Abstract

Andrew Simester and Andreas von Hirsch’s Crimes, Harms, and Wrongs: On the Principles of Criminalisation (Simester and von Hirsch 2011) is an important contribution to the philosophical debate over the nature and ethical limits of criminalisation. As they note in their reply in this symposium, one of the novel aspects of their account is that they do not advance one “unified, grand theory”. Rather, they analyse each ground of criminal prohibition—wrongfulness, harm-based, offense, and paternalistic prohibitions aimed at preventing self-harm—so as to develop guiding principles for their use (or, in the case of paternalism, the absence of an independent principle that would underwrite its use).The result is a rich set of arguments that advance a number of debates across the field of criminalisation.However, that is not all: the participants share the view that, as Tatjana Hörnle puts it, “any theory of criminalization presupposes assumptions about the functions of the criminal law. The q