Dr Kartik Upadhyaya

Kartik is Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Oxford Martin Programme on Decarceration, with a focus on arguments for decarcerating offenders whom governments lack moral standing to punish. More broadly he's interested in moral, political and legal problems arising from our practices of blaming, accountability, and other kinds of moral discourse. Beyond decarceration, he is writing about white saviourism, political hypocrisy and mass "piling-on" of online criticism.
Kartik was previously Philosophy & Politics Convenor at the University of Warwick, Research Fellow at Interdisciplinary Research Lab for Bioethics at the Academy of Sciences in Prague, and Research Fellow at the Yeoh Tiong Lay Centre for Politics and Philosophy, King's College London, also supported by REPHRAIN.

Kartik wrote his PhD in Philosophy at Warwick. His doctoral thesis defends a theory about the wrongness of hypocritical blaming, and why hypocrites 'lose standing' to blame people for moral faults similar to their own. Prior to undertaking doctoral research, Kartik read the MsC in Political Theory at the London School of Economics, and PPE at Warwick.

Recent Publications

‘Standing, More or Less...’ forthcoming in The Journal of Philosophy.
'The Normative Effects of Redressive Practices: What Changes and How?’ 2024. The Australasian Journal of Philosophy Early View, with Adam Slavny. doi: 10.1080/00048402.2025.2547361
The Aptness of What We Do Together’, 2024. Political Philosophy 1/2: 545- 574. doi: 10.16995/pp.16914
’The Good and the Wrong of Hypocritical Blaming’, 2023. Utilitas 36/1: 83-101. doi: 10.1017/S0953820823000286