Ambrose Lee

Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow

Ambrose Lee is a political and legal philosopher, currently holding a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship at the Centre for Criminology, to undertake a 3 year research project titled 'Internal Constraints to Coercive Harm Prevention'. This project builds on the AHRC-funded 'Preventive Justice' Project, which Ambrose worked with Professors Andrew Ashworth and Lucia Zedner as a research officer. The aim of the 'Preventive Justice' Project was to develop an account of the principles and values that should guide and limit the state’s use of coercive techniques in the prevention of harms, in particular its criminal law and other similar instruments. Building on this, Ambrose's current project investigates the rationale(s) behind why the state should prevent harms in the first place. Once this is identified, constraints on the state's use of coercive techniques to prevent harms can then be derived, by asking whether those coercive techniques contradict or undermine the rationale(s). The resulting set of constraints to coercive harm prevention would then be internal to the preventive rationale, which have to be accepted on pain of contradicting or undermining it, as opposed to constraints external to the preventive rationale that are more prevalent in contemporary literature.

Before he joined the Law Faculty and the Centre for Criminology, Ambrose was a lecturer in metaethics in the Division of Law and Philosophy at University of Stirling. He obtained his doctorate from the same university in 2011, with a thesis titled 'Duties of Minimal Wellbeing and Their Role in Global Justice'. Ambrose is also currently a Research Associate at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

Besides political and legal philosophy, Ambrose also has a keen interest in metaethics and moral philosophy. More specifically, he is interested in the following issues: theories of distributive justice (both domestic and global), value incommensurability, the nature of goodness, the nature of respect, justification of legal punishment, the nature of law, criteria for criminalization, the nature of wellbeing, and its relationship with morality.