Professor Matt Matravers

ISRF Mid-Career Fellow 2013-14

Professor Matt Matravers

ISRF Mid-Career Fellow 2013-14

ISRF Matt Matravers

Responsibility Without Desert

The criminal justice system both incorporates and reflects our beliefs about the kind of beings that we are. However, increasingly this system has appeared to think of people in contradictory ways. On the one hand – as in desert based sentencing and the rhetoric of “prison works”- we are choosing beings who are normally responsible for our actions and, because responsible, deserve the good or bad consequences that follow from those actions. On the other – as in sex offender registers and crime prevention orders – we are threats to ourselves or others who have to be monitored, controlled, and incapacitated.

The tension between these pictures of human agency is not restricted to criminal justice. The rise of the language of desert and responsibility has been accompanied by findings in neuroscience that purport to explain human action in ways that seem to bypass responsibility and desert. In psychiatry, similarly, the move is away from categorical diagnoses (disordered or not disordered) towards a dimensional approach (to degrees of disorder).

If we are to understand, and critically evaluate, these developments we have to have an account of the relationship between justice, responsibility, and desert. This project seeks to reconsider that relationship. In particular, the orthodox view is that responsibility in the law is one thing and is insulated from moral and medical ideas, which are quite another. This not only leaves contemporary legal theorists without the resources to do anything other than to condemn recent preventive justice measures, it threatens to introduce an untenable gap between the law and ordinary moral experience. I argue that by tracking the contours of responsibility and desert in our social and legal practices, we can reconstruct the relationship between justice and responsibility in the light of a revised understanding of desert.

Contacting Fellows

If you would like to contact any of our Fellows to discuss their ISRF-funded work, please contact Dr Lars Cornelissen (Academic Editor) in the first instance, at [email protected].