Volume 30, Number 4
July 2025
ARTICLE

The Fair Share Theory of Conventional Normativity

Volume 30, Number 4, July 2025, Pages 519–547
https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v30i4.4293
PDFPDF

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.
Copyright © 2025 Adam Lovett
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
|

What Is (Fundamentally or Per Se) Wrong with Colonialism: A Reply to Agrawal and Buchanan

Daniel Weltman

Rights Infringement, Compensation, and Luck Egalitarianism

Jesse Spafford

In Defense of Claim Rights

Michael Da Silva

Probability, Normalcy, and the Right Against Risk Imposition

Martin Smith

Value Capture

C. Thi Nguyen

Are Savior Siblings a Special Case in Procreative Ethics?

Caleb Althorpe and Elizabeth Finneron-Burns

Freedom, Desire, and Necessity: Autonomous Activity as Activity for Its Own Sake

Pascal L. Mowla Brixel

Bare Statistical Evidence and the Right to Security

N. P. Adams

On the Normative Connection Between Paternalism and Rights

Stephanie Sheintul

Why Extending Actions Through Time Can Violate a Moral Right to Privacy

Björn Lundgren

The Trouble with Formal Views of Autonomy

Jonathan Knutzen

Does Initial Appropriation Create New Obligations?

Jesse Spafford

Portico