The Social Roots of Normativity

The demands of normativity underpin our most basic practices: when we assess actions as right or wrong, good or bad, correct or incorrect, we perform normative assessments and thereby treat those actions as normative. Normativity is at issue in all these cases, from etiquette, manners, and law to ethics, language, and logic. Non-human forms of life also seem to be structured according to standards or norms. Yet although normativity is indeed a ubiquitous and basic phenomenon, and although we can offer an encompassing account of normativity in terms of the prevailing of standards, rules, or norms, the question of how normativity should be understood remains a central philosophical problem. What is the ontological status of norms—are they objective or merely subjective structures? What is their epistemic status—how are they known and learnt? In what form are norms expressed and how are different norms related to one another? From what do norms derive their force? How do the different forms of normativity, from biological to instrumental and moral, relate to each other, both developmentally and phylogenetically?