John McDowell’s article presents an argument that (intrinsic) values are real.
The distinction between primary and secondary qualities was made by John Locke. Primary qualities are objective and exist even if we don’t perceive them, such as shape and mathematical relationships. Secondary qualities are qualities are subjective and depend on our perceptions, such as color and taste.
Some people believed that if moral values are secondary qualities, then it is subjective and could be considered to be illusory. If they are primary qualities, then they are objective and could concern reality independently of our illusions. McDowell argues that morality might be something like a secondary quality, but that doesn’t make it an illusion. Moral values can be subjective, and subjective states can be real.
Primary and secondary qualities are related to our perceptions: When we observe an object, does our observation depend entirely on our sense organs or is the observation based on what the object is really like? Can we characterize an object as existing in a way that doesn’t wholly depend on our perceptual experience? (Although the color red is produced by microscopic elements, that is not how we understand the color red when we experience it. The color red is wholly understood in terms of perceptual experience) (168).
McDowell admits that we don’t know about ethical truths simply from perception, so it doesn’t actually make sense to say that moral values are secondary qualities. (Ethics requires some intellectual activity.) This is why he only wants to say that ethics involves something like a secondary quality. If ethics requires something like a primary quality, then it will be something like a Platonic form, which he finds to be absurd.
McDowell then argues that secondary qualities are not necessarily illusory because there is nothing misleading about them. Although the experience of the color red doesn’t tell us about the microscopic elements required to have the experience, there is still nothing misleading about the experience. The only way to know what color the microscopic elements will/should produce is to take a look (168-169). The color red could still be understood to be real, even though the experience might not resemble what exists in the world independently of our experience. (The color red is simply our experience of it.) The only reason that secondary qualities should ever be considered to be illusory is if they somehow trick us into thinking that they are primary qualities–and really do appear to us as they actually exist.
It seems unlikely that we can even create an idea of a primary quality from our color experiences, so it doesn’t seem that anything is misleading about them (169). The color red, for example, is simply our experience of red and doesn’t fail to resemble an object that it somehow purports to resemble.
Simply put: Secondary qualities can be subjective, but still real. Secondary qualities are not necessarily deceptive, misleading, or illusory.
Then McDowell argues that values are similar to secondary qualities by defending secondary qualities from the claim that they are extraneous (174). It has been claimed that secondary qualities don’t explain how things are in objective reality. It is true that secondary qualities tend not to explain how things are in the objective world, but this is probably because secondary qualities exist subjectively. Certainly subjective qualities tend not to be causally effective in the objective world, so we can’t have scientific experiments to find out if the color red exists objectively. It would be incoherent to even try to use (certain) secondary qualities as an explanation for how the objective world works considering that we can’t even give an account about what a secondary quality would be like if it was a primary quality.
It is true that values will also fail to explain objective reality and there is no causally effective objective moral reality that produces moral beliefs in us. However, circumstances we deem to be good or bad are said to “merit” such a response rather than to “cause” such a response (175). Saving a life tends to “merit” the response that we believe that a good action has occurred. Since value judgments are “merited,” we somehow decide which value judgments are appropriate without actually perceiving moral facts.
It might be true that we could falsely say something is “tasty” (induces pleasure), but we recognize that what each person tastes as good is different. However, this is not so with values and moral beliefs. One person can be right and another wrong. We expect that our moral beliefs can be mistaken. Sometimes we are willing to change our moral beliefs.
Although this essay has contributed some important arguments, there is much more that needs to be said. One very important question is how we know about ethics. If we know it from perceiving primary qualities, then ethics is clearly real and objective. However, it is still unclear how McDowell thinks we know about ethics. If we can’t explain how we know about ethics, then it might as well be an unjustified religious tradition, instinct, or habit. We might believe in values when no values actually exist.
If we know about “good” and “bad” because we have good and bad experiences, then intrinsic values are entirely dependant on subjective states. For example, pain. We experience pain as bad, so it is a candidate for knowledge of intrinsic value.