Norms and Values

Book excerpt: This collection increases the understanding of how norms work (and fail to work) in aligning people's behavior with the values they are socially supposed to serve, suggesting how norms should and could change in light of changing circumstances. The resources of analytical philosophy, evolutionary economics, empirical political science, social psychology, and sociology have been combined to address a range of theoretical questions: the conceptual and empirical relations between norms and values; the internal aspect of norms; the evolution, maintenance, and alteration of norms; norms, voluntary control, and guidance; norms and the emotions; norms and irrationality; the role of 'deficient' norms; and the social embedding of norms and values. The editors' ambition revolves around the desire to develop a unified account of the bridging functions of norms, employing a perspective that is both philosophical and social scientific at one and the same time. The distinctive feature of the contrib