Description
The normative assessment of social cohesion concerns its value as well as the moral or political norms that support it.
The value dimension concerns the questions of why and when social cohesion is valuable. The notion of social cohesion is often used in a broad way so as to cover a cluster of values, including belonging, community, empathy and solidarity, which in turn are closely related to caring, cooperation, inclusiveness, participation and trust. Assessing why social cohesion is important requires explicating how it is understood in the context at issue.
Social cohesion is not always worth striving for. The paradox of social cohesion states that if the degree of social cohesion is too high, the opposite is achieved. The underlying idea is that social ties between individuals within a social context do not only enable but also constrain, and they can be so constraining that they are oppressive. For instance, social cohesion can be accompanied by forms of group thinking and a suppression of pluralism. Therefore, it is also important to determine what the social ties are, what kinds of relations they constitute and what effects they have on the community. For the same reason, it is important to examine the value of social cohesion with reference to other moral and political values.
This is even clearer when we consider possible measures or policies that aim to foster social cohesion – any assessment of the desirability of such interventions requires a careful analysis of possible trade-offs with other values. The value issue also elicits the question of who we take to be the relevant beneficiaries. Should we focus only on the way social cohesion affects the well-being of individual citizens, or do we also consider its possible separate effects at the group level? Can we see it as part of the common good in the sense that it is a value for society as such?
The norm dimension comprises questions about the effect that moral and political norms have on social cohesion. Norms can enable social connections and solidarity within and between social groups, but they may also threaten social cohesion. They can, for instance, function as part of a process of inclusion of groups that used to be marginalized, but they can also lead to polarization that undermines the social fabric. More generally, processes of identity formation and politicization reveal that they may have positive as well as negative effects.
A complete picture of how and to what extent norms should support social cohesion requires an answer to the question of whom these norms apply to and hence who is obligated to take action. This issue of forward-looking responsibility is closely connected to that of backward-looking responsibility, in particular blameworthiness. And both kinds of responsibility raise the question who can make a difference. This issue of control needs to be considered at individual, social and institutional levels.
Furthermore, to what extent is there an individual, collective or institutional obligation to contribute to social cohesion? Does such a norm exist and, if so, what is its normative justification? Is it part of a more general political theory, e.g., a theory of social justice, or does it have an independent role to play? According to a prominent political theory, the question to ask is whether an overlapping consensus about any such norm can be arrived at.
Finally, many such questions are intimately related to how norms function in practice. For instance, if policies are formulated without citizen participation, this often decreases their perceived legitimacy. And it may be that there are in fact good reasons for regarding such policies as unjustified. Because of this, it is (even more) important to rely on adequate conceptions of normative concepts in empirical research. Thus, there is often a close connection between descriptive and normative questions.
Dive Deeper
- Asymmetric Compliance: A Study of Climate Responsibility Across Actor Scales
Jan Willem Wieland (philosophy, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Félice van Nunspeet (psychology, Universiteit Utrecht)
People have shared responsibilities towards the climate. For instance, they should refrain from flying long distances just for the fun of it. But they sometimes fail to act on such responsibilities. Such climate inaction can decrease social cohesion within a community. This project investigates the two-way relation between shared responsibilities and social cohesion. It asks when inaction and arguments that seem to support it is detrimental in this respect, and how perceived shared responsibilities can increase social cohesion.
- Overcoming the Fragility of the Social Contract
Frank Hindriks (philosophy, University of Groningen), Martijn van Zomeren (psychology, University of Groningen)
Liberal democracies are under pressure due to polarization and fragmentation as well as the underlying struggles of identity. As a consequence, they have become fragile. The aim of this project is to determine whether and how they can and should be strengthened. To this end, the project focuses on the social contract and the institutions that it supports. It asks how a new social contract can provide robust basic rights against the background of core liberal values. Furthermore, what roles can and should identity and social cohesion play in it?
- Laughing Across Differences: The Role of Humour in Pluralistic Social Cohesion.
Namkje Koudenburg (psychology, University of Groningen), Hedy Greijdanus (psychology, University of Groningen), Lisa Bastian (Philosophy, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Can humour bridge divides between opposing social or ideological groups? This project sets out to answer this question by combining social-psychological experiments with philosophical analysis. The aim is to investigate when and how humour as an interaction ritual can result in more versus less valuable forms of social cohesion between individuals and groups in society. The outcomes are expected to be useful in practice, as they could help foster cohesion in a range of social settings.
These three projects focus on how individuals within a society relate to one another. Each seeks to strike a balance between individual independence and social cohesion. The projects zoom in, respectively, on (1) arguments, (2) tolerance and (3) humour, all as tools to connect different groups and bridge existing divides between them. Each project also considers how such divides can deepen due to excuses, intolerance and disparaging that undermine compliance with moral norms.
The projects work at complementary levels of abstraction. The first looks at the mesolevel of societal organizations, asking how the behaviour of a certain group of organizations influences the attitudes and behaviours of others, both in a descriptive and in a normative sense. The second directly addresses the normative question of which forms of social cohesion are justified by what arguments. The third provides a normative analysis of a phenomenon at the level of individual psychology that also extends to groups and, through (social) media, beyond them. It addresses how humour interacts with social cohesion, for example by creating in-group or out-group dynamics.
The cluster provides a space for discussing these normative evaluations at different levels and to see how they cohere with each other, providing the opportunity to go from concrete examples to first principles. This corresponds to the Rawlsian method of a ‘reflective equilibrium’ between moral judgements about concrete cases and the reflection on abstract principles that are meant to capture these concrete cases. The cluster members can thereby also jointly reflect on one of the deepest normative challenges for social cohesion in the 21st century: how to understand and evaluate social cohesion in the face of difference, as shaped by social structures and reflected in human interests and values.