Why to be Fair. Are norms of Justice Social or Moral?

Abstract

In the last few years, there has been a good amount of theoretical work around the concept of social norm. The work of Cristina Bicchieri and Jon Elster has been specially interesting and intense in this field. Although their respective approaches present substantive differences, they both agree in defining social norms in contrast with other related concepts, such as moral norms. Notwithstanding this basic agreement, they disagree when classifying norms of justice. For Bicchieri these are social norms, while Elster’s view is more complex and he classifies different norms of justice in different categories: some are social while others are semi moral o moral. In this paper I focus on the treatment of one specific norm of justice, the norm of egalitarian distribution, which is a social norm for Bichieri but a moral norm from Elster’s view. With the aid of some recent experiments, I conclude that Elster’s view is more promising, at least when analyzing this particular norm.