Morality, convention and conventional morality

Abstract

Among anthropologists and sociologists, it is widely believed that moral rules are best understood as a type of social norm. Moral philosophers, however, have largely been hostile to this suggestion. In recent years, the impulse to distinguish moral rules from others types of social norm has received what many take to be empirical support from the work of Elliot Turiel and his collaborators, who have argued that there are two distinct “domains” of social cognition, the “moral” and the “conventional.” Many philosophers have taken this as proof that moral rules are fundamentally different from “conventional” social norms. I argue that moral philosophers should not be relying upon Turiel’s view to defend the moral/conventional distinction. First, I show that Turiel is claiming much less than many have taken him to be claiming, because he puts a lot of what philosophers have traditionally thought of as “morality” on the side of convention, or else in the broad region between the two that he refers to as “multidimensional contexts.” Second, I argue that his concept of the “conventional” is so narrow that the overwhelming majority of social norms – such as the standard rules of etiquette – wind up falling into the “multidimensional” category. This stems from his failure to distinguish between genuine conventions and what I refer to as “norms with conventional elements.”