MORAL STATUS OF NORMS

NORMS: THEIR MORAL STATUS

Norms
Conventions
Moral force of norms
Promising as a practice
Types of norms Return to contents

Norms

Moral Rules are traditionally considered to be part of morality, with much of their status coming from the social importance placed upon them. The recognition of the need for moral rules is nearly universal; killing, stealing, lying, and breaking promises are generally thought to be morally wrong. We may think of moral rules as universal norms. A norm is a rule that regulates voluntary behavior. While some moral rules are almost universally accepted, other norms regulate behavior more locally, using arbitrary standards. For example, people in some societies generally walk to the right. This is a norm, but whether people walk to the left or to the right is not thought of as morally important in itself. More important is that some form of behavior is adopted, even though the choice is arbitrary. The same is true with driving a car; in some countries people drive to the left, in some to the right. While it is crucial to pick a direction, the direction picked is not. We also need some sense of property, public and private. Virtually all groups have a conception of property, even though these notions differ from place to place. Top

Conventions

The fact that a norm is arbitrary, in its initial formulation, makes that norm a convention. Moral rules are not thought to be conventional, but many other norms, because they are partly arbitrary, are considered to be based on the fact that one way rather than another has been established as the correct way to do something in a particular environment.
Conventions are used to establish many ways of acting in a society, some of which are thought to be very basic. The contemporary Harvard philosopher W. V. Quine concludes that two classes of moral value exist: one involving altruistic motivation to help others, and the other based on "practices of one's society or social group." The British philosopher David Hume believed that many moral obligations, including obligations involving justice and keeping promises, stem from human conventions. Conventions regulate the way we act in a movie theater and in a classroom. They also define the way we address people in authority, and how we address younger people and older people. Conventions regulate how we eat and how we sleep, our notion of property, and the kind of money we use. Even marriage and religious practices are largely conventional. The importance placed on many conventions, even though they are partly arbitrary, suggests that conventions, at least some conventions, have a moral standing -- that they are part of moral experience. Top

Moral force of norms

Some conventions are quite trivial and are frequency broken without any thought of moral violation. Eating lunch around noon may be conventional, but failure to eat lunch, under normal circumstances, is not thought to be a violation of morality. But other conventions have a moral standing. In her recent study of social norms, the American game theorist and philosopher Edna Ullmann-Margalit cites the British philosopher H. L. A. Hart in presenting her own view that norms have a moral force.

[Norms] are conceived and spoken of as imposing obligations when the general demand for conformity is insistent and the social pressure brought to bear upon those who deviate or threaten to deviate is great.

This definition may be too broad, because some forms of behavior, like table manners, are not thought to have moral force, yet social pressure is brought upon those who deviate. Yet the definition correctly suggests that norms are widespread in a society. A local rule, like how to log on to a computer system, is not a obligating norm in Ullmann-Margalit's sense, even if violating that rule leads to error or serious reprimand. It is not such a norm because the demand is too specific. The widespread nature of a norm is suggested by the inclusion of "the general demand for conformity."
    Though table manners may not have moral force, many conventional norms do. Ullmann-Margalit gives a reason for this: norms establish expectations and regulate behavior even among agents who do not know each other. Norms establish dependencies and help solve social problems by encouraging people to coordinate their behavior. Driving on the right helps establish expectations, makes driving safer, and allows for the smooth flow of traffic. Not speaking out during a lecture, playing music at a proper level, respecting established property in conventional ways, and taking care of one's children at a shopping mall, all help to make social living more tolerable. When such norms are violated, people are often thought to be acting immorally.
    David Lewis, a contemporary American philosopher, considers conventions to be arbitrary because many different norms could serve the same function. Lewis understands that effective norms are stable, and he presents conditions that a norm must meet in order to be stable. A norm is stable, or likely to last, when most people are better off by following it. That stable norms are in the interest of most people adds to their standing as morally binding. When a norm is violated, then people may suffer.
    One may conclude that a norm is thought to have a moral standing when

People typically directly suffer when the norm is violated.
The norm is regularly followed.
It is widely thought that violating the norm is immoral.
The norm is well defined.

We may have difficulty determining which conventions have a binding moral standing partly because having a moral standing is not an isolated phenomenon. Moral experience includes rules, principles, and ideals. When breaking a norm also violates a well-established moral principle, like the prohibition against harm, then we have greater confidence that a norm is a moral norm. This is not to say that a norm can be derived from a principle. Remember, norms always have an arbitrary feature. We cannot conclude from a nonharm principle alone that cars should be driven on the right, or that we need some form of private ownership of property. We have norms about which side to drive on and well-established property rules; we know that harm can be done if people do not follow these norms.
We must be careful when we talk about harm done by failure to follow a norm. "Harm" is sometimes used in a normative sense. This means that specific types of harm are considered morally offensive. Under a normative sense, other harms are not considered morally offensive. The pain caused by a dentist is not thought to be covered under the moral prohibition against harming. Some people are offended, and thereby harmed, when others do the morally correct thing. Some people are harmed when someone does not put the fork on the correct side of the plate. If people are harmed in an unusual way, a way that most people would not be, we have reason to believe that the harm experienced is not reasonable. Part of the moral use of harm deals with whether a reasonable person in the same situation would be harmed by an action. So when it is claimed that failure to follow a moral requirement leads to harm, the harm involved should be interpreted as that experienced by a reasonable person. So a harm involved in violating a convention is given serious moral consideration when that harm is reasonable. Top

Promising as a practice

John Rawls, a contemporary American philosopher, claims that promising constitutes a social practice; it is, then, governed conventionally by social norms. David Hume also argues that promising is conventional; they are "human inventions, founded on the necessities and interests of society." According to Hume, our sense of disapproval when a promise is broken depends not on a natural sentiment but on a sentiment based on a prior convention designed to fill some human need. To the extent that this is true, promising does create serious moral obligations. Suppose promising was not governed by norms. In that case, the words "I promise" would not effectively ensure behavior. Few would reasonably rely on promises. If promises simply meant that a person will try to do something, then the promisor should feel morally free to break a promise when it is difficult to comply. But if promising is a well-defined practice intending to give firm assurance, then a promise has more moral weight, and a promise should be made only with the intention that the promised act will be done, short of very serious reasons against doing it.
Conventional norms, like the norms governing promises, do create expectations; people rely on conformity with conventions, and such norms do allow for the smooth functioning of the social order. Many conventional norms are thought to have a significant moral standing. In short, conventional norms, aside from moral rules, are part of moral experience and thereby have some moral standing. Top

Types of norms

    Edna Ullmann-Margalit maintains that three basic types of norms can be identified: Prisoners' Dilemma norms, coordination norms, and inequality norms. Each responds to social problems or situations that have unsatisfactory results in the absence of norms. Morally compelling norms may be the solution in each type of problem. The Prisoner's Dilemma represents situations where the outcome, for all, of acting "irrationally" is more desirable than acting "rationally." In these cases, people have conflicting payoffs, and so are tempted to take advantage of others. But by acting according to their own interests, when all or most others also act from individual interest, people select actions that are undesirable for all. So norms are used to foster a favorable outcome by putting social and moral pressure on people to act in ways that are against their immediate interests.
    Coordination problems are different. Here the interests of people are the same. They have no special desire to act differently. In contrast to norms involving conflicting interests, co-ordination norms, like driving on the right side of the road, involve no such conflict because people have little desire to do the opposite. We simply need some way to decide on the proper side. A norm solves the problem by providing information about the proper side.
    Coordination problems are common in life. In small groups, group leaders often emerge when they are best at proposing a way to get to consensus about one way to do things, even though it may not be the best way. One of the purposes of authority is to secure a single way of acting, so that things get done. In a similar way, one of the purposes of social norms is to ensure that actions get done.
    To claim that a norm has a moral standing is not to claim that it is morally proper. Moral experience is complex. A moral norm may conflict with a principle; a norm may be a holdover from different times with different needs and so may no longer be needed; and a norm may conflict with an ideal or with a moral rule. The code of silence in some communities may conflict with the need to tell the truth. A code of honor may conflict with rules against killing. A norm dealing with raising a family may conflict with equal opportunity. To say that norms have a moral standing -- are part of our moral experience -- does not mean that they are always proper, or that they shouldn't be changed. It does say that we may need a good reason to change or violate a norm. Even norms considered immoral when measured against the weight of moral experience might establish expectations, which need to be taken into consideration when considering change. In short, norms are a real but limited part of the moral domain.
    The need to evaluate norms is most apparent in Ullmann-Margalit's third type of norm: inequality norms, or, in her terminology, norms of partiality. Inequalities are pervasive in social life. Those with more want to keep it, but those with less may want to take what richer people have. Without norms, inequality leads to continual social fear and frequent social strife. This is the message of the seventeenth-century British philosopher Thomas Hobbes who wrote, in his Leviathan, that without the systematic use of social control through a dominating state with its police power, people would be in a perpetual state of war. Without such social control a person's life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
    According to Ullmann-Margalit, inequality norms provide social stability by serving "to promote the interests of the party favored by the inequality." Inequality norms are evident in relation to property, for example, in laws about trespass. Of course, laws against trespass do not only protect the better-off. Even those who rent property are protected. Universal protection meliorates the "partiality" of the norm because it protects the poor from the rich as well. A norm may protect the rich more than the poor, but it may still protect the poor. Whether or not the norm is proper depends on how life would be without it, on how the norm may be modified, and on how it coheres with moral rules and principles.
    We may think of trespass laws as mixed partiality norms. They help the poor as well as the rich, although differently. A pure partiality norm helps only one group, typically the better-of. A pure partiality norm is difficult to defend as morally proper. It is usually harmful, and it violates a basic moral requirement of impartiality.
    Cases of pure partiality norms are not easy to think of, but as a norm moves more to the advantage of one group than another, it becomes more suspect, morally speaking. Top