"The Echo of Agency" with Dr. Manuel Vargas

The arrangement of the social world seems to matter for moral responsibility, and in general, how we think about the nature of other people’s actions. Whether someone is acting under coercion, under oppression, or under conditions of widespread institutional corruption affects our assessments of moral culpability. We can better understand why these phenomena matter for culpability by drawing on some resources from the nearly forgotten history of Mexican existentialism. In particular, the idea that we rely upon a particular kind of “echo” in acting helps explain an important aspect of the social dimension of agency.

Manuel Vargas is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, winner of the 2015 Book Prize from the American Philosophical Association. He is one of the authors of Four Views on Free Will, and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology. With Santiago Amaya, he directed the LATAM Free Will, Agency, and Responsibility project, which aimed to foster work on those topics across the Americas. Vargas is currently writing a book on the history of philosophy in Mexico.

All GW students, faculty, and staff are welcome.