Symbolic norms are impossible-to-follow, yet necessary

Symbolic norms are impossible-to-follow, yet necessary: they guide social life without ever becoming a code that people can obey perfectly or simply discard. The expression condenses an argument about why society depends not on the elimination of moral conflict, but on its ongoing, precarious negotiation.

Meaning and Social Function

The expression rejects two imagined extremes. At one pole is a society marked by total ignorance of moral rules; at the other is one in which those rules are never violated. Both threaten society. Actual societies instead exist as compromises between them: norms retain their force, while their breaches remain part of social life.

The paradox is not that rules are merely ineffective. Their necessity and their impossibility belong together. Norms orient conduct, but the social order cannot be built on the expectation that every person will conform to them without remainder.

Kant, Sade, and the Limits of Moral Ideals

The argument tests this paradox against the sharply opposed positions associated with Kant and the Marquis de Sade. A Kantian ideal society would overcome radical evil, the inclination toward evil understood as inscribed in human nature, until moral law and human nature were harmonized and obedience no longer painful. The account calls this ideal unworkable. Sade’s thoroughly immoral society is no more viable: it represents the contrary extreme rather than a solution to the problem.

The impossibility of abolishing radical evil is also a warning against imagining that ethical demands can be made fully natural or effortless. The attempt to erase the gap between human inclinations and moral obligation risks an angelic ideal that suppresses the conflict on which the argument insists. Symbolic norms remain necessary not because they can finally be reconciled with human nature, but because social life requires norms even when perfect compliance is impossible.