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Morality, Normativity, and Society, David Copp. Oxford University Press, 1995, xii + 262 pages

Walsh is right to be sceptical of the normative adequacy of Paretooptimality there are other properties of distribution at which we should aim (even at the cost of sacrificing perfect Pareto-optimality, if that is required). But Walsh's positive programme here is unclear: he does not really transcend the trite in his attempts to give accounts of the normative goals at which we should aim, and the ways in which we should modify society, and behave as individuals, in order to achieve them. This failing is compounded by a failure to separate the normative from the descriptive in much of his discussion of economic models. To be fair, the task of unravelling the relation of economic models to the descriptive and normative aspects of society and the individual might well be precluded by the nature of much economic modelling: one gets the sense from reading Walsh that Alexander Rosenberg is justified in his conclusion (in 'If Economics Isn't Science, What Is It?', Philosophical Forum, 14 (1983), pp. 296-314) that economics is best interpreted as 'a branch of mathematics ... devoted to examining the formal properties of ... [certain] abstract relations', rather than as an attempt to give a foundation for public policy and the improvement of society.*