Bound by Convention

David Owens’s Bound by Convention: Obligation and Social Rules offers a powerful and novel account of the binding force of social conventions. But that description of the book, as significant as it sounds, actually undersells the topic and contribution. It is no less than a book about both the source and structure of our obligations in light of our social lives.Consider norms of neighborliness, which form the recurring example throughout part 1. I have an elderly neighbor. Sometimes I help her with physical tasks like bringing in packages or minding her garden. I have the sense that I should do these things, as a matter of being a good neighbor. I also have the sense that I’m a bad neighbor when I go out with earphones to run or do yardwork, thereby shutting down opportunities to chat. I probably should be more sociable.What could explain such felt obligations? Why should I be bound in these ways just by living here? If I lived in a city rather than a small town in Maine, I might not have such obligations. One can imagine two kinds of responses here. On the one hand, one might try to reduce these socially contingent obligations to other more basic and universal values and duties. Perhaps it is just a matter of beneficence, given her needs and my proximity. Or perhaps it is a matter of reciprocity—after all, she keeps an eye on my property when I’m away. On the other hand, the obligations might be considered binding simply in virtue of being the social convention around here. For better or worse, these are the rules of living in a small town in Maine and, insofar as I live here, they bind me.Owens contends that each of these approaches—reductionism and brute conventionalism—is unsatisfying. Instead, he defends what he calls “modest conventionalism.” Unlike the brute conventionalist, Owens regards rules as binding only where they serve some significant human interest. He shares “the reductionist’s desire to explain our obligations of involvement” (50). But, unlike the reductionist, Owens argues that the bindingness of conventions can’t be explained in terms of realizing other convention-independent values. “Convention is no mere device for the promotion of pre-conventional values, an instrument to satisfy ‘natural’ needs. Convention gives human life its texture by enchanting the social world, and the quest for such enchantment is a good part of what distinguishes us” (7).The key to this middle path is an idea that will be familiar to those who have read Owens’s pathbreaking prior work, especially Shaping the Normative Landscape (2012). It is the idea of normative interests. According to Owens, we have interests not only in what happens descriptively but also interests in the normative facts. These include what he calls “deontic interests”—“interests in being bound by certain norms, in being obliged to follow them” (11). The idea is that among the things that are good for us for their own sake are rights and obligations. This is true where they “help to constitute other things good for their own sake, namely certain human relationships” (19). Human connection is an important noninstrumental good, and it is realized by certain kinds of relationships, like friendship, family, and even neighborliness. And these valuable relationships are embodied in social practices, practices that often include rights and obligations. Insofar as it is valuable to have certain relationships, it is valuable to be bound in the ways that constitute those relationships.Can one really have an interest in being bound? After all, being under an obligation is typically regarded as an encumbrance, setting back one’s interests rather than advancing them. But Owens makes a powerful case that being under obligations can be good for us. He argues that obligations are not regrettable aspects of otherwise valuable phenomena. Consider friendship: “Friends usually welcome the deepening of the connection that comes with the exchange of favours or participation in some joint activity, and that includes the new bonds and expectations thereby created. Someone who regrets this development because they regard such commitments as encumbrances has the wrong attitude to the friendship.” (53) In this way, obligations can constitute something valuable for their own sake, valuable because they embody things mattering to us.Even if one accepts that we can have such deontic interests—that it can be noninstrumentally valuable to be subject to obligations—there remains a question about how that generates such obligations. Why should the fact that it would be good for me to be bound mean that I am? Owens calls this “the logical question.” His answer to it depends on rejecting a kind of rationalism. We should not insist that a reason for an obligation is something that can enter directly into reasoning. Instead, a reason for an obligation can simply be something that makes sense of actions and emotions. So, while it’s true that the deontic value of neighborly obligations doesn’t figure directly into my thinking about helping the woman next door, it still grounds my obligations of neighborliness. I only have such obligations because they are valuable in this way, not simply because they are the convention around here.The moves in Owens’s account are nuanced, and I cannot do them justice here. Owens has laid out a sophisticated picture of how the deontic features of our life might be grounded in interests. In this way, he develops the tradition of Hume in a form that modern nonconsequentialist philosophers can find satisfying and compelling.Were the appeal to normative and deontic interests only in service of answering these deep metaethical questions about the grounds for our social obligations, the project would be philosophically important. But it has a whole other dimension as well. It potentially informs first-order questions. According to Owens, “With rights and wrongings, form follows function” (35). The idea is that the interests that explain why a norm is binding also shape the rights and wrongings that the norm generates. Where the interests belong to a particular person, then the obligations are owed to them and breaches generate wrongings directly. Where the underlying interests are collective, the obligations have a different form and potential wrongings are only derivative. Importantly, there is a spectrum; many social obligations are a kind of hybrid. Norms of neighborliness arguably serve both individuals (e.g., me and the woman next door) and a community to which they apply (e.g., small-town Maine). The woman next door stands to be wronged directly if I am particularly brusque and antisocial as I head out for a run. I owe it to her to do better, which is a function of the fact that her interests are part of what ground the obligation. If someone else up the road must do extra caretaking because I drop the ball with my neighbor, that person too might be wronged, but only indirectly, as my obligation of neighborliness is not owed to them individually.In this vein, the second half of Bound by Convention is devoted to exploring how the modest conventionalism developed in part 1 can explain the contours of certain seemingly conventional obligations—rules of competition, the family, private property, truthfulness, and privacy. The book will be important reading for anyone interested in any of these topics. Each chapter is independently thought-provoking.Consider private property. Owens begins his discussion of private property by arguing that people have interests in certain things counting as theirs, interests that involve identification and control. Our interests in our bodies and our possessions cannot be fully explained in instrumental terms, as that cannot explain our concerns when another’s use wouldn’t interfere with our own—for example, being photographed while asleep, a harmless 3 a.m. trespass. Nor is our interest in control only about actual use, which can be impaired by natural phenomena. As Owens puts it, “The difficulty of reducing our interest in exclusion to our interest in use suggests that we are dealing with an essentially social interest, one that necessarily concerns my relations with others, relations that involve their being allowed differential access to myself and to what I own” (183). What we need to ground the relevant rights and duties is a normative interest, an interest in having normative authority.” Owens contends that property rights in certain personal things, like one’s home, exist at least in part to serve this authority interest. That’s why you owe it to me not to trespass in my home, and why you would wrong me if you did.But the social institution of private property extends far beyond private residences. Property rights are held by corporations, investors, and many others who in no way identify with the property. Here, Owens regards private property as an impersonal convention, existing to serve collective interests much as political offices do. Accordingly, rights and wrongings will follow that function. “Since individuals are not given the right to control such things as Trump Tower (as opposed to their own homes) in order to serve either their control or authority interests, there is no basis for Trump’s feeling personally wronged by harmless violations” (195). There is something intuitively plausible here, and it shows the power of Owens’s approach to understanding the shape of our interpersonal obligations by way of the normative interests that undergird them.As plausible as I find these claims, I am curious about the shift in focus to normative interests, away from the deontic interests that figured so prominently in part 1 but fade somewhat in part 2. Perhaps my ownership of my house serves to protect my control and authority interests. But if one is persuaded by Owens that it can be meaningful and good to be bound, one might wonder about other explanations. What if private property is less about empowering and more about binding? Notice that my owning my house is intertwined with my being a neighbor. What if the function of private property were to make us neighbors and stewards—to bind us to responsibilities that bring meaning to our lives? Indeed, perhaps what is noteworthy about the investor-owner is less that they don’t stand to be wronged by harmless trespass and more that they occlude others from the meaningfulness that ownership can convey.That’s admittedly a radical and underdeveloped suggestion. I mention it to flag the power of the conceptual tools that Owens develops. A potential complaint of some readers might be that Bound by Convention feels small-c conservative, a defense of existing social structures. But that’s not correct. It is a defense of the fact that our social structures shape our rights and obligations in profound ways. That is something that anyone thinking about normative relations of any kind should take seriously

Common sense · Moral obligation · Obligation · Property (philosophy) · Social thought · Virtue · Conflict of Laws and Jurisdiction · International Law and Aviation