I spent 2022-23 on a cross-disciplinary scholarship in the UCL Faculty of Laws. In the spring semester of 2024, I was a visiting researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. Before finding my way to philosophy, I did a music performance degree at Goldsmiths, University of London.
You can find details of my research below.Here is my academic cv and here is my ORCID.
Feel free to get in touch at kenta.sekine.18@ucl.ac.uk.
Contractual Deflationism and the Politics of Personal Detachment
Ergo: an Open Access Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming 2025).
What is the value of contractual relations to human life? For liberals like Dori Kimel, contract embodies the intrinsic value of personal detachment: its potential to emancipate us from traditional social relations. Borrowing a line of thought from Nancy Fraser, I argue that such liberals overlook that contractual relations may dominate us too, but instead through alienation under market conditions. I suggest that this issue remains irresolvable until we see personal detachment, and thus contract, as in fact of ‘merely’ instrumental value.
A paper on the possibility of tragedy [title omitted]
(under review)
Modern moral philosophy tends to think of situations of tragedy as incoherent, reasoning that if they existed, then they would violate the plausible principle that we cannot be blameworthy without fault. In this paper, I explain how we can accept the coherence of tragedy without denying the plausible principle. I suggest that, to do so, we need to develop Bernard Williams’s famous account of agent-regret further than he did himself.
A paper on second-order reasons [title omitted]
(under review)
Many reasons for action have the force of requirement, such as rules, norms, commitments and obligations. We have to do as they say even when we don't want to, or it's an inconvenience, or when there is a more desirable alternative. Joseph Raz famously argued that we should account for this in terms of a certain type of ‘second-order’ reason he called ‘exclusionary’ reasons: reasons not to act for certain reasons. His account has been controversial, and it has recently been argued that second-order reasons are quite generally incoherent. I defend second-order reasons against this argument, thus bolstering Raz's account of requirements.
A paper about agent-regret [title omitted]
(under review)
Some people think we are apt to feel bad about the bad things we did, because otherwise we do not properly appreciate the badness of what we did. But others deny this, saying, in effect, that we can properly appreciate the badness of what we did without feeling bad about it. Contemporary followers of P. F. Strawson have argued against the deniers that there is something inconsistent about the moral practices they would espouse. I agree with the neo-Strawsonians that there is indeed something inconsistent, but I offer a novel account of just what that might be.