Abstract
Social norms forbidding rape jokes, blackface, and flag-burning exemplify a peculiar form of etiquette, which I call political etiquette. Just as compliance with ordinary etiquette expresses respect for the other individuals involved in a social encounter, compliance with political etiquette expresses respect for social groups. In this paper, I propose that we understand political etiquette as a system of conventions whereby we indicate our commitment to treating vulnerable social groups in accordance with their rightful status. Because we have a standing obligation to assure all members of our community that their rightful social status will be respected, we have a powerful moral reason to conform with all existing political etiquette norms whose target social groups lack such assurance, even when compliance with these norms is not antecedently morally valuable. Alongside our moral reasons to comply with some existing political etiquette norms, we also have moral reasons to fortify good political etiquette norms and to reform or erode bad ones.
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Notes
Political etiquette is a neologism, not an established term. In what follows, I aim to show that the social norms I have gathered under this heading constitute a cohesive category that merits philosophical attention.
I offer a detailed account of social status in Sect. 3.1.
In this paper, the term social group is restricted to groups whose members’ social status may be affected by their membership in that group. Thus, for our purposes, children constitute a social group, but people whose names begin with “S” do not. Each of us belongs to many nested and intersecting social groups, which bear on our social status in complex ways (Crenshaw, 1989).
For ease of presentation, I write as if a particular political etiquette norm determines the meanings of the gestures it governs. In fact, the relationship between social norms and social meanings is more complex (see, e.g., Balkin 2003; Bicchieri 2017; Lessig 1995), but these complexities do not make a difference for the present argument.
Balkin (2003) and Lessig (1995) come close, with illuminating descriptive analyses of the ways that social and legal norms interact with social meanings, including meanings that concern the status of social groups. However, neither Balkin nor Lessig attempts to address the normative question that concerns us here: when and why do political etiquette norms have moral force?
The term norm-responsive is used expansively here. It is meant to include cases of unwitting compliance or violation.
The example of queuing norms highlights an ironic feature of etiquette: the more effectively a norm produces compliant conduct, the more that conduct comes to be taken for granted. When this happens, conduct in conformity with the norm becomes inconspicuous and loses its power to convey respect, while conduct in violation of the norm becomes more conspicuous and thus more effective in conveying disrespect.
The “status of a social group” may be understood roughly as the consequence of group membership for the social status of the group’s members. Membership in social groups may augment or diminish the status of their members: for example, in the university, belonging to professoriate augments one’s social status, while belonging to the custodial staff diminishes one’s status.
As I explain in Sect. 3.1 below, this reason is particularly forceful when members of those groups have good reason to fear that their social status will be wrongfully demoted because of their membership in that group.
My use of the summary/practice contrast differs from Rawls’s. In my usage, the practice conception does not exclude the possibility that moral considerations antecedent to the rule may contribute to the balance of reasons for or against some action. The practice conception differs from the summary conception in that it accommodates the possibility that the up-and-running political etiquette norms may contribute to the moral reasons that govern our action. See Rawls (1955) 28–29, suggesting that his use of the term “practice conception” is narrower. For further discussion, see Rouse (2006).
Cold comfort for headline writers and Scrabble players.
A proponent of the rule consequentialist summary view need not understand the underlying moral considerations in consequentialist terms. The moral reason marshaled on behalf of the Romanies might be understood in terms of nonconsequentialist conceptions of respect, for instance. For this reason and others, one could contest whether this view is properly considered an instance of rule consequentialism. Because that debate is orthogonal to the present discussion, I will not defend my view here.
This definition is inspired by Bicchieri (2006). My definition differs in one important respect from Bicchieri’s. Bicchieri deploys the notion of a norm in order to understand and change motivations to act. On her view, a norm is “social” for a particular agent if that agent’s motivation to comply with it is conditional on her beliefs about co-community members’ conduct and normative beliefs. Because an individual’s moral commitments are unconditional, moral norms are excluded from being social norms (Bicchieri, 2006). But the present focus on accountability makes it appropriate to consider moral norms and conditional social norms together (Van Schoelandt, 2018). So for our purposes, defining social norms as ones in which the expectation of general conformity is sufficient but not necessary for compliance captures the appropriate scope of norms.
Real life is a bit more complex than this story suggests. For one thing, norms may differ between micro-communities, so outsiders might not always know the local norms. Moreover, political etiquette norms are subject to rapid change, so those who briefly tune out could miss a norm shift. Consequently, the adoption of a norm does not guarantee that it will be known to every member of the community, much less to outsiders. Nonetheless, more settled social norms come closer to ensuring a shared behavioral expectation against which deviation can be judged willful.
I focus on proscribed conduct for the sake of simplicity, but the same could be said of prescriptions.
My understanding of political etiquette as a kind of idiom echoes Amy Olberding’s account of manners in The Wrong of Rudeness (2019) and Chenyang Li’s account of li in “Li as Cultural Grammar: On the Relation between Li and Ren in Confucius’ ‘Analects’” (2007). See also Táíwò (2020), noting similarities between my account and Li’s and Olberding’s.
It follows from this definition that “vulnerability” is a characteristic that comes in degrees, not a categorical property. On the view I defend, the more vulnerable a norm’s target is, the more powerful a moral reason we have to comply with the norm, to enforce it, to tolerate its attendant costs, and so on.
Exceptions to this generalization occur in contexts where we have extensive individualized evidence informing our expectations of treatment. For example, the black sheep of the family might lack assurance at a family gathering, and this lack of assurance may have nothing to do with her race, gender, or sexual orientation.
If it is widely believed that a group is widely seen as a rightful target of respectful treatment, but in fact members of the community generally believe that the group’s members are not rightful targets of such treatment, then the community is subject to pluralistic ignorance. In such a case, the status of the group is vulnerable, even though it might not be widely thought to be vulnerable.
Jeremy Waldron points out that our rightful claims to equal status may themselves be claims to high status, where “high” is understood objectively rather than relatively (2012a, 13–46).
Of course, such a social system is justifiable only if these professionals’ entitlement to deference is restricted to professional contexts and appropriately defeasible by other contextual considerations.
I am assuming here that even if Waldron is right that all of us are normatively entitled to be treated as nobles, the fact that this high status is shared equally means that the status we would rightfully command could not be quite as high as the status that feudal lords enjoyed.
Waldron’s notion of assurance differs slightly from my own: while I take assurance to be a strictly evidentiary state, Waldron sometimes uses the term to denote a mental state.
Some men’s rights advocates see men’s rightful status as superior to women. Norms that promote men’s superior status are bad for the same reason that Jim Crow political etiquette is bad: they support non-rightful status claims.
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Sadovsky, R.G. Political etiquette. Philos Stud 180, 919–940 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01892-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01892-5