In Enforcing Morality, Steven Wall revisits fundamental and important normative questions about the relations between law and morality, about the proper limits of law, and in particular about whether it’s a legitimate aim for a state to try and make its subjects more virtuous and their lives go better, or whether the mere immorality of an action suffices as a reason for criminalization, or perhaps for some lesser kind of legal intervention and regulation (Wall is explicit that his discussion is not restricted to just criminalization [2]).
The book is divided into two parts. In the first, Wall revisits familiar themes and contributions here, mostly discussing Mill’s Harm Principle (and alternatives to it in terms of sovereignty) and the Hart-Devlin debate. In the second part, Wall defends his own set of answers to these central questions: he rejects the Harm Principle (however exactly understood), he argues that creating the...
