Hybrid | Living Non-Criminal Lives

Please note that the time allocated for this colloquia will be devoted to discussion of the paper.

Speaker: Prof. Matt Matravers (University of York)

About the Paper

The focus of this paper is to address the question of what kinds of reasons the state has to help its citizens to live non-criminal lives. On first reading, that might seem odd given that the answer(s) might seem obvious, but I hope over the course of the paper to show that they are not. This is in part because I hope to show that the obvious most general answer – that the state has both instrumental and non-instrumental reasons to do so – obscures some important and interesting issues. The argument is in three steps. The first two consider two very different applications of instrumental reasons; one broad and systemic and one narrow. The third considers positive non-instrumental reasons for state action with respect to the specific example of desistance. The point of the chapter is less to determine answers to specific questions – ‘what precise reason do we have to do x and how weighty is it in relation to the conflicting reason to do y?’ – than it is to indicate the kinds of arguments that need to be made to answer such questions.

About the Speaker

Matt Matravers is Professor of Law and Director of the Morrell Centre for Legal and Political Philosophy at the University of York. In 2021-23, he holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, “Criminalisation and punishment: philosophical theory and practical reality”. As part of that, in 2021-2022, he is Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Criminology and Visiting Professorial Fellow at Fitzwilliam College, both at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of two monographs (Justice and Punishment, OUP, 2000, and Responsibility and Justice, Polity, 2007), and numerous papers in legal and political philosophy. In addition, he has edited seven collections of papers the latest of which is The Criminal Law’s Person (Hart/Bloomsbury, 2022). 

About the Institute

The Institute brings together political and legal theorists from Law, Political Science and Philosophy and organises regular colloquia in terms 2 and 3. If you would like to be added to the ILPP mailing list please contact us at laws-events@ucl.ac.uk