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Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Evaluating Bad Norms, John Thrasher
Evaluating Bad Norms, John Thrasher
Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research
Some norms are bad. Norms of revenge, female genital mutilation, honor killings, and other norms strike us as destructive, cruel, and wasteful. The puzzle is why so many people see these norms as authoritative and why these norms often resist change. To answer these questions, we need to look at what “bad” norms are and how we can evaluate them. Here I develop an integrative analysis of norms that aims to avoid parochialism in norm evaluation. After examining and rejecting several evaluative standards, I propose what I call a comparative-functional analysis of norms that is both operationalizable/testable and nonparochial, and …
Honor And Violence: An Account Of Feuds, Duels, And Honor Killings, John Thrasher, Toby Handfield
Honor And Violence: An Account Of Feuds, Duels, And Honor Killings, John Thrasher, Toby Handfield
Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research
We present a theory of honor violence as a form of costly signaling. Two types of honor violence are identified: revenge and purification. Both types are amenable to a signaling analysis whereby the violent behavior is a signal that can be used by out-groups to draw inferences about the nature of the signaling group, thereby helping to solve perennial problems of social cooperation: deterrence and assurance. The analysis shows that apparently gratuitous acts of violence can be part of a system of norms that are Pareto superior to alternatives without such signals. For societies that lack mechanisms of governance to …
The Price Of Sociality, John Thrasher
The Price Of Sociality, John Thrasher
Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research
A review of Jonathan Birch's The Philosophy of Social Evolution, published by Oxford University Press.
Political Stability In The Open Society, John Thrasher, Kevin Vallier
Political Stability In The Open Society, John Thrasher, Kevin Vallier
Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research
We argue that the Rawlsian description of a just liberal society, the well‐ordered society, fails to accommodate deep disagreement and is insufficiently dynamic. In response, we formulate an alternative model that we call the open society, organized around a new account of dynamic stability. In the open society, constitutional rules must be stable enough to preserve social conditions that foster experimentation, while leaving room in legal and institutional rules for innovation and change. Systemic robustness and dynamic stability become important for the open society in a way that they are not in the well‐ordered society. This model of the open …