The Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics invites you to join us for our annual Mala & Solomon Kamm Lecture in Ethics with C. Thi Nguyen, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah.
The lecture is open to all. Registration is required for both in-person and virtual attendance.
About the Lecture: Moral Diversity and the Division of Moral Labor
Some people are instinctively empathic and forgiving; others are angry warriors for justice. One might think: perhaps this difference is a good thing. I will consider some arguments for moral diversity: that is, that a good moral world consists of different moral temperaments, balanced in a moral ecosystem. I will take the first step in assessing the plausibility of moral diversity, by surveying some different possible paths. First, I consider epistemically flavored arguments. The simplest argument is that we need different moral specialists to cover the complexity of moral life. Second, I consider the need for moral exploration. Here I consider importing, to the moral domain, arguments from philosophy of science and social epistemology, in which diversity is a good epistemic strategy for exploring new options. Third, I consider arguments from social coordination: that it is good to have clearly different moral orientations dependably fixed in different roles. I end by considering some larger possibilities: first, that some forms of moral virtue involve occluding or ignoring reasons characteristic to other forms of moral virtue. Second, that, therefore, moral virtues are essentially in tension with others, and best instantiated in different people. In that case, there might still be a unity of the virtues, but it would be instantiated at the community level, rather than the individual.
About the Speaker: C. Thi Nguyen
I’m C. Thi Nguyen. I used to be a food writer, now I’m a philosophy professor at University of Utah. I write about trust, art, games, and communities. I’m interested in the ways that our social structures and technologies shape how we think and what we value.
My first book is Games: Agency as Art. It was awarded the American Philosophical Associations 2021 Book Prize. It’s about how games are the art form that work in the medium of agency. A game designer doesn’t just create a world – they create who we are in that world. Games shape temporary agencies for artistic purposes. And games turn out to be our way of writing down and communicating modes of agency; by playing them, we can try out different forms of agency. Here’s a summary of the book. There have also been some symposia discussing the book.
I was named to Vox’s 2024 Future Perfect 50 – their list of “thinkers, innovators, and changemakers who are working to make the world a better place.”
LOCATION:Thompson Room, Barker Center STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20261022T210000Z DTEND:20261022T223000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR