Criminalisation Theory

This book considers how normative criminalisation theory is affected by metaethics, and shows how different metanormative assumptions alter how criminalisation theories are understood. How does our understanding of normativity – the field of study for metaethics and philosophy of normativity more widely – affect how we understand criminalisation? This book shows how the theorising of criminalisation is closely connected to metaethical assumptions, but that these assumptions have, to date, not been explored or addressed. The book engages with some prominent normative criminalisation theories, including robust and modest legal moralism, as well as part of the more recent ‘political turn’ theories. In doing so, the book proposes a unique analytic framework – dividing the theorising of criminalisation into two analytic stages of what is being declared through criminalising, and how to justify criminalisation through deliberation – and shows how these criminalisation theories are making importantly different metanormative assumptions about the conceptual, ontological, and epistemic characteristics of the normative concepts and principles they use.