Mike Ashfield, “Aptic Normativity: The Right Fit for Rightness?”
Metaethicists standardly distinguish between evaluative categories (e.g., goodness, neutrality, badness) and deontic categories (e.g., requiredness, permissibility, impermissibility, unrequiredness) within the normative domain, and Selim Berker (2022) has recently argued that aptic categories (e.g., fittingness, unfittingness, correctness, incorrectness, properness, improperness) should be distinguished as a third family within this domain. Berker also suggests that, despite sometimes being lumped with the evaluative, the aretaic categories of virtue, vice, and their specific instances (e.g., wisdom, folly, courage, cowardice) might best be distinguished as a fourth family within the normative domain. However, Berker does not attempt to settle this issue. At the same time, Berker denies that the reason-related categories (reason, reasons, reasoning, reasonableness) constitute a unified family of normative categories, as they crosscut the deontic, evaluative, and aptic families of categories (at least).
Metaethicists defending the canonical deontic/evaluative dichotomy have tended to assume that “The distinction between evaluative and deontic consists in a generalisation of the traditional opposition between the good and the right.” Thus, rightness is often taken to be a paradigmatic example of the deontic. For this reason, Berker imagines an incredulous canonical theorist of rightness replying to his proposed tripartite division as follows: “What about right and wrong? If [as Berker argues] proper and correct are thin fittingness properties, then surely right is a thin fittingness property as well. But right is a canonical deontic property! So something must have gone wrong somewhere.” Indeed, Berker admits this implication is extremely controversial.
Given that every other putative thin fittingness term’s opposite is formed in English by adding a negative prefix (‘unfitting’, ‘inapt’, ‘unmerited’, ‘improper’, etc.), Berker allows that, where ‘wrong’ works differently, this may be a linguistic clue to the fact that something different is going on conceptually and metaphysically with rightness and wrongness. However, Berker’s stated preference is to argue that rightness and wrongness are thin fittingness categories. So, in this paper, I consider and expand on Berker’s arguments for the aptic categorization of rightness and wrongness, arguing that Berker’s preferred view, while controversial, is correct: aptic normativity is the best fit for rightness and wrongness.