User:Madva/sandbox

Manuel R. Vargas is Professor of Philosophy and Law at the University of San Francisco (through 2017) and is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego.

Research
His research focuses primarily on the nature of moral responsibility, blame, and punishment, and on issues in Latin American philosophy. His book, Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, won the American Philosophical Association's Book Prize in 2015. He is best known for the following ideas: (1) revisionism about free will and moral responsibility, claiming that a philosophically adequate theory of these concepts will be in conflict with various aspects of commonsense thinking about them (this is articulated in Four Views on Free Will, revisited in Building Better Beings); (2) the agency cultivation model, which holds that we should understand the normative foundations of moral responsibility as grounded in the way that moral practices surrounding blame develop and sustain a special form of agency, which is sensitive to moral considerations. Vargas has also written about the difficulty of explaining derivative responsibility, given the limits of our ability to foresee the consequences of what we are doing.

Awards and honors
Vargas won the American Philosophical Association's first Essay Prize in Latin American Thought in 2004. Other awards include the 2012 University of San Francisco Distinguished Research Award, the inaugural University of San Francisco College of Arts and Sciences Dean's Scholar Award in 2012, the University of San Francisco Provost's Faculty Team Innovation Award in 2011. In 2015, he was recognized as a Dean's Circle Research Scholar at the University of San Francisco School of Law.

He has also held both the NEH Chair in the Humanities (2005-2006, 2013-14), the Davies Professorship (2012), and served as the Fleishhacker Family Chair in Philosophy (2014-2015).