About the lecture
Bureaucracy changes us; it changes our actions, values, and our concepts. It might even have changed our morality.
Historian of Science Lorraine Daston suggests that contemporary institutions prefer “mechanical rules”, which are rules designed to be executed exactly and unthinkingly, without judgment or discretion. These rules eliminate the need for highly sensitive experts and make workers more fungible.
In this lecture, C. Thi Nguyen suggests that many of our current concepts have already been re-engineered to fit bureaucratic needs. Concepts like “art” and “moral responsibility”. Moral judgments, outside of institutions, can be complicated, fuzzy, and full of undigested nuance; it is bureaucracies that demand that we render clear, binary judgments about who was responsible for what. We therefore often find ourselves using crisped-up, sharply clarified versions of concepts, which may work better for institutional data-collection, but worse for certain parts of a human life.
The lecture is open to all.
Programme
14:15-15:00: The Exphil Lecture by C. Thi Nguyen
15:00: Comments by invited panel
- Michael Barnes is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oslo. His research connects social philosophy of language to the ethics of emerging technology (including AI), examining how online speech is and isn’t different from offline speech.
- Ingvild Torsen is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oslo. Her work is on Heidegger and aesthetics, primarily as the two relate to Post-Kantian philosophy, and on phenomenology and Continental philosophy in general.
15:45: Questions from the audience
About C. Thi Nguyen
C. Thi Nguyen is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah and writes about trust, art, games, and communities.
He is the author of The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game (Penguin, 2026), which takes account of the way gamification has changed our world and captured our values. His previous book was Games: Agency as Art (Oxford University Press, 2020), which was awarded the 2021 American Philosophical Association Book Prize.
Nguyen is a former food writer for the Los Angeles Times and writes frequently for the New York Times, Washington Post, and New Statesman, and elsewhere. He was among Vox’s 2024 Future Perfect 50 list of “Innovators, thinkers and changemakers who are working to make the future a better place” (vox.com).
About the Exphil Lecture
Every year, an influential philosopher and skilled speaker is invited to give a lecture on a theme relevant to the Examen philosophicum (Exphil) syllabus.
The lecture is open to everyone, and students are particularly welcome.
The lecture will be recorded and posted online. It will also be published in Inquiry - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.