Current Ethical Debates

UNIT 4

SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

Contents
4.0

Objectives

4.1

Introduction

4.2

Accounts of Social Institutions

4.3

General Properties of Social Institutions

4.4

The Main Theoretical Accounts of Social Institutions

4.5

A Teleological Account of Institutions

4.6

Normative Character of Social Institutions

4.7

Social Institutions and Distributive Justice

4.8

Further Readings and Reference

4.0

OBJECTIVES

Contemplating all the men of the world, who come together in society to work,
struggle and better themselves, cannot but please you more than any other being
Antonio Gramsci, in a letter from prison to his son Dleio. It is a fact that human
person is not island and we are social and political creature in the words of
Aristotle. One of the characters of human beings is social, relational and
cultural of his/her existence. At all levels (cosmic, social, religious, etc) we are
related to things, persons and events outside us, and as we journey along the
pathway of life, we let them contribute to the moulding of our being. Living in
social groups is an essential characteristic of humans. It is the transcendental
condition of humans that enables them to be related to others. Sociality and
individuality are not opposite poles. They are necessarily related to each other.
To be social one has to be individual and vice versa. An individual can stand face
to face with one another and thus by standing they constitute a community or
society. Society becomes a crowd/collectivity when everyone becomes no one.
Sociality has to be gradually lived and developed. It is a constant ideal and real.
This ideal has to be appropriated by existential struggling.
In order to have meaningful existence in the society, we have to have right
knowledge of the society. The social institutions play important role in forming
the society. They have a variety of significant customs and habits accumulated
over a period of time. The social institutions provide certain enduring and accepted
forms of procedure governing the relations between individuals and groups. Thus
this Unit pictures the role of social institutions which give the habitual way of
living together which has been sanctioned, systematized and established by the
authorities. We must know that these institutions are the wheels on which human
society marches on. In every society people create social institutions to meet
their basic needs of survival. Hence a study of social institutions is important. A
social institution is a stable cluster of norms, values, structures and roles. So we
discuss various salient accounts of social institutions. Accounts emanating from
sociological theory as well as philosophy are also mentioned in this unit. A
teleological account of social institutions is presented. The normative character
of social institutions is outlined in general terms. This normativity is multi-faceted.
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For example, it includes the human goods realised by institutions as well as the
rights and duties that attach to institutional roles. Finally we deal with the more
specific normative issue of the justice of social institutions.

4.1

Social Institutions

INTRODUCTION

The term social institution refers to complex social forms that reproduce
themselves such as political institutions like, governments, state, the family,
human languages, universities, hospitals, economic institutions like business
corporations, and legal systems. Jonathan H. Turner, a professor of sociology at
University of California defines it as a complex of positions, roles, norms and
values lodged in particular types of social structures and organising relatively
stable patterns of human activity with respect to fundamental problems in
producing life-sustaining resources, in reproducing individuals, and in sustaining
viable societal structures within a given environment. Again, Anthony Giddens,
a British Sociologist who is renowned for his theory of structuralism, holds that
Institutions by definition are the more enduring features of social life. He goes
on to list as institutional orders, modes of discourse, political institutions,
economic institutions and legal institutions. The contemporary philosopher of
social science, a distinguished philosopher and psychologist from New Zealand
Rom Harre follows the theoretical sociologists in offering this kind of definition:
An institution was defined as an interlocking double-structure of persons-asrole-holders or office-bearers and the like, and of social practices involving both
expressive and practical aims and outcomes.
Theory of social institutions is not concern of sociologists alone but it has
philosophical interest as well. One important reason stems from the normative
concerns of philosophers. For instance John Rawls (1921 2002) an American
philosopher and a leading figure in moral and political philosophy has developed
elaborate normative theories concerning the principles of justice that ought to
govern social institutions. There are five major institutions that are conventionally
identified. 1. Economic institutions which serve to produce and distribute goods
and services, 2. Political institutions that regulate the use of and access of, power,
3. Stratification institutions determine the distribution of positions and resources,
4. Kinship institutions deal with marriage, the family and the socialization of the
young, 5. Cultural institutions are concerned with religious, scientific and artistic
activities.

4.2

ACCOUNTS OF SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

Any account of social institutions must begin by informally marking off social
institutions from other social forms. Unfortunately in ordinary language the terms
institutions and social institutions are used to refer to a miscellany of social
forms, including conventions, rituals, organisation and systems. Moreover, there
are a variety of theoretical accounts of institutions, including sociological as
well as philosophical ones. Indeed, many of these accounts of what are referred
to as institutions are not accounts of the same phenomena; they are at best accounts
of overlapping fields of social phenomena.
To start with, social institutions need to be distinguished from less complex
social forms such as conventions, social norms, roles and rituals. The latter are
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Current Ethical Debates

among the constitutive elements of institutions. Social institutions also need to

be distinguished from more complex and more complete social entities, such as
societies or cultures, of which any given institution is typically a constitutive
element. A society, for example, is more complete than an institution since a
society at least as traditionally understood is more or less self-sufficient in
terms of human resources, whereas an institution is not. Thus, arguably, for an
entity to be a society it must sexually reproduce its membership, it must have its
own structure, territory, culture, language and educational system, and it must
provide for itself economically and at least in principle politically
independence.
Social institutions are often organisations. Moreover, many institutions are systems
of organisations. For example, capitalism is a particular kind of economic
institution, and in modern times capitalism consists in large part in specific
organisational formsincluding multi-national corporations organised into a
system. Further, some institutions are meta-institutions; they are institutions that
organise other institutions. For example, governments are meta-institutions. The
institutional end or function of a government consists in large part in organising
other institutions (both individually and collectively); thus governments regulate
and coordinate economic systems, educational institutions, police and military
organisations and so on largely by way of legislation.
Nevertheless, some institutions are not organisations, or systems of organisations,
and do not require organisations. For example, the English language is an
institution, but not an organisation. Moreover, it would be possible for a language
to exist independently of any organisations specifically concerned with language.
An institution that is not an organisation or system of organisations comprises a
relatively specific type of agent-to-agent interactive activity, e.g. communication
or economic exchange, that involves: (i) differentiated actions, e.g.
communication involves speaking and hearing/understanding, economic
exchange involves buying and selling, that are; (ii) performed repeatedly and by
multiple agents; (iii) in compliance with a structured unitary system of
conventions, e.g. linguistic conventions, monetary conventions, and social norms,
e.g. truth-telling, property rights.

4.3

GENERAL PROPERTIES OF SOCIAL

INSTITUTIONS

In our discussion on social institutions, there are four salient properties, namely,
structure, function, culture and sanctions. Roughly speaking, an institution that
is an organisation or system of organisations consists of an embodied structure
of differentiated roles. These roles are defined in terms of tasks, and rules
regulating the performance of those tasks. Moreover, there is a degree of
interdependence between these roles, such that the performance of the constitutive
tasks of one role cannot be undertaken, or cannot be undertaken except with
great difficulty, unless the tasks constitutive of some other role or roles in the
structure have been undertaken or are being undertaken. Further, these roles are
often related to one another hierarchically, and hence involve different levels of
status and degrees of authority. Finally, on teleological and functional accounts,
these roles are related to one another in part in virtue of their contribution to the
end(s) or function(s) of the institution; and the realisation of these ends or function
42

normally involves interaction between the institutional actors in question and

external non-institutional actors. The constitutive roles of an institution and their
relations to one another can be referred to as the structure of the institution.

Social Institutions

Note that on this conception of institutions as embodied structures of roles and

associated rules, the nature of any institution at a given time will to some extent
reflect the personal character of different role occupants, especially influential
role occupants. Moreover, institutions in this sense are dynamic, evolving entities;
as such, they have a history, the diachronic structure of a narrative and a partially
open-ended future. Apart from the formal and usually explicitly stated, or defined,
tasks and rules, there is an important implicit and informal dimension of an
institution roughly describable as institutional culture. This notion comprises
the informal attitudes, values, norms, and the ethos or spirit which pervades
an institution. Culture in this sense determines much of the activity of the members
of that institution, or at least the manner in which that activity is undertaken.
There can be competing cultures within a single organisation; the culture
comprised of attitudes and norms that are aligned to the formal and official
complex of tasks and rules might compete with an informal and unofficial
culture that is adhered to by a substantial sub-element of the organisations
membership.
It is sometimes claimed that in addition to structure, function and culture, social
institutions necessarily involve sanctions. It is uncontroversial that social
institutions involve informal sanctions, such as moral disapproval following on
non-conformity to institutional norms. However, some theorists argue that formal
sanctions, such as punishment, are a necessary feature of institutions. Formal
sanctions are certainly a feature of many institutions, notably legal systems;
however, they do not seem to be a feature of all institutions. Consider, for example,
an elaborate and longstanding system of informal economic exchange between
members of different societies that have no common system of laws or enforced
rules.
Check Your Progress I
Note: Use the space provided for your answer
1)

How is Social Institution distinguished from Society?

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2)

How are Social Institutions treated as Organisations and Institutions?

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Current Ethical Debates

3)

What are the salient properties of Social Institutions?

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4.4

THE MAIN THEORETICAL ACCOUNTS OF

SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

Theoretical accounts of institutions identify institutions with relatively simple

social forms especially conventions, social norms or rules. At one level this is
merely a verbal dispute such simpler forms could simply be termed institutions.
However, at another level the dispute is not merely verbal, since what we are
calling institutions would on such a view consist simply of sets of conventions,
social norms or rules. These accounts are called atomistic theories of institutions.
Here the atom itself typically consists of the actions of individual human
persons, e.g. conventions as regularities in action that solve coordination
problems. The individual agents are not themselves defined in terms of
institutional forms, such as institutional roles. Hence atomistic theories of
institutions tend to go hand in glove with atomistic theories of all collective
entities, e.g. a society consists of an aggregate of individual human persons.
Moreover, atomistic theories tend to identify the individual agent as the locus of
moral value. On this kind of view, social forms, including social institutions,
have moral value only derivatively, i.e. only in so far as they contribute to the
prior needs or other requirements of individual agents.
The regularities in action or rules made use of in such atomistic accounts of
institutions cannot simply be individual regularities in action or individual rules
for action; rather there must be interdependence of action such that, for example,
agent A only performs action x, if other agents, B and C do likewise. Moreover,
some account of the interdependence of action in question is called for, e.g. that
it is not the sort of interdependence of action involved in conflict situations. By
contrast with atomistic accounts of social institutions, holistic accounts stress
the inter-relationships of institutions (structure) and their contribution to larger
and more complete social complexes, especially societies. Thus according to
Barry Barnes, Functionalist theories in the social sciences seek to describe, to
understand and in most cases to explain the orderliness and stability of entire
social systems. In so far as they treat individuals, the treatment comes after and
emerges from analysis of the system as a whole. Functionalist theories move
from an understanding of the whole to an understanding of the parts of that
whole, whereas individualism proceeds in the opposite direction.
A system of moral is always the affair of a group and can operate only if the
group protects them by its authority. It is made up of rules which govern
individuals, which compel them to act in such and such a way, and which impose
limits to their inclinations and forbid them to go beyond. Now there is only one
moral power - moral, and hence common to all - which stands above the individual
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and which can legitimately make laws for him, and that is collective power. To
the extent the individual is left to his own devices and freed from all social
constraint, he is unfettered by all moral constraint. It is not possible for
professional ethics to escape this fundamental condition of any system of morals.
Since, then, the society as a whole feels no concern in professional ethics, it is
imperative that there be special groups in the society, within which these morals
may be evolved, and whose business it is to see that they are observed.

Social Institutions

Holistic accounts of social institutions often invoke the terminology of internal

and external relations. An internal relation is one that is definitive of, or in some
way essential to, the entity it is a relation of; by contrast, external relations are
not in this way essential. Thus being married to someone is an internal relation
of spouses; if a man is a husband then necessarily he stands in the relation of
being married to someone else. Likewise, if someone is a judge in a court of law
then necessarily he stands in an adjudicative relationship to defendants. Evidently,
many institutional roles are possessed of, and therefore in part defined by, their
internal relations to other institutional roles.
Thus we have discussed atomistic and holistic accounts of social institutions.
However, there is a third possibility, namely, molecularist accounts. Roughly
speaking, a molecularist account of an institution would not seek to reduce the
institution to simpler atomic forms, such as conventions; nor would it seek to
define an institution in terms of its relationships with other institutions and its
contribution to the larger societal whole. Rather, each institution would be
analogous to a molecule; it would have constitutive elements (atoms) but also
have its own structure and unity. Moreover, on this conception each social
institution would have a degree of independence vis--vis other institutions and
the society at large; on the other hand, the set of institutions might itself under
certain conditions form a unitary system of sorts, e.g. a contemporary liberal
democratic nation-state comprised of a number of semi-autonomous public and
private institutions functioning in the context of the meta-institution of
government.
We can find here that atomistic and holistic accounts of institutions have been
presented and found to be problematic. Atomistic accounts focus on the elements
of institutions, and thereby fail to provide an adequate account of the structure or
glue that might transform a mere set of conventions or rules into an institution.
Holistic accounts focus on the whole societies of which institutions are typically
a part, and seek to explain the part in terms of the whole; in so doing they fail to
offer an account of institutions that sufficiently respects their distinctive character
and relative ontological independence of society conceived as a unitary whole.
Let us now turn to an account of institutions that treats institutions, so to speak,
on their own terms. The account in question is consistent with institutional
molecularism, broadly conceived.

4.5

A TELEOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF
INSTITUTIONS

Teleology finds its etymology in the Greek word telos which means end and
logos, science. It refers to final purpose and as a theory it explains and justifies
values in reference to some final purpose or good. It is a theory that derives duty
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or moral obligation from what is good or desirable as an end to be achieved. The

central concept in the teleological account of social institutions is that of joint
action. Joint actions consist of the intentional individual actions of a number of
agents directed to the realisation of a collective end. A collective end is a species
of individual end; it is an end possessed by each individual involved in the joint
action. However it is an end, which is not realised by the action of any one of the
individuals; the actions of all or most realise the end. Examples of joint action
are two people lifting a table together, and two men jointly pushing a car.
Collective ends can be unconsciously pursued, and have not necessarily been at
any time explicitly formulated in the minds of those pursuing them; collective
ends can be implicit in the behaviour and attitudes of agents without ceasing to
be ends as such. Further, in the case of a collective end pursued over a long
period of time, e.g. by members of an institution over generations, the collective
end can be latent at a specific point in time, i.e. it is not actually being pursued,
explicitly or implicitly, at that point in time. However, it does not thereby cease
to be an end of that institutionwhich is to say, of those personseven at those
times when it is not being pursued. Social norms are regularities that are also
norms; agents believe that they have a duty to conform or that they otherwise
ought to conform. Such norms include ones respecting and enforcing rights.
Here the ought is not that of mere instrumental rationality; it is not simply a
matter of believing that one ought to conform because it serves ones purpose.
Some conventions and most rules are also norms in this strong sense. For example,
the convention and the law to drive on the left is a norm; people feel that they
ought to conform. This strong sense of ought includesbut is not exhausted
bythe so called moral ought.
Organisations consist of a formal structure of interlocking roles. These roles can
be defined in terms of tasks, procedures and conventions. Moreover, unlike social
groups, organisations are individuated by the kind of activity that they undertake,
and also by their characteristic ends. So we have governments, universities,
business corporations, armies, and so on. Perhaps governments have as an end
or goal the ordering and leading of societies, universities the end of discovering
and disseminating knowledge, and so on. Here it is important to reiterate that
these ends are, firstly, collective ends and, secondly, often the latent and/or implicit
(collective) ends of individual institutional actors.
A further defining feature of organisations is that organisational action typically
consists in, what has elsewhere been termed, a layered structure of joint actions.
One illustration of the notion of a layered structure of joint actions is an armed
force fighting a battle. Suppose at an organisation level a number of actions
are severally necessary and jointly sufficient to achieve some collective end.
Thus the actions of the mortar squad destroying enemy gun emplacements,
the flight of military planes providing air-cover and the infantry platoon taking
and holding the ground might be severally necessary and jointly sufficient to
achieve the collective end of defeating the enemy; as such these actions
constitute a joint action. This can be consistently held while maintaining that
organisations, as well as conventions, are a pervasive and necessary feature of
human life, being indispensable instruments for realising collective ends.
Collective ends are a species of individual ends; but merely being an end is in
itself neither, say, morally good nor morally bad, any more than being an intention
or a belief are in themselves morally good or morally bad.

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It should also be noted that the social norms governing the roles and role structures
of organisations are both formal and informal. If formal, then they are typically
enshrined in explicit rules, regulations and laws, including laws of contract. For
example, an employee not only believes that he ought to undertake certain tasks
and not others, but these tasks are explicitly set forth in his contract of
employment. As mentioned above, informal social norms to a greater or lesser
extent comprise the culture of an organisation. Organisations with the above
detailed normative dimension are social institutions. So institutions are often
organisations, and many systems of organisations are also institutions.
Teleological accounts can be either descriptive or normative. Slavery is a morally
objectionable social institution mobilising physical force and ideology in the
economic interests of the slave-owners at the expense of the human rights of the
slaves; in the case of many such institutions the real end of the institution might
need to be masked by the ideology, if the institution is to survive. Perhaps many
asylums are likewise morally objectionable institutions. On a descriptive
teleological account, such institutions will turn out to be institutions; their nature
as institutions will not be denied. However, in the context of such a descriptive
account of institutions the question of their morally objectionable institutional
activities and ends will simply not arise. However, by the lights of a normative
teleological account of social institutions, the end(s) of any given institution to
be some social or human good and there ought to be moral constraints on
institutional activities. Accordingly, on a normative teleological account a morally
objectionable institution such as slavery will turn out to be defective qua
institution. Nevertheless, on the normative account such morally objectionable
collectivities are institutions; the normative teleological account needs to be
consistent with the descriptive teleological account.

Social Institutions

Check Your Progress II

Note: Use the space provided for your answer
1)

How do atomistic theories explain social institutions?

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2)

How do holistic and molecularist accounts stress on the role of Social

Institutions?
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Current Ethical Debates

3)

What is The central concept in the teleological account of social

institutions?
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4)

What is the nature-teleological accounts of social institutions?

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4.6

NORMATIVE CHARACTER OF SOCIAL

INSTITUTIONS

Normative theory involves arriving at moral standards that regulate right and
wrong conduct. In a sense, it is a search for an ideal litmus test of proper behaviour.
The Golden Rule is an example of a normative theory that establishes a single
principle against which we judge all actions. Other normative theories focus on
a set of foundational principles, or a set of good character traits. Normative theories
seek to provide action-guides; procedures for answering the practical question
(What ought I to do?). The key assumption in normative theory is that there is
only one ultimate criterion of moral conduct, whether it is a single rule or a set of
principles.
Social institutions have a multi-faceted normative dimension. Moral categories
that are deeply implicated in various social institutions include human rights
and duties, contract based rights and obligations and rights and duties derived
from the production and consumption of collective goods. Take police institutions.
Police are typically engaged in protecting someone from being deprived of their
human right to life or liberty, or their institutional right to property. Moreover, a
distinctive feature of policing is the use, or threatened use, of coercive force.
Here the institution of the police is different from other institutions that are either
not principally concerned with protecting moral rights, or that do not necessarily
rely on coercion in the service of moral rights.

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There is relationship between social institutions and human rights. However,

there are a range of moral rights that might be termed institutional moral rights.
These are moral rights that depend in part on rights generating properties possessed
by human beings qua human beings, but also in part on membership of a
community or of a morally legitimate institution, or occupancy of a morally
legitimate institutional role. Such institutional moral rights include the right to
vote and to stand for political office, the right of legislators to enact legislation,

of judges to make binding judgments, of police to arrest offenders, and of patients

to sue doctors for negligence. Here we need to distinguish between: (a)
institutional rights that embody human rights in institutional settings, and therefore
depend in part on rights generating properties that human beings possess as human
beings (these are institutional moral rights), and; (b) institutional rights that do
not embody human rights in institutional settings. The right to vote and the right
to stand for office embody the human right to autonomy in the institutional setting
of the state; hence to make a law to exclude certain people from having a vote or
standing for office is to violate a moral right. But the right to make the next
move in a game of chess, but not three spaces side wards, is entirely dependent
on the rules of chess; if the rules had been different, e.g. each player must make
two consecutive moves or pawns can move side wards, then the rights that players
have would be entirely different. In other words these rights that chess players
have are mere institutional rights; they depend entirely on the rules of the
institution of the game of chess. Likewise, parking rights, such as reserved
spaces and one hour parking spaces in universities are mere institutional rights,
as opposed to institutional moral rights.

Social Institutions

Let us now focus on institutional moral rights. There are at least two species of
institutional (moral) rights. There are individual institutional (moral) rights and
there are joint moral rights. Joint moral rights are moral rights that attach to
individual persons, but do so jointly. For example, in the context of some
institution of property rights the joint owners of a piece of land might have a
joint right to exclude would-be trespassers. Having explored in general terms
the normative character of social institutions let us now turn in the final section
of this entry to a more specific normative aspect of institutions, namely their
conformity or lack of it with principles of distributive justice.

4.7

SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS AND DISTRIBUTIVE

JUSTICE

Justice is an important aspect of many, if not all, social institutions. Market

economies, salary and wage structures, and tax systems, judicial systems, prisons,
and so on are all in part to be evaluated in terms of their compliance with principles
of justice. Here it is important to distinguish the concept of justice from, on the
one hand, the related concept of a rightespecially a human rightand from
goods, such as well-being and utility, on the other hand. Self-evidently, wellbeing is not the same thing as justice. However, there is a tendency to conflate
justice and rights. Nevertheless, arguably the concepts are distinct; or at least
justice in a narrow relational sense should be distinguished from the concept of
a right. Genocide, for example, is a violation of human rightsspecifically, the
right to lifebut it is not necessarily, or at least principally, an act of injustice in
a relational sense. A persons rights can be violated, irrespective of whether or
not another - or indeed everyone - has suffered a rights violation. However,
injustice in the relational sense entails unfairness as between persons or groups;
injustice in this sense consists in the fact that someone has suffered or benefited
but others have not. Although the concept of a right and the concept of justice
are distinct, violations of rights are typically acts of injustice (and vice-versa).
Moreover, the concept of justice is itself multi-dimensional. Penal justice
(sometimes referred to as retributive justice), for example, concerns the
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Current Ethical Debates

punishment of offenders for their legal and/or moral offences, and is to be

distinguished from distributive justice. Thus it is a principle of penal justice, but
not distributive justice, that the guilty be punished and the innocent go free.
Distributive justice is essentially a relational phenomenon to do with the
comparative distribution of benefits and burdens as between individuals or groups,
including the distribution of rights and duties but not restricted to the distribution
of rights and duties, e.g. the injustice of excluding blacks (but not whites) from
voting in elections to determine the national government in apartheid South Africa
or of lower wages being paid to women than those paid to men for the same
work.
Distributive justice is an important aspect of most, if not all, social institutions;
the role occupants of most institutions are the recipients and providers of benefits,
e.g. wages, consumer products, and the bearers of burdens, e.g. allocated tasks
and, accordingly, are subject to principles of distributive justice. Moreover,
arguably some institutions, perhaps governments, have as one of their defining
ends or functions, to ensure conformity to principles of distributive justice in the
wider society. However, distributive justice does not appear to be a defining
feature, end or function of all social institutions. Communication systems, such
as human languages, are arguably defined in part in terms of the end of truth, but
not in terms of justice; hence, a communicative system would cease to be a
communication system if its participants never attempted to communicate the
truth, but not if its participants failed to respect principles of distributive justice,
e.g. in terms of the number of occasions on which particular speakers were allowed
to speak.
In conclusion, a final point about liberal democratic governments and distributive
justice. There is at least one important and uncontroversial principle of distributive
justice that arises in the context of collective enterprises (joint action); namely
that, other things being equal, the benefits produced by joint actions should flow
back to those who performed the joint action. Let us assume that inevitably
citizens of a given polity participate in collective enterprises; whereas this is not
necessarily the case for individuals who are not citizens of the same polity. (In
the contemporary globalising world this assumption is increasingly implausible;
but let us grant it for the sake of argument.) Surely this principle of distributive
justice, if any, should be enforced by governments in relation to their own citizens
but not in relation to non-citizens. Perhaps, at any rate, one key test of this
proposition is whether or not individuals would be morally entitled to enforce
such a principle of distributive justice in the absence of government. If the answer
is in the affirmative, i.e. individuals have a natural right to enforce this principle
of distributive justice, then presumably governments have a right to enforce it;
after all, as we have seen above, according to liberal democratic theory individuals
relinquish to government whatever pre-existing moral rights to enforcement they
might have had.
What if the answer to our question is in the negative; does it follow that the
government has no moral right to enforce this principle of distributive justice?
Not necessarily. For one thing enforcement of such a principle of distributive
justice is not necessarily the violation of a human right; if it were, this would be
a moral constraint on governmental action in this regard. For another thing, in
the context of a liberal democratic state citizens can make legitimate joint
decisionsvia their representative governmentsthat are simply unavailable

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to them when they are functioning as lone individuals; and one of these joint
decisions might well be to enforce such a principle of distributive justice in their
society on the grounds that it is a weighty moral principle the enforcement of
which is morally required.

Social Institutions

Now consideras is in fact the casea world in which many joint economic
enterprises are in fact trans-societal, e.g. a multi-national corporation. Naturally,
the citizens of different societies (polities)or at least their representative
governmentsmight also make a joint decision to (jointly) enforce this principle
of distributive justice in relation to trans-societal joint economic enterprises
involving citizens from both polities, e.g. wages in a poor society would need to
reflect the contribution of the wage-earner to the overall benefits produced by
the multi-national corporation. And if the citizens are committed on moral grounds
to the enforcement of this principle of distributive justice in relation to intrasocietal economic interactions, it is difficult to see why they should not be likewise
committed to it in trans-societal economic interactions.
Check Your Progress III
Note: Use the space provided for your answer
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What are the Multidimensional aspects of Justice?

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2)

How does Distributive Justice play a role in Social Institutions?

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4.9

LET US SUM UP

In this unit gave the formation of social institutions through various philosophical
theories and their implications in the ethical field.

4.10 KEY WORDS

Teleology

It means end and refers to final purpose and as a

theory explains values in reference to some final
purpose.

Social Institution

They are simple social forms, conventions and rules,

in addition to structure, function and culture of
society.

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Current Ethical Debates

4.9

FURTHER READINGS AND REFERENCES

Bottomore, T. B., Sociology A Guide to Problems and Literature (Bombay:

Blackie & Son Publishers Pvt. Ltd, 1971)
Bombwall, Principles of Civics and Indian Administration (Lucknow: Atma Ram
& Sons, 1972)
Durkheim, Emile, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, C. Brookfield (tr.)
(London: Rutledge, 1992)
Durkheim, Emile, Rules of Sociological Method (New York: Free Press, 1964).
Miller, Seumas, Social Action: A Teleological Account (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2001).
Parsons, Talcott, On Institutions and Social Evolution (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982).
Ryan, Alan, The Philosophy of the Social Sciences (London: Macmillan, 1970)
Searle, John, The Construction of Social Reality (London: Penguin, 1995)
Scott, Richard, Institutions and Organisations (London: Sage, 2001).
Weber, Max, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (Glencoe, Illinois: Free
Press, 1949).

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