Otteson's book "Actual Ethics" (Cambridge University Press, 2006) was named the first-prize winner of the 2007 Templeton Enterprise Award, an award sponsored by the Templeton Foundation and administered by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. The award goes to "the very best that has been written ... to advance the cause of ordered liberty around the world" by an author under the age of forty, and it carried with it a $50,000 cash prize, more than what accompanies a Pulitzer Prize or a National Book Award.