It’s Not Just About Forks

Social norms have a bad reputation in the field of metaethics. In discussions on the nature of normativity, culturally-variable norms that are clearly a matter of social fact are cast to the side as merely normative in a formal sense, which means they have no interesting normative force calling for an explanation. That this theoretical position does not fit our practice becomes clear as soon as you try facing the wrong way in an elevator or wearing a tracksuit to a funeral. So where does the metaethicists’ dismissal come from?

Part of the explanation lies in the history of this debate: the literature on the distinction between formal and authoritative normativity builds on a tradition where we try to pinpoint the special normative character of morality by comparing it to less universal and less mysterious norms of our own making. Another part of the explanation, I believe, is a striking oversight in which norms receive the spotlight. On a broad understanding, social norms include scripts for how to behave within particular activities and institutions, duties and entitlements of social roles we occupy, norms of one’s gender, race and class, and in general norms that provide the mutual expectations needed to enable cooperation and to establish complex social structures. When metaethicists think of social norms, they think of table-setting rules.

Let me illustrate this with a typical case I recently encountered at a metaethics conference. At a talk that distinguished different kinds of normativity, etiquette was put forward as a category of norms that lack normative force. The example given to back up this classification was a norm – found in an old-fashioned etiquette book – on how to present grapefruit to one’s guests: apparently, a grapefruit ought to be served cold. This is convincing as an example of a norm without normative force. Plausibly, it does not matter for anything whether I serve my grapefruit in the exact way that etiquette experts have once proclaimed correct; I do not act in violation of any reasons with real weight when I choose to prepare my fruit in whatever way I please. Yet, does this really show that etiquette lacks force as a whole? Aren’t most of the prescriptions governing our everyday interactions much more meaningful than the grapefruit norm?

When bringing up etiquette, metaethicists like to point to the most arbitrary and intuitively least important norms in this category, usually related to quite formal occasions. They are the strict kind of rule that one does not grasp through common sense but has to be taught through conduct books and finishing schools. In her classic “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives”, Philippa Foot’s illustration of etiquette is that “an invitation in the third person should be answered in the third person”, a rule she then calls a “piece of nonsense” (p. 309 in the Philosophical Review version). An even more familiar example is rules about where exactly to place your pieces of cutlery around the plate, or which fork to use for all the courses one encounters at an unusually fancy dinner.  Fork rules convey a fear of being humiliated by one’s ignorance of overly elaborate scripts – they represent frivolous and archaic restrictions that seem to have no point except to identify the outsiders who do not know how things are done.

There can be legitimate reasons to focus on the table-setting niche of etiquette. If we are trying to compare the normative status of morality and etiquette, it makes sense to discuss clean examples of norms that clearly fall under etiquette and do not seem to be intertwined with moral duties. While Karen Stohr argues that even fork rules are morally important (in “The Etiquette of Eating”, Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics), I am not convinced that a moral justification of good manners can reach quite this far. However, when our discussion of etiquette is limited to fork rules, this creates the false impression that all etiquette norms are equally insignificant. That basically no attention is paid to the broader category of social norms beyond etiquette makes the misrepresentation even more serious.

I see three different ways in which the stereotype of etiquette used in the metaethics literature goes wrong.

1. Pointing to norms that are not norms

Do we actually have a norm that one must serve grapefruit cold? The etiquette norms are not constituted by what is in etiquette books – especially not decades-old ones that we do not use as guides for our behaviour anymore. Norms change and get forgotten. The existence of a social norm arguably requires some degree of collective conformity or wide-spread belief in or acceptance of the norm. If hardly anyone is aware that one is to serve grapefruits in a particular way, then it is simply not the case that one is supposed to serve grapefruits in this way. Etiquette advice writers have influence in determining which rules we have, but no absolute power. The obscurity of some detailed prescription makes the claim that it has no real normative weight convincing, but should at the same time make us doubt that it is a norm (for us, here and now) at all. We therefore need to be careful with using examples of unfamiliar norms as evidence that we have etiquette rules without force.

We also need to pay attention to which social contexts etiquette rules apply in. ‘You must not eat peas with a spoon’ may be in force in a relatively formal dining context, but it does not apply during an ordinary meal at home or even during a dinner with friends in a casual restaurant. This makes fork rules appear especially frivolous: they are too restrictive for everyday situations. Their normative status, however, must be judged from the contexts they actually apply in. At home, you can use whatever cutlery is clean. When you get invited to the Nobel banquet, using the right fork for your salad will suddenly seem very significant.

2. Limiting etiquette to formal dining etiquette

Etiquette follows us everywhere – the demands of good manners restrict and shape our behaviour far beyond fancy dinner parties. Karen Stohr makes clear that etiquette is not exclusive to contexts where salad forks are involved:

Informal meals are governed by etiquette rules as well, even when it is pizza on the couch (e.g., be careful with long cheese strands, try not to get pizza stains on the pillows, don’t take the last piece without checking with the others).

Karen Stohr, “The Etiquette of Eating”, in Barnhill, Budolfson & Doggett (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics, OUP (2017): 705. 

Etiquette also does not merely concern meals, of course. Wherever we face other people, some standard of appropriate conduct is in place. In many cases, displaying good manners is a matter of real importance for how we live together. A narrow focus on formal dining norms therefore does not warrant broad conclusions about how trivial etiquette is.

3. Limiting social norms to etiquette

Finally, rules of etiquette – especially fork rules – do not adequately represent the broader domain of social norms. This category of norms is large and varied, as my students’ examples show. Social norms include scripts for how to act in a job interview, norms on how much noise one may make in a public space, as well as culturally-specified ideals of privacy and fairness. The unwritten rules governing life in society may be contingent and somewhat arbitrary, but they are far from inconsequential and meaningless. There is an open question about the normative status of social norms, which cannot be answered by pointing out how silly table-setting norms are.

Investigations of normativity still have a lot to learn about and from the informal rules we impose on ourselves. If we want to start taking social norms seriously as an interesting normative domain, we have to stop talking about forks.