TY - JOUR
T1 - Rights and Obligations in Cambridge Social Ontology
AU - Slade-Caffarel, Yannick
N1 - Funding Information:
I am indebted to Tony Lawson for the comments and suggestions he provided during the development of this paper. I would also like to thank the members of the Cambridge Social Ontology Group. Finally, I received detailed comments from two anonymous referees of this journal, for which I am very grateful.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Authors. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
PY - 2022/6
Y1 - 2022/6
N2 - Rights and obligations—sometimes referred to as deontology or deontic powers—are key to most contemporary conceptions of social ontology. Both Cambridge Social Ontology and the dominant analytic conception associated, most prominently, with John Searle, place rights and obligations at the centre of their accounts. Such a common emphasis has led some to consider deontology to be a point of similarity between these different theories. This is a mistake. In this paper, I show that a distinctive conception of rights and obligations underpins Cambridge Social Ontology and its social positioning theory. Moreover, I argue that a fuller understanding of the account of rights and obligations defended in Cambridge in fact reveals that it can be differentiated from other conceptions and, most importantly, Searle’s, by its recognition that a practical dimension is always involved in social constitution.
AB - Rights and obligations—sometimes referred to as deontology or deontic powers—are key to most contemporary conceptions of social ontology. Both Cambridge Social Ontology and the dominant analytic conception associated, most prominently, with John Searle, place rights and obligations at the centre of their accounts. Such a common emphasis has led some to consider deontology to be a point of similarity between these different theories. This is a mistake. In this paper, I show that a distinctive conception of rights and obligations underpins Cambridge Social Ontology and its social positioning theory. Moreover, I argue that a fuller understanding of the account of rights and obligations defended in Cambridge in fact reveals that it can be differentiated from other conceptions and, most importantly, Searle’s, by its recognition that a practical dimension is always involved in social constitution.
KW - Social Ontology
KW - Rights and Obligations
KW - Deontology
KW - Collective Practice
KW - Collective Acceptance
KW - Practical Dimension
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85122132705&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12332
DO - https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12332
M3 - Article
SN - 0021-8308
VL - 52
SP - 392
EP - 410
JO - JOURNAL FOR THE THEORY OF SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR
JF - JOURNAL FOR THE THEORY OF SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR
IS - 2
ER -