NDPR Steven Wall Enforcing Morality

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Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2025.09.4 View this Review Online View Other NDPR Reviews

Steven Wall, Enforcing Morality, Cambridge University Press, 2023, 250pp., $34.99 (pbk) ISBN 9781009363761.

Reviewed by Richard Arneson, University of California, San Diego

Steven Wall’s latest book Enforcing Morality covers a lot more ground than its title appears to offer. He defends the enforcement of morality-in-a-broad-sense, which encompasses norms about (1) what ways of living are worthwhile and valuable; (2) what kinds of conduct wrong others without imposing harm on them absent their consent; (3) what impersonal goods, such as landscapes of natural beauty, persons might be required to preserve for their inherent value, to some degree independently of whether that preservation would improve human or animal welfare; (4) what character traits anyone has moral or prudential reason to cultivate in oneself or refrain...