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Laura Valentini, Morality and Socially Constructed Norms, Oxford University Press, 2024, 256pp., $40.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780192845795.
Reviewed by Shawn Tinghao Wang, University of Washington
Laura Valentini’s book offers a careful, precise, and insightful analysis of an important issue in moral and political philosophy: When and why does following a socially constructed norm become a pro tanto moral obligation? Her answer is the “agency-respect view”: it is when and because we should respect the individuals’ agential commitments behind it (81). This is not meant to exhaust all possible moral reasons for following a socially constructed norm; Valentini allows that sometimes norms are morally binding due to the “the substantive merits” of their contents (54). But the agency-respect view is meant to exhaust the “content-independent” grounds for the moral force of a socially constructed norm—namely, those considerations that justify its being morally obligatory without appealing to its substantive merits (54).
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