Andrei Marmor's Social Conventions (Princeton Unversityi Press, 2009), a work by a US legal academic and philosopher (and author of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law), is promoted as "a much-needed reappraisal of the nature of the rules that regulate virtually every aspect of human conduct".
"Social conventions are those arbitrary rules and norms governing the countless behaviors all of us engage in every day without necessarily thinking about them, from shaking hands when greeting someone to driving on the right side of the road". Norms and their legalisation, tacit or otherwise, include the acceptability of knocking out the family pet, cutting its throat and then barbecuing it (distasteful but apparently not illegal in New Zealand or Australia, as long as it's your dog, there was no egregious cruelty and slaughter was for home consumption).
"... Marmor begins by giving a general account of the nature of conventions, explaining the differences between coordinative and constitutive conventions and between deep and surface conventions", before going on to explain how conventions work in language, morality and law. Princeton goes on to claim that the work "clearly demonstrates that many important semantic and pragmatic aspects of language assumed by many theorists to be conventional are in fact not, and that the role of conventions in the moral domain is surprisingly complex, playing mostly an auxiliary and supportive role. Importantly, he casts new light on the conventional foundations of law, arguing that the distinction between deep and surface conventions can be used to answer the prevalent objections to legal conventionalism."
Just the thing to accompany my 're-engagement' with Austin, Raz and performative utterances.
