Mala and Solomon Kamm Lecture in Ethics with C. Thi Nguyen

Thompson Room, Barker Center
12 Quincy St,
Cambridge
Thu., Oct. 22, 2026, 5 – 6:30 p.m.



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.

Gazette Classification: Ethics, Humanities, Social Sciences
Organization/Sponsor: Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics
Speaker(s): C. Thi Nguyen, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah
Cost: Free
Ticket Web Link: www.ethics.harvard.edu…
Harvard Key Required: No
More info: www.ethics.harvard.edu…