The Authority of Social Norms

Abstract

An important recent development in metaethics has been a broadening of its scope. Traditional metaethics was concerned mainly with trying to understand the normative character of moral norms. Contemporary metaethicists are now also turning their attention to a range of other normative — or putatively normative — phenomena and trying to understand the normativity of, for instance, norms of rationality (Broome, 2005; Kolodny, 2005; Schroeder, 2009c; Southwood, 2008), norms of prudence (Brink, 2003; Bykvist, 2006; Laden, 2009), epistemic norms (Chrisman, 2007; Chuard and Southwood, 2009; Jenkins, 2007), and so on.