Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Politics, Philosophy & Economics

Publication Date

2025

Keywords

social norms, social rules, social practices, acceptance, commitments

Abstract

According to some theories, a rule counts as a social norm within a community only if the members of the community generally accept the rule. This is a conceptual claim: proponents of these theories do not deny that a rule can structure people's interactions and relationships even though few people accept it; they simply deny that such a rule should count as a social norm. I argue that this approach draws arbitrary boundaries that cut through explanatorily significant categories with no theoretical payoff. We typically invoke social norms either to explain empirical phenomena (e.g. what people do) or moral phenomena (e.g. what people should do). In both domains, “acceptance theories” of social norms do not define a category of rules that warrants distinctive attention. On an alternative approach, a rule counts as a social norm as long as people cooperate with expressive practices representing the rule as valid, whether they accept the rule or not. I argue that “practice theories” of social norms are more fruitful, and so we should abandon “acceptance theories.”

Funding Source

A New Faculty Initiative Grant from Illinois State University enabled work on this paper. This article was published Open Access thanks to a transformative agreement between Milner Library and Sage Journals.

Comments

First published in Politics, Philosophy & Economics (2025): https://doi.org/10.1177/1470594X251364823

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

DOI

10.1177/1470594X251364823

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