Norms and Government

By norms, I mean the patterns of thought and action that by their compelling nature are repeated and generalized in similar situations. Every instance of thought and human action has in its operation a form or norm that is the organizational aspect of the activity as it is applied to a situation or a content. In the arena of social thought and action, norms include moral principles and ‘shoulds’ that indicate intentions for human activity. We say couples should get married before having children or polygamy is wrong.

Norms tend toward a process of grouping together to form larger systems. This process of building larger systems brings with it increasing coherence, wider extension, and removal of contradictions. systems. When various individual norms clash, the process of development consists in overcoming contradictions by re-organizing previously disconnected norms into larger systems. The normative aspect of thought enlarges and extends its forms to more elements and situations. In short, we can observe the normative systems of the human species developing over time.

This development is, of course, uneven, and we find the norms of society vary widely across groups and individuals. Liberals and conservatives hold different and often mutually incompatible norms—pro-life versus pro-choice. The norms of society vary widely across groups and individuals. Liberals and conservatives hold different and often mutually incompatible norms—pro-life versus pro-choice. Thus, there are many normative systems; there is not one normative system of society.

Some normative systems are weaker in that they are more limited and appear contradictory when extended to other areas whereas others have achieved the integration of many subsystems of norms. The values of weak undeveloped norms appear more as egocentric wants and desires such as the desire for free health care or a living wage whereas advanced systems produce abstract values such as love, tolerance, voluntarism. The systems thus vary from those more centered on particular subjective notions to those that are de-centered from egocentric viewpoints to a more universal framework that incorporates and reorganizes the weaker, earlier forms.

The norms and values of society form the basis and justification for law. Morality and norms of all kinds do not derive from law but produce law. They are the source of law which only incompletely formalizes some norms, and not always the best norms. And, of course, there are competing norms that challenge the validity of other norms whether expressed in law or not. The difficulty is that we can’t make law the source of the normative principles that guide human actions either as a practical matter or as a explanatory framework for the source of human norms. And government cannot establish their own validity. Somewhere in their history is their establishment and imposition by force. Voluntary government wouldn’t be government since it would be replaced by multiple forms of inter-individual cooperations. Government functions only as people intend to use force with reprisal to them.

Furthermore, there are multiple norms and normative systems with no one set that is a finished product, non-contradictory, all encompassing, and definitive. Even if there was, we have no access to such an ideal, we have no way to recognize the ideal, we have no way into the Platonic heavens. We certainly can’t rely on popular opinion, religious leaders, politicians, presidents to be the source either in practice or as an explanation of the source of norms, nor can we rely on our intuitions or to things in our thought we think are obvious and necessary. The intuitively obvious is notoriously at the whim of subjective biases, and it cannot be the source of normatively enlightened.

Obviously, human norms develop over time both from childhood to adult as well as historically from pre-cognitive humans down to present day. Admittedly given all this, the problem of norms seems almost unsolvable but since norms develop we can find a vector to their history, a direction toward which normative systems tend to develop. It should be non-controversial to posit from fact and theory a general direction of one-way authoritarian and coercive relationships organizing groups and inter=individual activities toward cooperative and voluntary relationships. Development replaces coercive obedience with choice and cooperation. We move from various forms of human enslavement to voluntary and mutually beneficial systems of exchange.

As to normative systems of moral and social activity, it would seem that to attempt to use law as a coercive tool by which to control and enforce various forms of ‘enslavement’ (by which we mean compelling confinement in a certain form of relationship that disproportionately serves an overlord at the expense of the subjugated people) expresses a very primitive level of normative development. Such systems demand and enforce obedience directed against the will and choices of some people. We would have to say of those people who would subject gays and lesbians to such a system of legally forced compliance with non-universal norms, norms idiosyncratic to their subjective preferences, that these people are relatively primitive in their normative development.

While the problem of non-tolerance of primitive normative systems might seem to be a legal one—let’s use the law to fix this problem—the law is not the source of norms, and it is not the cure. Democratic action is not a source of moral development because the law is only a tool, an expression of normative thought. It is the development of the normative systems that constitutes fundamental advance of a society. Keeping government out of the problem is necessary since government and law creates a rigidity and a fundamental impediment to human development, in this case of the development of normative reasoning and morality.

Bigotry and intolerance are not a problem unless they are enacted in law or if they use government to force compliance with their primitive notions of right and wrong. If government prevents harm from the attempts by bigots and intolerant people to force their norms and values on others, we can then have every faith that the vector of human development of societies’ moral and normative systems will continue. Government can’t cause progress; it can only block and impede progress.

Within human activity, indeed within all living systems, is that form-creative process that produces development and evolution of living systems, and this is true not only for biological and social/psychological systems but for ethical and all other normative systems. Life is form creative, and it is transcendent of its condition except when a force outside it blocks its constructive activities. Force, in any form whether private, organized, or government, is evil for it harms the development and transcendence of life.

Life is good.