Moral Categories, Part Two

Moral Categories: The Deontic, the Evaluative, and the Aptic—Selim Berker's three categories of normative concepts. @PhiloofAlexandria

[Tm-ktuw]

Professor Bonevac, thank you so much for another interesting video!

[hunterkallay]

Thank you, Dr. Bonevac. Where I’m struggling with the tests is the relationship between duals and primitive opposites. It seems to me that primitive opposites are necessarily duals, which makes this aptic category difficult for me (though I clearly see the grading test doesn’t fit nicely). I need some help figuring out how, for example just and unjust, can be primitive opposites but not duals. This is tripping me up.

[kallianpublico]

Sounds like physics. Like studying laws of conservation, breaking them down into symmetries and deciding whether certain measurements are invariant over time.
Is morality a flow of deontic, evaluative and aptic behavior over time? What's the difference between mathematical decision trees and evolutionary decision trees in the behavior of mathematicians and monkeys?
What are the exact parameters for deciding whether the movie "Porky's" is more sleazy or less sleazy than the movie "Gone Girl"?
Should I pair sleazy with classy, or is it more apt to pair dirty with filthy? These categories need more hyperbole and less normativity.

[Tm-ktuw]

Professor Bonevac, Plutarch in the beginning of the Life of Sertorius raises very interesting ontological problem: “It is perhaps not to be wondered at, since fortune is ever changing her course and time is infinite, that the same incidents should occur many times, spontaneously. For, if the multitude of elements is unlimited, fortune has in the abundance of her material an ample provider of coincidences; and if, on the other hand, there is a limited number of elements from which events are interwoven, the same things must happen many times, being brought to pass by the same agencies. “

I wanted to ask you, are there any philosophers, which thoroughly studied this problem?

[APaleDot]

I'm not entirely convinced that these concepts don't have duals. It seems to me that just because you don't have a word for a concept, doesn't mean that concept doesn't exist. If you can describe it using multiple words, that seems just as fine as describing it with one word. So maybe the dual of "correct to do A" really is just "not correct not to do A" or "incorrect not to do A"?

That may seem like a reach, but I think if you examine the logical structure of the duals explained in the video, it's not so unreasonable. Consider the "obligatory is dual to permissible" relationship. What is the logical structure of this relationship? Well, you put a "not" on both sides of one of the words and it will transform one concept into the other. The negation of "obligatory" is "optional". If it's "not obligatory to do A", that's the same as "optional to do A", but since we're considering putting "not" on either side of the word, we really should call this the left-negation because we put "not" on the left. There is another concept which we might call the right-negation. For "obligatory" that would be like saying it's "obligatory not to do A", which is really to say that it's "forbidden to do A".


So, hopefully you are understanding that we've set up a kind of square with these four concepts at each corner, and you can travel from one corner to another by adding a "not" either to the left or the right of the word. "obligatory not" is the same as "forbidden", and "not forbidden" is the same as "permitted". By this analysis, what you've called "duals" are really just concepts which are across the diagonal from each other. This is achieved by adding a "not" to both sides of the word. "not obligatory not to do A" is the same as "permitted to do A", and "not forbidden not to do A" is the same as "optional to do A", and vice versa.

Okay, but with these new aptic terms we only have left-negations. We are missing two whole corners of the square, so doesn't that mean there are no duals? I don't think so.
Consider the very first example of duals you gave in the previous video, perhaps the easiest to understand: "necessary is dual to possible". The duality is clear, but what's not so clear is whether we have both left- and right-negations. We could say that "not possible" is the same as "impossible", but have we actually come up with a new concept here? Isn't "impossible" just negating "possible"? Does it really count as a new word? Nonetheless, it seems clear that "necessarily not true" is indeed the same as "impossible", which is what we need for the dual relationship to hold. Similarly, we need "not necessarily true" to be the same as "possibly not true" and that seems to work just fine, but we have no word to describe that concept. Still, it seems like a valid concept which is used all the time in everyday speech. And this "not necessarily true" concept would be dual to "impossible" even though we don't really have unique words for either of these concepts. This implies that you don't necessarily need unique words for every corner in the square in order for the relationship of duality to exist, in which case these aptic terms might be considered a special case of the deontic.

[beetleinabox]

The square root of 9 is indeed 3. Not -3, though (-3)^2 = 9

[MajestyofReason]

Fascinating video. To me, appropriate/inappropriate don’t seem like privative opposites. Consider that my snapping my fingers right now doesn’t seem appropriate; it doesn’t seem to be a ‘fitting’ thing to do. But it also doesn’t seem *inappropriate*. To my ears, it’s neither appropriate nor inappropriate.