social norms are moral; they are built on, enact, and reproduce moral judgments that have evolved in a society. whether you consider them moral or not is a question to pursue, but it is clear that all social norms can be shown to have a moral impulse.
since you don't smoke, do the following: go up to someone bum a cigarette and then proceed to stay in their vicinity but don't smoke it.
the person we'll be extremely annoyed. why? because you asked for her/his property and s/he gave it to you w/o expecting payment or future return of the cigarette [you don't borrow smokes generally]. embedded in such an exchange are social norms which are, in this case, rules for what can and can not [should/should not] be done with property [in this case, prop that is *given* (not sold, not lent) to you by someone who *owns* that property]. specifically, you should use that property for what it was intended. [you could destroy as some anti smokers do but response of anger is quite the same.] property, sociologically, is nothing but a set of social relationships [rules, norms, mores] defining what can/should and cannot/should not be done with things, ideas, people. all societies have these rules for defining property. this little insight comes from marx, initially, but was developed by anthropologists studying kinship rules and the intimate relationship to property among aboriginal people. the kikuiyu in w. africa, for example, have extensive rules about property and who gets what and why. if a cousin is given a piece of land in that social context it is wrong to let it lie fallow or destroy it.
so lotsa norms [moral judgments] embedded in that little cigarette breaching experiment, eh? what else does it do? well, on an everyday micro-level it teaches us about property, persons, ownership, and about in/appropriate emotional responses to violations of property norms. combine this seemingly mundane interaction with all the other ones we engage in and we can see how 'private property' is so taken for granted in capitalist societies.
>There is also a question of what is
>normal, compared to what is moral and what is legal. None of these
>categories have to overlap at all. Do we really need the 'facts', that
>is, the details on who did what, was there penetration, and so on in
>order to make a moral judgment? No, moral judgments do not depend on
>facts at all. On the other hand, determining what constitutes a social
>norm is supposed to require empirical facts, and at least
>theoretically, legal judgments are supposed to require a finding on
>facts.