Chris Melenovsky

This article challenges a reductive analysis of social practices by distinguishing five kinds of reason for following the rules of conventional practices. Depending on one’s preferred intellectual tradition, conventional practices enable coordination, facilitate cooperation, constitute activities, fulfil reciprocity, or specify abstract rights. Instead of being rival theories of social practices, these different models complement one another in a normative analysis of social practices. By distinguishing five kinds of reasons to follow conventional rules, this paper supports a more dynamic conventionalist analysis of subjects like property, the law, professional obligation, civic responsibility, and culture.

The idea that society is a cooperative venture has been used by contractualists, contractarians, and deliberative democrats to justify the burdens of society to each member. In such a cooperative venture, those who benefit from society owe a contribution and those who contribute are owed benefits. Even though this idea is quite intuitive, there are deep disagreements about what makes society cooperative. Some focus on acts of production, others on fair interaction, and still others on the intention to contribute to shared projects. In this article, I show where this kind of disagreement causes problems in current debates, and I defend one conception of social cooperation as uniquely best. Specifically, I argue that the relevant acts that make society a cooperative venture are acts of institutional rule-following. Society is a cooperative venture because people cooperate with one another by following the rules of our basic institutions.

When Buchanan discusses the constitutional changes that members of society would agree to, he uses the status quo as the default. If no agreement occurs, we continue with the constitutional rules that are currently in place. This article argues that this choice results in an unjustified status quo bias. To make this point, I examine and challenge three possible arguments in favor of using the status quo as the default. Then, I give two arguments in favor of a form of contractarianism that does not use the status quo as a default.