The Fair Share Theory of Conventional Normativity

Abstract

Often, we should obey conventional, or socially constructed, norms. You should tip in America, queue up in England, take your hat off when you enter a church in Italy. But why? Laura Valentini has recently suggested that obeying conventional norms respects the agency of those who support such norms. In this article, I argue that this is not why we should obey conventional norms. Instead, we should think of the moral force of such norms in terms of doing our fair share. This line of thought starts with the idea that we have many weighty collective obligations: obligations to fairly allocate goods, to help people author their own lives, to ensure workers are paid sufficiently for their work. It is very difficult to motivate and coordinate everyone so as to discharge these obligations. But human beings are norm-following creatures—we are strongly disposed to adopt and comply with social norms. So the most reliable means to discharging these collective obligations is to set up and maintain good social norms. Thus, we have a duty to do our fair share toward upholding such norms. Obeying social norms is doing our fair share in promoting the more fundamental moral goals.