
