Which social arrangements have a history of fostering progress and prosperity? One quick answer, falsely attributed to Adam Smith, holds that we are guided as if by an invisible hand to do what builds the wealth of nations. A more sober answer, closer to what Smith said and believed, is that if the right framework of rules—plus decent officiating—steers us away from buying and selling monopoly privilege and steers us toward being valuable to the people around us, we indeed will be part of the engine that drives human progress and the wealth of nations.

The “new institutionalist revolution” in social sciences has led to a repositioning of social norms to the forefront of the pre-analytic vision in institutional theory and to the consolidation of the contextual analysis approach. That has significant epistemological, methodological, and political philosophy implications. This essay follows the logic of these developments showing: (a) why they inherently lead to the feasibility problem, the key of applied theory, toward which both contemporary philosophy and institutional analysis converge from different venues; (b) how feasibility is a nexus of empirical, counterfactual, normative, and contextual elements, that is, something more complex than a mere matching between empirical reality and institutional design; (c) what are the governance implications of all of the above, with an emphasis on an alternative approach (distinctive enough to circumvent both the conservative averseness to intervene and progressive drastic interventionism) and in which the public choice process is seen mainly as endogenized, socialized, and institutionalized, as opposed to formalized, intellectualized, and externalized.

This essay investigates the relationships among scripts, schemata, and social norms. The authors examine how social norms are triggered by particular schemata and are grounded in scripts. Just as schemata are embedded in a network, so too are social norms, and they can be primed through spreading activation. Moreover, the expectations that allow a social norm’s existence are inherently grounded in particular scripts and schemata. Using interventions that have targeted gender norms, open defecation, female genital cutting, and other collective issues as examples, the authors argue that ignoring the cognitive underpinnings of a social norm can hamper the effectiveness of behavioral interventions.

The corruption of the rule of law is an ambiguous phrase. It can refer either to the corruption of the value of the rule of law or to the corrupting effect that the commitment to the rule of law produces. This essay explains how both can be the case. The rule of law is one of a cluster of values that liberal political theory requires a morally legitimate government to exemplify. Thus, the rule of law is a component part of a just political structure. However, the phrase "the rule of law" is often used colloquially to refer to most or all of the cluster of liberal values. When used in this way, a duty to obey the law often attaches itself to the concept of the rule of law. It is the association of this duty with the concept of the rule of law when used in its narrow, literal sense to refer to only one of the liberal values that corrupts both those who are committed to the rule of law and the respect for the value itself.

In one broad construal, corruption consists of deriving benefit from power over others in morally objectionable ways. The charge that capitalism is corrupt is usefully understood as a claim that modern capitalist economies inevitably and pervasively generate corrupt gains, in this sense, through conduct that does not transgress capitalist norms for individuals’ economic conduct. Modern capitalism has two features that would figure prominently in such an indictment: gains from the inferior bargaining power of most workers and gains from the superior political influence of those in the best economic situations. The taint of corruption should be reduced by political measures that move capitalist commerce toward Adam Smith’s commercial ideal of gains from exchanging help for help and that show appreciation of the equal importance of everyone’s presumed desire to have a life shaped by directives that he or she willingly accepts. Through such measures, capitalism could, in principle, become non-corrupt. In practice, unequal political influence will prevent this. Ending the corruptness of capitalism is an unattainable yet productive goal of reform.

Our primary aim in this paper is to sketch a cognitive evolutionary approach for developing explanations of social change that is anchored in the psychological mechanisms underlying normative cognition and the transmission of social norms. We throw the relevant features of this approach into relief by comparing it with the self-fulfilling social expectations account developed by Bicchieri and colleagues. After describing both accounts, we argue that the two approaches are largely compatible, but that the cognitive evolutionary approach is well suited to encompass much of the social expectations view, whose focus on a narrow range of norms comes at the expense of the breadth the cognitive evolutionary approach can provide.

The scholarly discourse on social norms in the tradition of Thomas Schelling (1960) often makes a sharp distinction between social norms and social conventions. In attempting to apply that distinction to actual practices and to teach it to practitioners and students I encountered frequent difficulties and confusions, and finally concluded that it is untenable. I recommend a return to some version of Ullman-Margalit’s (1977) distinction between social norms of cooperation and social norms of coordination. Social norms, I say, are distinguished by beliefs in a relevant group that the rule is typical among them and approved of among them. I describe four ways that social norms of coordination, including conventions of social meaning, are influenced by social approval and disapproval. I contend that the effort by Southwood and Eriksson (2011) to show that social conventions and social norms are essentially different breaks down because their conception of social norms is overly moralized. I present a more social conception of social norms that does without the regnant distinction between “social norm” and “social convention” and instead allows for social norms of cooperation, social norms of coordination, and other kinds of social norms.

This essay lays out three kinds of corruption—personal, structural, and civic—stressing the differences among these phenomena. It then explores civic corruption via the work of the eighteenth-century Scottish thinker Adam Ferguson. Civic corruption occurs when the citizens of a republic lose interest in defending their shared institutions, and pursue their private wealth alone; avoiding it, according to Ferguson, requires placing limits on these private pursuits and getting citizens to participate in the public realm instead. By way of a comparison with Ferguson’s contemporary and friend Adam Smith—who agreed with Ferguson on many issues, although not on what was corrupting about the acquisition of wealth—the essay argues that Ferguson, for all his emphasis on participatory government, was a liberal, not a collectivist. With that in mind, the essay endorses many of Ferguson’s suggestions from a liberal perspective, and argues that, to preserve liberal republics, it is often necessary to expand what governments do, so as to maintain the commitment of citizens to their public institutions. This prescriptive implication brings out sharply how civic corruption differs from personal corruption, which may best be limited by shrinking the role of government, rather than expanding it.

This essay challenges conceptions of political corruption that rely on standards external to politics and explores an understanding of corruption as something that is part of the internal policing of politics. The essay draws attention to the multiple, conflicting ideas and principles that contribute to our understanding of corruption but argues that these often generate over-moralized and over-generalized claims and can become corrosive of the compromises and procedures that are central to political rule. The essay shows that recent accounts of political corruption often have highly attenuated understandings of “politics” and are over-expansive in their normative commitments, and argues that how we understand and talk about the corruption of politics is of major significance for the stability and effectiveness of the political orders of Western societies.

Humans often comply with social norms, but the reasons why are disputed. Here, we unify a variety of influential explanations in a common decision framework, and identify the precise cognitive variables that norms might alter to induce compliance. Specifically, we situate current theories of norm compliance within the reinforcement learning framework, which is widely used to study value-guided learning and decision-making. This framework offers an appealingly precise language to distinguish between theories, highlights the various points of convergence and divergence, and suggests novel ways in which norms might penetrate our psychology.

It is crucial for policymakers to focus their attention on social norms if they want to improve policy outcomes, but doing so brings in new normative questions about the appropriate role of the state. Indeed, I argue that efforts to reduce coercion at the state level can create potentially pernicious and difficult to eliminate forms of coercion at the informal level. This creates a new normative challenge for thinking about the broader regulatory apparatus, and complicates our approach in utilizing social norms for democratic policy ends. I will distinguish between two forms of social norms orientations in policy: a diagnostic approach and a design approach. We will see that the diagnostic approach better models a Humean approach to supporting social norms, and a design approach has a more Millian character. While it is easier to justify a design approach in the abstract, as it has very little room for abuses of state authority, if Mill is right that social norms can be a source of coercive power that runs afoul of the harm principle, then a design approach will sometimes be necessary to counter this form of tyranny. However, this latter approach is complex, and as such we may want to take a recommendation from Mockus to focus on deliberative approaches to norm change.

This essay explores those in pre-modern Britain (chiefly the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) who were accused of corruption and yet denied their guilt and made defenses, disavowals, justifications, protests, vindications or at least sought to explain away, rationalize, or legitimize their behavior, both to themselves and to others. Six, sometimes overlapping, categories of rationales are identified. Focusing on the strategies and arguments used by the allegedly corrupt has both historical and philosophical value. Thinking about such cases helps both the state and its citizens to be as clear as possible about how to define integrity, and judge whether there was, or is, an intention to break, subvert, or manipulate moral codes. Thus it is not merely the legislator or the law court, but also the court of public opinion, that decides such matters; and debates about the acceptability of such defenses are an important part of a process of public debate about where society has drawn, or does now draw, ethical lines. There are degrees of corruption that need careful evaluation. Thinking about the past also raises interesting questions about whether corruption can be judged across time, culture, and space by a set of universal values. I argue that what appear to be universal values evolved over time as a result of particular cultural circumstances and contests over historical scandals. Contesting corruption allegations was an inherently political process: corruption is not just an economic issue but also a political and moral issue that demands contextualization. That process must include an understanding of national histories.

A norm of equal treatment is cited regularly in the American jurisprudence of property “takings” under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, as a benchmark of fair treatment of owners. According to an increasingly prevalent version of this equality norm, courts should look to parity of treatment among property owners in investigating whether particular regulations “take” property. This essay argues, however, that such an equality norm is misplaced, and that courts should judge fairness by the criterion of expectation—including reasonable expectations of regulation.

A norm of equality becomes problematic in the face of the economic theory of the evolution of property. This theory posits that as resources become more congested, their uses carry increasing common pool costs or “externalities”—a scenario that should predictably result in more stringent resource management—up to and including the establishment of regulatory regimes as well as property rights themselves. This evolutionary pattern, however, places earlier and later resource users in different positions vis-à-vis both common pool externalities and regulatory responses, and their different temporal positions fragment the meaning of equal treatment and destabilize it as a jurisprudential norm. This essay argues that while equal treatment may be a benchmark for special or invidious cases, like those relating to civil rights, the great bulk of takings cases involve regulatory responses to congesting resources, where a norm of equal treatment breaks down. Thus, in seeking fair treatment, takings jurisprudence should downplay equality and instead look to the understanding of property as a basis of expectations—but those expectations should include the anticipation of reasonable regulatory responses to resource congestion.

The corruption of public officials and institutions is generally regarded as wrong. But in what exactly does this form of corruption consist and what kind of wrong does it imply? Recent proponents of the “institutionalist approach” to political corruption have concentrated on those occasions when incentive structures distract institutions from their essential purpose and weaken public trust. The corruption of individual public officials has been less relevant to their work, except for when it leads to the erosion of the functioning of institutions. From this perspective, a clear emphasis has been put on the consequences of corruption. In contrast, I argue that political corruption, whether individual or institutional, can be more fundamentally understood as a form of political injustice in which someone has violated the logic of mutual accountability that undergirds all relations of justice in rights-based systems. In this sense, political corruption occurs when public officials use their entrusted power of office for the pursuit of an agenda whose rationale may not be vindicated as coherent with the terms of their mandate. By focusing on the inherent qualities of corrupt political relations, I lay out a novel relational and deontological understanding of the inherent wrongness of political corruption as a form of unaccountable action.

The more obvious forms of corruption are often preceded and explained by the etiolation of a practice: as its participants lose track of the point of their activities, their moral immune system is disabled. The argument is developed via a case study, philosophy itself. After advancing the hypothesis that philosophy is in the first instance the machine tool industry of the intellect—that its task is making the intellectual tools that make the intellectual tools—we consider what becomes of such an enterprise when this objective slips out of focus.

Some moral responsibility theorists think that certain agents (like psychopaths) can be morally responsible—and morally criticizable—for their actions and attitudes even though they lack any competence in grasping or responding to moral norms (a blindness to moral reasons that is typically called “normative incompetence” or, more accurately, “moral incompetence”). In this essay, I provide a new argument against these theorists by exploring the intersection between two normative domains, the funny and the moral. There are, it turns out, interesting and significant ways that properties from each domain bear on reasons to respond in the other, and so there are interesting and significant ways in which people’s responses to cruel jokes or insult humor may be criticizable. I then survey various personality and psychological impairments that seem to undercut criticizability in this intersecting domain. Learning about these people and their impairments yields a wealth of information about what true normative competence actually requires, as well as why competence of the specifically moral variety really is required for moral criticizability.