Abstract
A key feature of ISCT is the claim that individuals are required to comply with the norms that are “accepted by a clear majority of the community as standing for an ethical principle” [Donaldson and Dunfee, 1999, The Ties that Bind (Harvard Business School Press, Boson, MA), p. 39], so long as these norms are consistent with hypernorms. I refer to this as the communal authority thesis. Many people see the communal authority thesis as an attractive feature of ISCT, a welcome move away from the abstraction of principle-based ethical theories. I argue in this article, however, that the communal authority thesis is false: we do not have a general moral obligation to comply with the accepted norms in our community. I consider and reject several defenses of the communal authority thesis, including the central arguments put forward by Donaldson and Dunfee. I go on to develop my own position, which accepts that social norms can be important from the moral point of view. However, I argue that social norms are important because they can shape the morally important features of our situation, not because we have a general obligation to comply with these norms as such. I use examples such as gift giving in Japan and the housing crisis to illustrate my position.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Cohen, J.: 1997, ‘Arc of the Moral Universe’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 26 (2), 91-134.
Donaldson, T.: 1996, ‘Values in Tension: Ethics Away from Home’, Harvard Business Review (September–October)
Donaldson, T. and T. Dunfee: 1999, The Ties that Bind (Harvard Business School Press, Boson, MA).
Durkheim, E.: 2008, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK).
Estlund, D.: 2008, Democratic Authority (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ)
Grofman, B. and S. Feld: 1988, ‘Rousseau’s General Will: A Condorcetian Perspective’, American Political Science Review 82 (2):567–576.
Habermas, J.: 1996, Between Facts and Norms (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA).
Hayek, F.: 1960, The Constitution of Liberty (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL).
Hobbes, T.: 1991, Leviathon (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK).
Klein, A. and Z. Goldfarb: 2008, ‘The Bubble’, Washington Post (June 15), p. A01
Locke, J.: 1988, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK).
Mackay, C.: 1980, Extraordinary popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (Three Rivers Press, New York, NY).
Morris, C.: 2008, The Trillion Dollar Meltdown, (Public Affairs, New York, NY).
Rawls, J.: 1999, A Theory of Justice, revised edition (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA).
Raz, J.: 1986, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK).
Rousseau, J.: 1997, ‘On the Social Contract’. In Rousseau, J. (ed.), The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK).
Scanlon, T.: 1998, What We Owe to Each Other (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA).
Scanlon, T.: 2003, ‘Promises and Contracts’, in The Difficulty of Tolerance (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK), pp. 234-69.
Simmons, A. J.: 1979, Moral Principles and Political Obligations (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ).
Sunstein, C.: 2002, Risk and Reason (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK).
Walzer, M.: 1970, Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War and Citizenship (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Hussain, W. No More Lemmings, Please – Reflections on the Communal Authority Thesis. J Bus Ethics 88 (Suppl 4), 717–728 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-009-0328-1
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-009-0328-1