Matt Matravers

Professor Matt Matravers

Mid-Career Fellow 2013-14

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.

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Areas of interest

Law Legal Philosophy Criminal Justice Penal Justice Punishment Philosophy of Law

Cohort

MCF1

Biography

Matt Matravers is Professor of Law at the University of York. He joined York Law School in 2015, having been at the University of York since 1995 serving as Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, and Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations. He is on the AHRC Peer Review College, the Council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and am a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. Matt has held visiting appointments at Yale, UCL, Michigan, Oldenburg, Minnesota, and Cambridge. He is also co-editor-in-chief of the journal Criminal Law and Philosophy.

Matt is currently writing a philosophical account of the nature of criminal justice informed by empirical evidence. In the recent past, he has worked on state misconduct and sentence mitigation, the problem of doing penal justice in circumstances of social injustice, and on what the state owes to those whom it has punished.

Biographical details correct as of 07.02.25