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 |  Subject: Sick Statist Fuck: (((Social norms and state power)))  Wed Jul 17, 2019 3:10 am | |
| The following is the first in a series of blog posts accompanying newly released Bradley Lectures Podcast episodes. The subject of this post is “Making men normal,” an episode examining Cass Sunstein’s 1996 Bradley Lecture, “Should government change social norms?”
The study of politics, government, or law often deals with the fundamental question of what actions the state may legitimately prohibit. The seemingly obvious answer, at least in the western liberal tradition, amounts to a form of John Stuart Mill’s harm principle: State power is rightfully exercised if an action causes harm to another person or the public.
But the answer is not actually so obvious. (Libertarians: Prepare to avert your eyes.)
In a Bradley Lecture given at AEI in November 1996, law professor Cass Sunstein argued that the government can and (normatively speaking) should take a great step further than Mill and change social norms that inhibit “freedom and well-being.”
Sunstein’s argument turns on a few stipulations, which people of all political inclinations ought to take seriously. The first is that norms — which encompass quite a lot, from considering certain opinions beyond the pale of acceptable discourse to not carrying a gun in a neighborhood where guns are uncommon — function as taxes or subsidies on certain behaviors. Someone carrying a gun in Sunstein’s upper-middle class neighborhood, he mentions, is “taxed” for doing so with social distrust and stigma.
What’s more, Sunstein argues that the norms we inherit were not formed by our own conscious choices but by a long series of laws, opinions, and cultures that came before us. We are unfree as long as we subscribe to those norms and not those shaped by our own reason and choice. Perhaps we should greet state intervention as a liberator.
But Sunstein obviously faces several major obstacles in making his case. Not least of those is the American founding, which in its spirit (if not always in the letter of its documents) enshrines a more liberal sensibility than Sunstein advances, and limits state power accordingly. He faces pragmatic obstacles as well: How does government achieve its goals? In the case of discouraging cigarette smoking in the 1990s, it was a combination of public messaging and taxation — but how widely can that strategy apply?
But more interesting for those observing today’s political battles is the problem of limitation. What may reasonably called “norms” is a set of behaviors so vast as to cover every facet of American life. We are governed by norms as consumers, parents, employees, or just strangers passing by on the street. We are governed by ethical norms that have been shaped by generations past, which together constitute the society we know today. There is no escaping the norms that, Sunstein contends, are ripe for replacement.
So why should the state be compelled to change only norms that may influence “freedom and well-being”? For that matter, why should those terms be limited in scope at all?
Some on the political left and right have embraced Sunstein’s mode of thinking lately, reflecting the broad potential applications of Sunstein’s thesis.
On the left, consider norms surrounding language and terminology. As norms begin to shift around gender fluidity and individuals’ preferred gender pronouns, certain governments have chosen to push the “norm cascade” forward with the full force of the law by fining or even jailing those who refer to other people by a not-preferred pronoun.
On the right, meanwhile, debate rages over whether and how to order American society towards a higher good. Conservatives have in the past advocated for “statecraft as soulcraft,” or government that can “make men moral,” generally choosing to direct the norm-changing power of the state towards fostering virtue and moral behavior, rather than increasing choice and autonomy — values which, interestingly, Sunstein explicitly subordinates to the “public good.”
Many conservatives blanch at the notion of using state power to increase individual autonomy and maximize choice, while progressives are similarly suspicious of the state enforcing codes of virtue and morality. Sunstein places stark questions before us all, then: What norms, if any, may the state work to change? What is the limiting principle that renders some norms untouchable?
(And what are we going to do with the all the libertarians who just fainted?)
https://www.aei.org/publication/social-norms-and-state-power/
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