Norms are a powerful psychosocial force that shapes the experience of our world, our values, and our identity. Through culture and language, we build up an understanding of the world that feels true and accurate. However, this feeling of veracity is inherent to our internalization of what is considered normal by those around us. By understanding the mechanism of how values and beliefs are inculcated, we can gain an appreciation for the force and power of our moral norms, both those we recognize and those we do not.
Topics in the text below:
Norms Acquired
Norms and Moral Relativity
Norms Internalized
Norms and Solidarity
Norms in Science
Norms and Rationality
Norms and Language
Norms Acquired
Norms are complex, powerful, psychological, social, and cultural creations that take our subjective feelings and transform them into truths. This normative influence extends to our perception of truth and while we may not even consider our beliefs to be moral in nature, they are simply felt to be true, often beyond questionability. The experience we have that our beliefs are true is the result of the normative process. Understanding this process adds to our moral intelligence, giving us the capacity to reflect on our beliefs, enhancing those that are adaptive, altering or abandoning those that hinder our ability to flourish.
Norms are the fundamental building blocks of our moral beliefs. Convention, social conditioning, and familiarity generally determine an individual’s moral beliefs. We tend to take on the beliefs and attitudes of the world around us, especially from influential relationships and impactful experiences. However, in the face of such powerful normative forces, it can be very difficult to keep in mind that what we think is true may or may not be.
Generally, norms are not easily altered or critically reflected upon; rather, norms just exist — practically as given. For instance, in Pre-Columbian Central and South America, human sacrifice was an established norm. And, under the English system of justice, torture was an accepted method for interrogating a witness until the eighteenth century. Currently, throughout most of Western Europe, morals are held to be entirely relative without any basis in objective truth. All three of these instances reflect norms of the times. Whatever beliefs a culture has, those beliefs are going to be disseminated throughout the society and inculcated in the members of that society. We all grow up and live in a family and a society surrounded by belief systems. This exposure results in various degrees of adoption of these belief systems as our own.
The acquisition of moral beliefs comes from an interaction between our individual psychological constitution and the world in which we live. Moral beliefs are inculcated from our family, community, and culture through a normative process — what we believe to be moral is what is normative in our world. Basically, we acquire the morals of the people who surround us. The values, beliefs, and behaviors we see become accepted as normal, at many levels unquestioningly. This is a normative process, and means that whatever is consensually accepted is held to be true. Moreover, whether we adhere to the prevailing norms or rail against them, we are engaged with the forces of socio-cultural norms.
Generally, we have the ability to reflect on truths that we have not fully internalized or as when we reflect on other people’s differing moral views. Paradoxically, as difficult as it is to reflect on the truth of our own moral views, it is perhaps too easy to question others who hold views that are not normative for us. By deepening our understanding of the power of the normative process, we can advance our moral intelligence, increasing our ability to more fully self-reflect.
Moral intelligence includes understanding that just because something is established consensually, this does not address the veracity or adaptability of the normative construction. Moral views are created through a normative process; however, this does not inherently make the morality real or un-real. Equally true, just because moral views are established through a normative process, this does not mean that all moral views are equal. Some views may be more adaptive than some other views. We should not dismiss the power, utility, or truth in morality just because it is acquired normatively. Morality is acquired through a normative process; this does not speak to the viability, adaptiveness, or veracity of the acquired morality.
Norms and Moral Relativity
Normatization is one way of looking at how moral systems are established and disseminated. Normatization is a process of transmission, not a moral theory. Any moral system can be inculcated through normative processes. Although the normative process is not itself a moral theory, this process may, on the face of it, seem to contradict some moral theories while validating others.
Not all moral theories are going to accept that morals are acquired through the process of normatization; for example, nativistic or theistic moral systems assert that the true morals emerge naturally from nature or imposed by deistic or theistic mechanisms. Additionally, normative processes of moral transmission may be taken mistakenly to prove that all morals are relative, that there are no objective moral truths. That is, if moral events are transmitted by the conventions of a given group of people, the conclusion is that there are no absolute moral truths and that morality is entirely relative. However, just because the transmission and inculcation of moral thinking is normative, this does not mean all moral beliefs are relative. The relative nature of moral truths is tied to the theory of moral relativism, not to the development of norms in a given culture. Relativism is a moral system that holds that each group or person holds a moral view uniquely determined by his or her circumstances. Normative processes are distinctly different from moral relativism.
Normative processes speak to how moral truths come to be known and disseminated in a group or culture. The elucidation of moral truth is independent of the normative process, which does not address the content of the moral truths, nor does it address the possibility that there are absolute moral truths. The fact that moral principles are derived from normative processes does not address the veracity of the moral principles themselves. Just because moral principles appear to arise from normative processes does not mean these principles are or are not based in objective truth.
Norms Internalized
Internalization is the psychological process that transforms a sociocultural norm into a personally held belief or truth. Through internalization, the norm comes to be felt as a factual, rational truth. Once internalized a norm becomes an aspect of one’s own psychological make-up. The process of internalization shapes the intensity of the subjective feeling that a norm is more than consensually determined and a fully internalized norm can be experienced as a desire or a call to action, a motivational tendency.
Initially a norm may simply be accepted. An accepted norm has a lesser degree of internalization and the norm is not experienced as a motivational disposition. The acceptance of a norm is tantamount to endorsing compliance with a belief or behavior. Acceptance is facilitated through social pressure and vicarious learning. The process of acceptance is further developed through discourse with others and self-reflection. When we sincerely accept a belief, we are likely to act consistently in regards to that belief.
The consistent action that stems from acceptance results in an emotional attachment to the belief. This consistency then reinforces the sincerity of our acceptance and builds a feeling of the belief having veracity. This pattern of consistency leading to emotional endorsement is at the root of many religious indoctrinations and can be seen even in the Alcoholics Anonymous admonition to group attendees to “keep coming back.” The consistent action leads to an emotional connection that increases the importance and meaningfulness of the belief. Subsequent to acceptance, one may move to an avowal of the norm. Avowal is an active endorsement of the belief bringing along the subjective experience of owning the belief as one’s own.
The final level of inculcation of a belief is internalization. Internalization of a belief results in an emotional fusion with that belief and there is little, if any, sense of it being an external acquisition. Once internalization has occurred any sense of acceptance or avowal is seen as a mere by-product of the emotionally driven belief system. The emotion evoked from the internalized belief results in a subjective experience that the belief represents a deep truth. Ultimately any remaining cognitive associations are replaced with a feeling that the belief is true, based ones gut feeling or intuition. The belief is now a part of one’s very sense of identity.
Norms and Solidarity
The universal tendency of families and societies to promulgate norms reflects the meaning-making nature of human beings. We all share a basic need to create meaning; norms and moral beliefs are societal manifestations of that basic need. This shared human need to create meaning can help us appreciate the wide diversity of moral views. We may not like or approve of another’s moral values, but we can appreciate the need for meaning inherent in being human.
All cultures develop moral norms. Such ubiquity fuels evolutionary psychologists’ inference that moral norms are evolutionarily adaptive. People are social creatures and effective social coordination requires shared values and norms in order to facilitate coordination of social behaviors. Moral norms may represent stable evolutionary systems (SES). An SES is an established eco-system that is stable from an evolutionary perspective. An SES will have enough diversity to be able to adjust to sudden social or ecological change and yet afford sufficient homogeneity to maximize socio-ecological opportunities.
By acknowledging the universality of creating morals, we can see the similarity in all people striving to make moral valuations in their lives. This shared human striving to create moral meaning is what Richard Rorty calls moral solidarity. According to Konstantin Kolenda, moral solidarity allows us to move beyond the diversity of moral belief systems and onto an appreciation for the mutuality of the need to create moral meaning. Solidarity is a tolerant subjective humanistic perspective toward the conflicting and disparate moral views of others. Through an appreciation of the shared need to create moral meaning, we may be able to recognize the humanness of the other person’s perspective, even if we strongly disfavor the content, argue, or even fight against that content.
Accepting that we all share a need to create moral values can help us transcend a tendency to deprecate or devalue groups that hold disparate moral views. Such transcendence of moral disparagement not only reduces intergroup conflict, but also allows each group and individual to focus on his or her own moral values, development, and purpose. Solidarity can give each of us the space to hold some independent values without total estrangement from differing moral systems. Solidarity does not free us from the normative processes; however, it does give each of us the opportunity for developing an increased range of normatively determined moral perspectives.
Although the quest to feel solidarity with others who we may consider wrong seems beyond our tolerance ability, this degree of open-mindedness has surrounded us for over a generation in other areas of science and philosophy. The laws of quantum mechanics and the post-logic analytics of deconstructionism in philosophy question our very physical and mental reality. Many of us today, function in the world with an acceptance that the fundamental nature of the mental and physical world is indeterminate. If we can endorse such indeterminacy in our fundamental reality, is it really such a stretch to focus on a similar perspective on our values and moral behaviors?
Norms in Science
Moral values are not alone in being based on norms. Empirical science is also viewed as normatively determined. For example, a fundamental normative process in the advancement of science is the peer review. The hallmark of contemporary scientific research is the peer-reviewed journal process; having your article published in a peer-reviewed journal bestows a certain veracity on the article’s contents and theorizing.
Peer review, as a way to establish truth, has been around for millennia. In the middle ages, the peer-review process was the scholasticism of the Catholic Church. If you wrote a treatise that conformed to established doctrine your idea was considered to be valid. We have since come to establish improved methods, such as empirical research; however, the process is still the same. If your book or article is peer reviewed, endorsing or adhering to certain established principles or at least following accepted procedures, then your assertions are considered valid.
The fact that consensually determined truth was erroneous in the middle ages did not result in abandoning the use of consensus. The scientists in the middle ages used consensus but were very inaccurate. However, the past and present failures in consensually established scientific truth did not result in giving up searching for better consensual pragmatics. We would have been very wrong to take the errors and limits of alchemy and other pre-sciences to mean that there is not any particular truth to science. Instead, we established empirical methods, as well as general theories of science, to set parameters to guide consensually determined establishment of scientific fact.
A similar acceptance of moral philosophy and moral theory is needed. Just because the normative process has resulted in moral theories that seem limited or erroneous, even injurious and harmful, we cannot just say that there is not a moral system that is more viable than another. This would be like saying, “since the scientists in the middle ages used consensus and were so wrong, we must discard consensually established science.”
We can neither blindly accept nor blindly discard our current use of normative consensus for defining truth. We can learn from the pragmatics of consensually established truth and be open to accepting what works, and rejecting what does not work. For example, medical science is an area where consensus plays an overarching role in the establishment of medical truth. In the mid-twentieth century anyone having a coronary event, heart attack, or heart disease, was told to rest and not exert oneself lest one bring on a fatal episode. There was one lone voice-in-the-wilderness advocating for exercise to build up the heart muscle. His ideas were shunned for many years because it was not aligned with the agreed doctrine. However, the empirical observations that people who exercised were more likely to recover, eventually overcame the limits of establish wisdom. Currently, the medical community includes exercise in recovering from, and preventing, heart attacks.
A stance of curiosity and open mindedness, combined with the establishment of viable measurement, has allowed science and medicine to advance phenomenally. The science of moral psychology and the philosophy of moral theory need to be cast in a similar light: improved observation may lead to an acceptance that there are moral systems that are adaptive, adding to the well-being of its adherents. We can no longer simply say that since morals are determined by consensus, that there is no such thing as moral truth. Moral truth may be better analogized to empirical truth. We can then search for ways to attain to better moral systems.
Some outstanding research in moral psychology by Paul Bloomfield explores morality in the same light as looking at the concept of healthy, as a measurable attribute of a system. Just as there are conditions to every system that indicate it is functioning in a healthy way, there may be a similar perspective toward human belief systems, some moral stances may be more adaptive, just like there are health related stances that result in a healthier person.
Norms and Language
Language itself is a normative process that does not reveal reality, but actually creates our reality. According to Konstantin Kolenda, language does not define the world through signs, but serves to help us create meaning in order to better utilize our experiences. As stated by Richard Rorty, language is a tool, not a fact, and is best seen as a form of coping with the world and not a form of copying the world.
Language is more analogous to metaphor than to objective signification. We use metaphor to shape our engagement with the world; recursive engagement then shapes our metaphors. As our metaphors become more resonate with our shared experiences, the metaphor moves towards the realm of conventional language usage. Over time, the metaphoric origin of language becomes obscured and we come to experience the language as describing and defining an objective world.
Appreciating the metaphorical roots of language allows us to experience a greater depth to our world. As Jiddu Krishnamurti emphasized, naming something is not the same as having an experience. Often deeper meaning, mystery, and wonder are flattened or eliminated by naming. When we remain aware of the creative role of language, we will engage with language to create new metaphors and new meanings. In this way, language becomes a form of culture and history, aiding us in connecting viable narratives that shape our sense of self.
The normative force of cultural narratives means that individuals embedded in the culture may not be able to be objective, resulting in our narratives becoming experienced as absolute truth. Contemporary American narratives include a high valuation of the self, freedom of choice, and the belief in an objective empirical science in establishing truth. The development of moral intelligence includes being able to appreciate the normative nature of these apparently self-evident belief systems. This does not mean surrendering our beliefs to superficial relativism, but appreciating how each of us has come to the truths that are held as Truths.
Norms and Rationality
Not only are our beliefs the result of normatization, but how we think about seemingly objective events is normatively determined, as well. Consensual determination of what one believes is not limited to morality. All rational thought is normative, but we tend not to question the veracity of our rationality; we just feel that what is real is real. Fundamentally, what we believe to be rational is what has been inculcated as normal.
The normative nature of rationality does not mean there is no real world; but just as is true for morality and science, our way of thinking about reality does not define the nature of reality. Postmodernism challenges us to recognize how perspectivism shapes every aspect of our experience in the world. The postmodern assault on knowing absolute truth is tied to the nature of language. It is really easy to feel that we know what something is when we are able to name it or describe it. Deconstruction of language shows us that the word does not correspond to reality; the word corresponds to other words. According to pragmatic humanism language construction is how we navigate in the world. Language cannot be taken as defining the way the world is.
Language is established through a normative process, where the meanings of words are consensually determined. Language emerges out of metaphor. Subsequent normative use of the metaphor establishes correspondences of words with objects and ideas. This normative correspondence eliminates the metaphoric aspect and the words or concepts come to be seen as direct correspondence with reality. Since most of our thinking is in words, what we think and how we think about it, is the result of the social, cultural, and historical context of our lives. Our thoughts reflect the accepted norms of our time.
Contemporary perspectives on the nature of knowledge suggest that norms play a significant role in determining what is to be construed as factual or true. Even the bedrock of science and empiricism is being examined in the light of non-objective influences. Empiricism asserts itself as objective and factual, establishing rational knowledge that is value-free. Historically the empirical was held out as being a doorway through which one would find the truth about reality. However, the objectivity of empirical science is based on the belief that only what can be measured and tested is deemed as fact. And, if established measurement and testing makes a determination, it is definitive. The current efforts in philosophy of science are examining how the definitions set by empirical science limit the type of questions scientists are even allowed to explore.
Questioning knowledge and fact need not result in skepticism, but can support open-minded exploration. The apparent normative and subjective determinants of knowledge can expand the range of science beyond empiricism. Rather than abandon the idea that there is any rationally based truth, it might be helpful to consider the nature of what might be called subjective-rationality or a rationality based in non-empirical objectivity. This is the nature of moral knowledge — emerging from subjective normative processes that include psychosocial and cultural events as well as psychological determinants.