Abstract

Our everyday behaviour is constantly shaped and restricted by the unwritten rules of our society. In metanormative debates, it is taken for granted that these social norms are not normative in the authoritative sense. Indeed, they are used as the paradigmatic example of norms that are merely formally normative.

In this paper, I go against this consensus, arguing that it is an open question whether (some) social norms have significant normative force. I consider and reject a range of potential defences of the idea that social norms could not be authoritative, from claims about the insignificance of conventional norms to worries about capturing the fugitive thought. Questioning unwarranted assumptions about the normative status of social norms opens up a promising area of metanormative inquiry.