Class 3.2: Value Capture
Over the last two weeks we have been discussing ways in which people’s goals or values put them into conflict with one another. For today’s class we continue in this theme for one final session, by looking at philosopher Thi Nguyen’s current research on the phenomenon of value capture - a systematic process that distorts people’s values in ways that could either align their goals with one another, put their goals into opposition with one another, or do a little bit of both, by aligning some people’s goals with each other in opposition to the goals of others.
Thi Nguyen
Thi Nguyen
C. Thi (“T”) Nguyen is a contemporary philosopher who teaches at the University of Utah. If you look him up, you’ll see that he used to be a food writer in Southern California and that he has written a very cool book about what is fun and rewarding about games. Our reading for today grows out of one of the later chapters of that book, which he gave as a public lecture at USC during the pandemic on the topic of gamification.
Value Capture
Nguyen’s paper on Value Capture is forthcoming in the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy. That means that it is about to be formally published in the next few months, but has not been, yet. So this is about as cutting-edge of research as it is possible to get in the field of philosophy. His paper grows out of a public lecture that he gave during the pandemic for the Conceptual Foundations of Conflict Project at USC in fall 2021, and is the basis for a book that he will soon be publishing that expands these ideas. You can watch his CFCP Public Lecture here:
In his paper, Nguyen wants to give us the concept of Value Capture so that we can recognize and identify it when it happens. He believes that once we see a few paradigmatic examples of Value Capture we are immediately going to see that there is at least sometimes something deeply disturbing about it, and he tries to try to say something illuminating about what is wrong with it in his paper. He isn’t trying to say everything that is wrong with it, or to say that it is always wrong.
Nguyen’s paper appears to be long in terms of pages, but it is double-spaced and he writes clearly and in a way that is relatively easy to read (for a philosopher) - he used to be a food writer, after all, so he can write. So I’m not going to try to walk through its difficult parts here. You can read it at this link (remember - I strongly recommend that you print it out!).
