Ethics Monday: Kevin Pham
Date and Time
Location
Kevin Pham will discuss his new book, The Architects of Dignity: Vietnamese Visions of Decolonization, published in September 2024 by Oxford University Press. This event will be moderated by Director Eric Beerbohm. A light lunch will be served. Registration is required for in-person and Zoom attendance.
Vietnam has long been a crossroads of empires and thus a site of rich cross-cultural intellectual exchange. This book introduces Vietnamese political thought to debates in political theory, showing how Vietnamese thinkers challenge Western conventional wisdom about dignity and national shame. Drawing on French and Vietnamese language material, it traces an intergenerational debate among six influential Vietnamese figures in colonial Vietnam. These figures had competing ideas about the best moral education, ethics, and ideology to strengthen the Vietnamese to stand up to French colonial domination, what the Vietnamese should do with their Confucian traditions given the influx of political and social ideas from the West, and how they should harness feelings of national shame to construct national dignity. Their answers offer surprising lessons for how we in the West can enhance our understanding of the aims of moral education, decolonization, shame, dignity, and cross-cultural engagement.