The moral entrepreneur may press for the creation or enforcement of a norm for any number of reasons, altruistic or selfish.
[citation needed] Pro-life and pro-choice movements are an example of two moral entrepreneurs working against each other on a single issue.
[5] 1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias Rule creators generally express the conviction that some kind of threatening social evil exists that must be combated.
After a time, crusaders become dependent upon experts or professionals, who serve to legitimize a moral creed on technical or scientific grounds.
Such officials tend to take a pessimistic view of human nature because of their constant exposure to willful deviance.
The creation and application of explicit rules are seen as characteristics of moralism, or the tendency to treat people as enemies.
This is often the goal of the moral entrepreneurs: to rally the support of society behind their specific aims through the redefining of behaviors and groups as deviant or problematic.
"[10] They do not use rational argument, and according to Posner: Rather, they mix appeals to self-interest with emotional appeals that bypass our rational calculating faculty and stir inarticulable feelings of oneness with or separateness from the people (or it could be land, or animals) that are to constitute, or be ejected from, the community that the moral entrepreneur is trying to create.
[12] Typifying is a prominent rhetorical tool employed by moral entrepreneurs when attempting to define social problems.
Through typification and the creation of a dangerous class, moral entrepreneurs aim to place the activities of a particular group on the public's agenda and label certain actions as social problems.
Moral entrepreneurs are also central in the construction of social deviance, including the development of drug scares.
The role of moral entrepreneurs in this instance, for example, is to assign responsibility to drugs for an array of preexisting public problems.
[7] Examples of laws created by moral entrepreneurship include those during prohibition in the United States, San Francisco's anti-opium den ordinance of 1875, and the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914.