Ronan Ó Maonaile

According to a traditional distinction in moral philosophy, the deontic and the evaluative constitute two wholly separate families of normative categories, with properties and relations such as ‘ought’, ‘ought not’, ‘required’ and ‘forbidden’ belonging to the first group, and ‘good’, ‘bad’ and ‘better than’ belonging to the second. Selim Berker offers a systematic defence of this distinction by proposing five logical features which all deontic categories have but evaluative categories lack, or vice versa. In this paper, I show how each of Berker’s five features can in fact be found among categories across the two families. Along the way I acknowledge some differences that survive scrutiny. The upshot is that the deontic and the evaluative families are much more closely interrelated than is often assumed. I then offer a new account of the relationship which can make sense of these results: the similarities and differences in the logical structures of certain deontic and evaluative categories can be understood in terms of the specific ways these categories guide our reasoning about normative matters.

In bioethics, two sorts of normative categories are commonly used. These can be split into two families: the deontic categories, such as ‘right’, ‘ought to’ and ‘requirement’, and the evaluative categories, including ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘better than’ and ‘the best’. While other normative concepts such as ‘virtue’ and ‘vice’ have also been discussed, the aptic categories, including ‘fitting’, ‘appropriate’ and ‘merited’ have received little to no attention from bioethicists. Drawing on Philip Stratton-Lake's important contributions to the metaethical literature on the aptic categories, this paper investigates the role of fittingness in bioethics. To this end, we first establish four characteristic features of the aptic categories. We then show how fittingness can be applied in four areas of bioethical research, before considering some objections. We conclude that there is much to be gained by expanding the dialogue between recent metaethical work on the aptic categories and practical ethics.

This thesis is about the relations between different normative categories. Normative categories are things like reasons, oughts, values, and fittingness. The guiding question is this: can we explain the nature of one normative category in terms of another? Specifically, I am interested in explaining the nature of fittingness, a normative category which has received increased attention in recent years. The thesis develops several related claims: (1) fittingness is irreducible to other normative categories; we cannot explain the nature of fit in terms of value or the balance of normative reasons, (2) there is no one normative category which fully explains all the others; all X-First views are seriously flawed, and (3) the project of explaining the nature of normative categories and the relations between them is best advanced by articulating the particular features that unite and divide them.