Edna Ullmann-Margalit

This pathbreaking book casts new light on how to handle life’s most difficult decisions. Edna Ullmann-Margalit and Cass R. Sunstein examine the role of social norms in creating both stability and instability, while offering an in-depth exploration of why people choose not to choose. Ullmann-Margalit and Sunstein evaluate the identifiable strategies people use when confronted with difficult problems, such as delegating, adhering to firm rules, adopting presumptions, and taking small, reversible steps. They emphasise the importance of norms of considerateness in maintaining social cohesion, highlighting the positive impact of personal sacrifice in both work and family environments. The authors also investigate how norms influence consumer choices, and how purchasing habits can reveal a desire for solidarity and commonality. Ullmann-Margalit and Sunstein address the effect of norms on inequality, analysing the contagious nature of indignation, which often leads to large-scale societal changes, such as the movement for equality between men and women. Decisions and Social Norms is essential reading for scholars and students of philosophy, economics, behavioral science and psychology. Providing insights on decision-making in political, legal and commercial spheres, this book is also invaluable to policymakers and practitioners in political science, law and business.

This pathbreaking book casts new light on how to handle life’s most difficult decisions. Edna Ullmann-Margalit and Cass R. Sunstein examine the role of social norms in creating both stability and instability, while offering an in-depth exploration of why people choose not to choose. Ullmann-Margalit and Sunstein evaluate the identifiable strategies people use when confronted with difficult problems, such as delegating, adhering to firm rules, adopting presumptions, and taking small, reversible steps. They emphasise the importance of norms of considerateness in maintaining social cohesion, highlighting the positive impact of personal sacrifice in both work and family environments. The authors also investigate how norms influence consumer choices, and how purchasing habits can reveal a desire for solidarity and commonality. Ullmann-Margalit and Sunstein address the effect of norms on inequality, analysing the contagious nature of indignation, which often leads to large-scale societal changes, such as the movement for equality between men and women. Decisions and Social Norms is essential reading for scholars and students of philosophy, economics, behavioral science and psychology. Providing insights on decision-making in political, legal and commercial spheres, this book is also invaluable to policymakers and practitioners in political science, law and business.

Normal Rationality is a selection of the most important work of Edna Ullmann-Margalit, presenting some influential and widely admired essays alongside some that are not well known. She was an unorthodox and deeply original philosopher whose work illuminated the largest mysteries of human life. Much of her writing focuses on two fundamental questions. (1) How do people proceed when they cannot act on the basis of reasons, or project likely consequences? (2) How is social order possible? Ullmann-Margalit's answers, emphasizing what might be called biased rationality, are important not only for philosophy, but also for political science, psychology, sociology, cognitive science, economics (including behavioral economics), law, and even public policy. Ullmann-Margalit demonstrates that people have identifiable strategies for making difficult decisions, whether the question is small (what to buy at a supermarket) or big (whether to transform one's life in some large-scale way). She also shows that social dilemmas are solved by norms; that invisible-hand explanations take two identifiable (and dramatically different) forms; that trust can emerge in seemingly unpromising situations; and that considerateness is the foundation on which our relationships are organized in both the thin context of the public space and the intimate context of the family. One of the distinguishing features of Ullmann-Margalit's work is its close attention to the details of human experience, and its use of those details to offer fresh understandings of social phenomena. Her essays cast new light on a diverse assortment of problems in philosophy, social science, and individual lives.

Edna Ullmann-Margalit provides an original account of the emergence of norms. Her main thesis is that certain types of norms are possible solutions to problems posed by certain types of social interaction situations. The problems are such that they inhere in the structure (in the game-theoretical sense of structure) of the situations concerned. Three types of paradigmatic situations are dealt with. They are referred to as Prisoners' Dilemma-type situations; co-ordination situations; and inequality (or partiality) situations. Each of them, it is claimed, poses a basic difficulty, to some or all of the individuals involved in them. Three types of norms, respectively, are offered as solutions to these situational problems. It is shown how, and in what sense, the adoption of these norms of social behaviour can indeed resolve the specified problems.

More than fifty years ago the discovery of scrolls in eleven caves beside the Dead Sea ignited the imagination of the world--and launched a vast academic field. Expectations abounded that the scrolls would reveal actual contemporaneous accounts of the birth of Christianity, perhaps even of the life of Jesus. The research that followed--its inner logic, and what its impassioned and often highly controversial theories reveal about the framing of facts and the interpreting of texts--is what interests philosopher Edna Ullmann-Margalit in this thoroughly absorbing book. Since the inception of Dead Sea Scrolls research, a central theory has emerged. Known as the Qumran-Essene Hypothesis, it asserts that the scrolls belonged to the Essenes, a sect whose center was at the nearby site of Qumran. In Out of the Cave, Ullmann-Margalit focuses on this theory and the vicissitudes of its career. Looking at the Essene connection, the archaeology of Qumran, and the sectarian nature of the scrolls community, she explores the different arenas, and ways, in which contesting theories of the scrolls do battle. In this context she finds fascinating examples of issues that exercise philosophers of science as well as the general public--issues that only amplify the already intrinsic interest of the Dead Sea scrolls.