Manuel Vargas

Observations of animals engaging in apparently moral behaviour have prompted the question of whether morality is shared between humans and other animals, with little agreement on the answer. Some philosophers explicitly argue that morality is unique to humans, because moral agency requires capacities that are only demonstrated in our species. Other philosophers argue that some animals can participate in morality because they possess these capacities in a rudimentary form, or because the touted capacities are not necessary for moral participation. Empirical research programs on possible moral capacities such as fairness and empathy have seen scientists joining in these debates. We argue that the current debate suffers because discussions often fail to provide both a proper philosophical foundation about the nature of moral practices and a solid empirical ground for claims about what animals can and cannot do. In this chapter we focus on the second of these issues, and defend the claim that animals have three sets of capacities that, on some views, are taken as necessary or foundational for moral judgment and action. These are capacities of care, capacities of autonomy, and normative capacities. Care, we argue, is widely found among social animals. Autonomy and normativity are more recent topics of empirical investigation, so while there is less evidence of these capacities at this point in our developing scientific knowledge, the current data is strongly suggestive.

Self-control can involve more than just impulse inhibition. For some notions of self-control, especially those concerned with moral responsibility, sensitivity to reasons is the idea central to self-control. For these accounts, it is not obvious how to capture the idea that people are responsible for negligence and other instances of apparently non-volitional culpability. One blames people for failing to take into account some important moral consideration in deciding what to do, for failing to remember some commitment, and for failing to recognize situationally relevant things. This chapter proposes an account of this broader notion of self-control, one that solves the problem of control in non-volitional culpability cases, and that retains the idea that people in such cases could have complied with the demands of morality.

There are reasons that weigh both in favor and against judging agents blameworthy for actions produced in part by implicit biases. Indeed, perhaps implicit bias reveals that our received views about agency are mistaken or confused. If so, then perhaps implicit bias is not merely some further phenomenon to which we can apply our pre-existing theories of moral responsibility and agency, but instead, a kind of challenge to those theories. This essay argues that there is an appealing way of thinking about the blameworthiness of actions caused by implicit bias that allows us to accommodate some of the radical aspects of the emerging scientific picture of agency, without entirely abandoning our commonsense picture of agency. The key is to recognize how a roughly “ecological” conception of moral agency can provide us with principled resources for distinguishing when agents are in circumstances that afford responsibility, and when they are not.

Libertarianism is the view that we have free will, understood in a way that precludes determinism being true. This chapter provides empirical and methodological considerations in favor of the thesis that libertarianism among philosophers is, to an unusual degree, a product of motivated reasoning. Empirical evidence about philosophers strongly suggests that theists are particularly likely to be engaged in motivated reasoning on behalf of libertarianism. This is problematic, because motivated reasoning distorts truth sensitivity. The chapter goes on to some implications of these findings, including the possibility that a good deal of philosophy is a product of motivated reasoning. Some potential ramifications are discussed.

This chapter canvases some notable historical accounts of the philosophical dimensions of work within the context of Latin American philosophy, including reflections by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, José Vasconcelos, José Mariategui, and Rosario Castellanos. The chapter examines how labor was conceptualized prior to the European invasion of the Americas, and how labor figured in philosophical discussions of colonialism, socialism, capitalism, and resistance. It also discusses the socioeconomic conditions that shaped labor practices prior to, during, and after European colonization of the Americas. The chapter also considers various philosophical discussions of the way in which social identities—being a woman, being Indigenous, and so on—interacted with labor practices. In so doing, the chapter highlights the ways in which Latin American philosophy addresses the role of work in the construction of collective identity and social transformation.

It is sometimes instructive to reflect on a problem as it appeared before our current philosophical presumptions became ingrained. In this context, Maurice Mandelbaum’s “Determinism and Moral Responsibility” is of particular interest. Published in 1960, it appeared only a few years before the wave of work that gave us much of our contemporary understanding of moral responsibility, free will, and determinism. Mandelbaum’s account repays reconsideration. Mandelbaum argues that (1) there is an underappreciated threat to “determinist” or compatibilist accounts of responsibility, and (2) this threat can be met with a suitable compatibilist account of the etiology of action.

The Latinx Philosophy Reader showcases a wide range of significant philosophical works about Latinx people and their experiences, displaying the breadth, distinctiveness, originality, and diversity of Latinx philosophy. Readings include discussions of what it is like to be perceived as undocumented, ethical quagmires affecting those who interpret for their family members, the difficulty of pursuing career success without compromising one's cultural identity and values, the nature of citizenship, disputes about labels, the significance of language, and debates about the nature of Latinx identity. The editors' detailed introduction orients readers with an overview of the origins of the field of Latinx philosophy, a guide to terminology, and a history of the idea of Latinx identity in the United States. The volume's 35 readings are made up of both widely read and cited articles from journals and books and newly commissioned contributions from the leading voices in the field. All of them are organized into seven thematic units in contemporary Latinx philosophy: I. Social Identity II. Mestizaje and Indigeneity III. Cross-Cultural Challenges IV. Epistemology, Phenomenology, and Coloniality V. Language and Communication VI. Immigration/Citizenship VII. Metaphilosophy Each of these seven units includes its own introduction that connects each reading to the overarching themes of the unit and volume. Throughout, the readings provide an accessible entry point to readers new to philosophy. The texts generate opportunities for philosophical reflection without requiring readers to consult additional resources to grasp the major insights. They can be read in any order, allowing for ready adaptation to the particular interests of instructors and students.

Four Views on Free Will is a robust and careful debate about free will, how it interacts with determinism and indeterminism, and whether we have it or not. Providing the most up-to-date account of four major positions in the free will debate, the second edition of this classic text presents the opposing perspectives of renowned philosophers John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom, and Manuel Vargas. Substantially revised throughout, this new volume contains eight in-depth chapters, almost entirely rewritten for the new edition, in which the authors state their different positions on the debate, offer insights into how their views have evolved over the past fifteen years, respond to recent critical literature in the field, and interact and engage with each other in dialogue. In the first four chapters the authors defend their distinctive views about free will: libertarianism, compatibilism, hard incompatibilism, and revisionism. The subsequent four chapters consist of direct replies by each of the authors to the other three.

This volume brings together work in free will, ethics, metaethics, feminist theory, disability studies, experimental philosophy, and psychology. The theme for both the workshop and these papers was “Non-Ideal Agency and Responsibility,” and in these essays, our authors take a number of different and creative angles on this theme. Roughly half of the essays fall under the rubric of non-ideal agency. They discuss ways in which our agency is impacted by inherent psychological limitations, by the social contexts in which we act, or by different ways in which our abilities can break down. The other half fall under the rubric of non-ideal responsibility. They discuss both the modes by which we assess imperfect exercises of our agency and the ways in which common forms of assessment are themselves imperfect.

A satisfactory construal of the subject matter of free will debates must allow for disagreements along two axes. First, it must allow for the possibility of higher order disagreements, or disagreements about what concepts, phenomena, or practices an account of free will is supposed to capture or explain. Second, it must allow for the fact of variation in the extent to which theories are bound by antecedent pre-philosophical thought, talk, and practices. A promising way of accommodating these two thoughts is to treat free will in broadly functionalist terms. On the account proposed here, free will is a power that makes sense of everyday responsibility practices. This construal is not widely shared, but it allows for the possibility that we might have false beliefs about the nature of free will, while still making sense of central philosophical debates about free will.

Focusing on the recent work of Michael Bratman as emblematic of several important developments in the philosophy of action, I raise four questions that engage with a set of interlocking concerns about systemic functionalism in the philosophy of action. These questions are: (i) Are individual and institutional intentions the same kind of thing? (ii) Can the risk of proliferation of systemic functional explanations be managed? (iii) Is there an appealing basis for the apparent methodological individualism in our theories of action and agency? and (iv) Why not, instead, pursue a methodologically anti-individualist and ecological approach to action and agency? The latter alternative, I suggest, offers a promising way to retain many of the core insights of the Bratmanian project while avoiding the difficulties inherent to some of the methodological presumptions of some strands of contemporary philosophy of action.

Explicitly fictional armchair reconstructions of the past are sometimes taken to be informative about philosophical issues. What appeal a counterfactual genealogy has depends on its speculative accuracy, that is, its accuracy in identifying relevant causal, functional, or explanatory particulars. However, even when speculatively accurate, counterfactual genealogies rarely secure more than proofs of possibility. For more ambitious deployments of genealogy – for example, efforts to show what properties the target concept in fact predicates – genealogies are hamstrung by the possibility of predicative drift, or changes over time in what the concept predicates. Still, even when counterfactual genealogies fail to tell us about our current practices or concepts, they may identify appealing successors. Pettit's (2018 Pettit, Philip. 2018. The Birth of Ethics: Reconstructing the Role and Nature of Morality. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.[Crossref], [Google Scholar]) innovative defense of moral realism and his employment of a counterfactual genealogy provides an illuminating instance of the promise and challenges facing accounts employing counterfactual genealogies.

In this chapter, we recount some of the most pressing objections to character scepticism, pointing out their limitations and, when appropriate, incorporating their suggestions. From here, we consider what empirically informed moral improvement might look like by turning to the skill analogy. While the skill analogy provides a realistic rubric for becoming a better person, many of the questions concerning the details of how moral improvement might take place remain unanswered. When developing expertise in domains like chess and morality, a wide range of factors will likely be important and it is unlikely than any one individual factor will be especially important. Given this, for any account of moral improvement, our optimism should be bounded: the effect of any particular intervention is likely to be limited, in both magnitude and domain. Lastly, we consider how character scepticism has reshaped the way we think about moral responsibility, whether this is cashed out in reasons-responsiveness or self-expression accounts. While both views face challenges, by distinguishing the possession of the responsibility-making feature from failures to manifest that property in behaviour, we gain a certain degree of wiggle room that allows us to accommodate empirical findings while holding on to notions of responsibility. This chapter highlights that the ‘person-situationism debate’ has expanded far beyond its beginnings, giving way to new accounts of moral improvement and moral responsibility.

This article identifies a novel challenge to standard understandings of responsibility practices, animated by experimental studies of biases and heuristics. It goes on to argue that this challenge illustrates a general methodological challenge for theorizing about responsibility. That is, it is difficult for a theory to give us both guidance in real world contexts and an account of the metaphysical and normative foundations of responsibility without treating wide swaths of ordinary practice as defective. The general upshot is that theories must either hew more closely to actual practice than they appear to, or they must provide some normative foundation for responsibility that does not go through actual practice.

Culpability under oppression is puzzling. On the one hand, it seems callous to insist that someone’s being subject to oppression is never relevant to her culpability. On the other hand, responsible agency exists under systematic disadvantage; insisting that oppression always undermines a person’s culpability seems too forgiving and disrespectful to those agents. One philosophical challenge that grows out of reflecting on these matters is whether there is a way to reconcile the thought that agency is socially constituted—a product of circumstance—with the thought that some psychological configurations rightly underpin our condemnatory practices, while others do not. This chapter offers a framework for thinking about these issues, especially the question of culpable action under conditions of oppression. The account maintains that oppression matters for culpability in some cases and not in others, because culpability is a function of the properties of agents and the context that shapes their agency.

Attention to the details of putatively obvious examples of philosophy-as-worldview within Latin America give us reasons to be skeptical about the taxonomy that gives us the category of philosophy-as-worldview. Among the examples that suggest difficulties for this way of thinking about the philosophical enterprise are 19th century Mexican ethnolinguistics, contemporary efforts to reconstruct historical and contemporary Indigenous thought, and 20th century efforts to articulate regional ontologies within Latin America. However, reflection on these cases also point to a different project worth considering, namely, a taxonomy of wisdom- and knowledge-focused practices that might allow a different way of drawing distinctions between kinds of “philosophies”.

Constitutive instrumentalism is the view that responsibility practices arise from and are justified by our being prosocial creatures who need responsibility practices to secure specific kinds of social goods. In particular, responsibility practices shape agency in ways that disposes adherence to norms that enable goods of shared cooperative life. The mechanics of everyday responsibility practices operate, in part, via costly signaling about the suitability of agents for coordination and cooperation under conditions of shared cooperative life. So, there are a range of identifiable conditions where the ordinary operation of responsibility practices—and thus, the usual normative force of the practices—is disrupted. Even so, these conditions are not so widespread as to favor a more thoroughgoing abandonment of responsibility practices.

In mid-twentieth-century Mexican philosophy, there was a peculiar nationalist existentialist project focused on the cultural conditions of agency. This article revisits some of those ideas, including the idea that there is an important but underappreciated experience of one's relationship to norms and social meanings. This experience—something called accidentality—casts new light on various forms of social subordination and socially scaffolded agency, including cultural alienation, biculturality, and double consciousness.

It is notable that all of the leading theories of blame have to employ ungainly fixes to deflect one or more apparent counterexamples. What these theories share is a content‐based theory of blame's nature. Such approaches overlook or ignore blame's core unifying feature, namely, its function, which is to signal the blamer's commitment to a set of norms. In this paper, we present the problems with the extant theories and then explain what signaling is, how it functions in blame, why appealing to it resolves the problems in other theories, what the signaling function implies for a wider range of gray‐area cases, and what the larger significance is of blame's core function for interpersonal interactions in a variety of (non‐moral) normative domains.

We sometimes fail unwittingly to do things that we ought to do. And we are, from time to time, culpable for these unwitting omissions. We provide an outline of a theory of responsibility for unwitting omissions. We emphasize two distinctive ideas: (i) many unwitting omissions can be understood as failures of appropriate vigilance, and; (ii) the sort of self-control implicated in these failures of appropriate vigilance is valuable. We argue that the norms that govern vigilance and the value of self-control explain culpability for unwitting omissions.

Moral psychology is the study of how human minds make and are made by human morality. This state of the art volume covers contemporary philosophical and psychological work on moral psychology, as well as notable historical theories and figures in the field of moral psychology, such as Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, and the Buddha. The volume’s 50 chapters, authored by leading figures in the field, cover foundational topics, such as character, virtue, emotion, moral responsibility, the neuroscience of morality, weakness of will, and the nature of moral judgments and reasons. The volume also canvases emerging work in applied moral psychology, including adaptive preferences, animals, mental illness, poverty, marriage, race, bias, and victim blaming.