Table Of ContentExplaining Norms
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Explaining Norms
Geoff rey Brennan, Lina Eriksson,
Robert E. Goodin, and Nicholas Southwood
1
3
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© Geoff rey Brennan, Lina Eriksson, Robert E. Goodin, and Nicholas Southwood 2013
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Preface
This book represents the culmination of our work on the ‘Norms, Reasons, and Values’
project at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University,
funded by Discovery Grant DP0663060 from the Australian Research Council. We
are glad to record our gratitude to the ARC for fi nancial support and to the Research
School for providing such a stimulating cross-disciplinary environment for our work.
We are grateful for advice and support from our past and present ANU colleagues,
especially Christian Barry, Tom Campbell, Peter Cane, Hilary Charlesworth, Keith
Dowding, John Dryzek, Daniel Friedrich, Alan Hájek, Paul ‘t Hart, Frank Jackson,
Andrew Leigh, Gerry Mackie, Philip Pettit, Rod Rhodes, Chris Reus-Smit, Michael
Smith, Jane Stapleton, Daniel Star, Kim Sterelny, and David Wiens.
It may not look it on the map, but Canberra proves truly to be the crossroads of the
academic universe. An extraordinary number of academics pass through, and we have
bent the ears of most of them on the topics of this book. Doubtless we will forget
some, but defi nitely among the many ANU visitors who have contributed importantly
to our thinking are: John Aldrich, Michael Baurmann, Mark Bovens, John Broome,
Elizabeth Bruch, Tom Christiano, Gerry Doppelt, David Estlund, Nancy Folbre, Pablo
Gilabert, Les Green, Werner Güth, Alan Hamlin, Kieran Healy, Heidi Hurd, Chris
Kutz, Nicola Lacey, Christian List, Sue Mendus, Michael Moore, Claus Off e, Dave
Schmidtz, David Soskice, Kai Spiekermann, Chen-Liew Ten, Edna Ullmann-Margalit,
Laura Valentini, Jeremy Waldron, Lea Ypi, and Ruth Zimmerling. We are particularly
grateful to Elizabeth Bruch and Kieran Healy, who worked with us in the early phases
of the project to try to give it fi rmer sociological grounding (any shortcomings in that
respect that remain are clearly our fault, not theirs!).
Many of these chapters were trialled at conferences and seminar presentations else-
where. Versions of Chapters 3 and 6 were fi rst presented at a May 2008 conference on
‘Norms and Values: The Role of Social Norms as Instruments of Value Realization’ at
the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research of the University of Bielefeld; and versions
of material in Chapters 4, 5, and 9 were fi rst presented at the April 2009 workshop on
‘Empires of Norms and Laws’ at the ECPR Joint Sessions in Lisbon. Other of this mate-
rial has been presented in seminars at the University of Tilburg, the London School
of Economics, the University of Leiden, the University of Glasgow, the University of
Manchester, ANU, the University of Leeds, the University of Oxford, the University
of Miami, Boston University, and the Humboldt University, Berlin. Finally, although
not formally part of this book, our discussion of evolutionary dynamics has been
reshaped in light of follow-on work with Brett Calcott presented at the November
vi preface
2009 conference on ‘Darwin and the Social Sciences’ at ANU. We are grateful to
those audiences in general, and in particular (in addition to people named elsewhere)
to Joel Anderson, Christina Bicchieri, Luc Bovens, Richard Bradley, Michael Brady,
Daniel Epstein, Russell Hardin, Stephan Hartmann, Ulrike Heuer, Stefan Huster,
Gerald Lang, David Lyons, Fiona MacPherson, Martin O’Neil, Jonathan Quong, Hillel
Steiner, Michael Stocker, Bob Sugden, Justin Weinberg, and Andrew Woods.
The writing of this book has been a truly collaborative enterprise. Philosophers (as
all of us are, after some fashion or another) are an intellectually gregarious bunch, but
when it comes to writing they typically tend to be lone wolves. ANU philosophers
are very much the exception to that rule. When setting out on a project that involved
writing a book together, we tried to fi gure out how all that collaboration came about
so naturally in Canberra. Upon refl ection, it occurred to us that ‘lunching an idea’ is
the crucial mechanism: you go to lunch with someone; you get into an interesting
conversation on some topic of mutual interest; one of you goes back and writes it up;
you swap drafts back and forth a bit; et voilà ! So we organized ourselves to lunch this
book together on roughly a monthly basis, sometimes roping in a visiting fellow or a
local expert on the topic on that lunch’s agenda. One or another of us was tasked with
writing up the lunch, based on notes of our discussion but building on that discus-
sion with further ideas that occurred to us as we were writing; and then those drafts
shunted back and forth among the four of us, until they reached the present form.
Thanks, therefore, to Judy and Tony and The Gods for their own convivial (if unwit-
ting) support of this project.
ANU philosophers are a footloose bunch. Throughout the project, Geoff Brennan
spent part of the year in North Carolina, jointly at the Duke University Department
of Political Science and the University of North Carolina Department of Philosophy;
there he thanks Doug MacLean, Geoff Sayre-McCord, Mike Munger, and Jerry
Postema. At the end of project funding, Lina Eriksson moved to the Flinders University
Philosophy Department, where she continues these discussions with George Couvalis
and Ian Ravenscroft. At the same time, Bob Goodin spent a year in Washington, DC,
as Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Bioethics at the National
Institutes of Health, where he discussed these ideas with Amitai Etzioni, Frank Miller,
Chiara Lepora, Annette Rid, Cass Sunstein, and Alan Wertheimer; Goodin is now
spending much of his time at the University of Essex Government Department, con-
tinuing these discussions with Sheldon Leader, Avia Pasternak, David Sanders, Hugh
Ward, and many others. During the mid-to-late phases of the project Nic Southwood
was based in Europe—fi rst at the Department of Philosophy at the University of
Leiden and then in Oxford at Jesus College—where he thanks John Broome, John
Filling, Pauline Kleingeld, David Miller, James Morauta, Eric Schliesser, Adam Swift,
Patrick Tomlin, Bruno Verbeek, and Stuart White.
preface vii
Some material in this book has previously been published in diff erent forms. We are
grateful to publishers for permission to reprint here from:
• Michael Baurmann, Geoff rey Brennan, Robert E. Goodin, and Nicholas
Southwood (eds), Norms and Values: Social Norms as Instruments of Value Realisation
(Baden Baden: Nomos Verlag, 2010): for Lina Eriksson, ‘Rational choice expla-
nations of norms: what they can and cannot tell us’, 179–97; Robert E. Goodin,
‘Norms honoured in the breach’, 289–98; and Nicholas Southwood, ‘Norms, laws
and social authority’, 75–91.
• Nicholas Southwood, ‘The authority of social norms’, in Michael Brady (ed.),
New Waves in Metaethics (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 234–48.
• Nicholas Southwood, ‘The moral/conventional distinction’, Mind 120 (2011):
761–802.
• Nicholas Southwood and Lina Eriksson, ‘Norms and conventions’, P hilosophical
Explorations 14.2 (2011): 195–217.
At Oxford University Press, Peter Momtchiloff has once again proven a model edi-
tor. We are grateful to him for organizing valuable feedback on the manuscript from
three insightful readers. And we are grateful to him and the OUP production team for
shepherding the book so smoothly into print.
Neoclassical economics will be dethroned if and when . . . sociological theory
comes up with a simple and robust theory of the relation between social norms
and instrumental rationality. Until this happens, the continued dominance of neo-
classical theory is ensured by the fact that one can’t beat something with nothing.
Jon Elster ( 1986b : 26–7)
Contents
1. Introducing norms 1
Part I. Explaining the Nature of Norms
2 . Norms 15
3. Formal and non-formal norms 40
4 . Moral and social norms 5 7
Part II. Explaining the Emergence, Persistence, and Change
of Norms
5 . Patterns of emergence, persistence, and change 93
6 . Rational reconstruction 1 33
7 . Social meaning 1 56
8 . Bad norms 176
Part III . Explaining With Norms
9 . Norm following 195
10 . Norm conforming 218
1 1. Norm breaching 234
12 . Attitudes and modes of deliberation 245
13 . Conclusions 260
References 263
Index 279
