Sekine, Kenta;
(2025)
Contingency, Tragedy and Politics.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
The question that guides this thesis is: how should we respond to contingency in our lives? I address this question as it arises for what I argue is the most troubling face of contingency in our lives, the phenomenon I call ‘tragedy.’ Tragedy befalls us, in this sense, when we find ourselves apt to experience feelings of moral responsibility for something we did, even though we were not at fault in so doing. We can hear the guiding question in two registers. How should we each respond to tragedy? And how should we collectively respond? At the individual level, I argue that tragedy proves recalcitrant to philosophical understanding unless we can account for a feeling of responsibility that is like agentregret in being apt in the absence of fault, but like blame in being of a ‘moral’ quality sufficient to do justice to the phenomenology of tragedy. I propose to account for such a feeling in terms of ordinary agent-regrets that are hard to let go of, or repress, because they respond to failures to satisfy important obligations of ours. It is with such feeling that we should, as individuals, respond to tragedy in our lives. To defend this view, I offer accounts of ordinary agent-regret and the distinctive normative force of obligation. With this in hand, I go on to address the guiding question at the level of the collective. I do so by bringing out what I believe to be the political dimensions of tragedy. I consider how the societal distribution of tragedy is affected by struggles over the obligations that in fact constitute the value of our social relations, and over how we collectively understand the role of that value in human life. We should collectively respond to tragedy, I claim, by engaging in such struggles.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Contingency, Tragedy and Politics |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Philosophy |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10211717 |
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