Abstract
Some fifteen years ago, John McDowell suggested that moral realists ought to exploit the analogy between moral qualities and secondary qualities. Rather than think of moral qualities as brutely there without any internal relation to some exercise of human sensibility, McDowell proposed that moral realists should claim that moral qualities are dispositions of a sort-dispositions to elicit merited responses in appropriate agents. 1 In the intervening years, McDowell's suggestion has been widely discussed and criticized. 2 My aim in this essay is to consider afresh the claim that moral qualities are secondary qualities-or as I shall call them, response-dependent qualities.3 I will argue that some of the more prominent objections to this position are inconclusive, but that there are other good reasons for rejecting it. If the overall argument of this essay is correct, then we shall have further grounds for thinking that the moral realist ought to defend what I will call a primary account of moral qualities.
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