Description: We are all immersed in a sea of social norms, but they are sometimes tricky to observe with any clarity. They are often invisible to us and emerge only when they are not observed. Social norms are important to understand because they are both limiting of our freedom, such as gendered and racialized norms, and at the same time the very conditions of our agency. Social Goodness presents an original theory of the normativity or normative "oomph" of social role norms by developing an artisanal model for human social normativity. The artisanal model for social role normativity has resources to explain both the "stickiness" or persistence of social norms, and our ability to criticize existing norms and to engage in normative self-creation--to create new normative selves.
Review Quotes: "This is a terrific book on the source and nature of social normativity. These are important topics that philosophers have only recently started to turn to and this work will be a benchmark." -- Ãsta, Author of Categories We Live By
"Norm governed practices, roles, and skills pervade everything we do. Charlotte Witt's astute and compelling account of the authority and critical assessment of social roles and norms appropriately brings them into the center of philosophical discussions of normativity." -- Joseph Rouse, Author of Social Practices as Biological Niche Construction and Articulating the World"Social Goodness^ is a rich, original, and important contribution, and I highly recommend it to metaethicists, social ontologists, and philosophers interested in social normativity." -- Åsa Burman, Ethics"Charlotte Witt's Social Goodness not only makes an original contribution to the literature, but it also does so in a way that points toward important, underexplored regions of conceptual space...The resulting view is comprehensive, compelling, and original....Social ontologists and anyone interested in social norms are well advised to take notice of this book. It offers a new research project. It opens up a whole new set of exciting and important research questions to answer. It is agenda-setting philosophy at its best." -- Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews