[PAST EVENT] Philosophy Colloquium: Manuel Vargas (U of San Francisco), "Negligence and Social Self-Governance"

September 15, 2014
4:30pm - 6:30pm
Location
Washington Hall, Room 307
241 Jamestown Rd
Williamsburg, VA 23185Map this location
"Negligence and Social Self-Governance"

Abstract: Negligence and other instances of apparently non-volitional culpability are an important part of our responsibility practices. However, these phenomena are deeply puzzling for many philosophical accounts of moral responsibility. This paper presents a new account of non-volitional culpability that does not run afoul of the problems that beset ordinary control-based accounts of responsibility, and that also retains the idea that people in such cases could have acted in a way that complies with the demands of morality.

Professor Vargas's principal research interests include moral agency, philosophical issues in the law, and Latin American philosophy. He is the author of Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (Oxford, 2013). With John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, and Derk Pereboom, he co-authored Four Views on Free Will (Blackwell, 2007). With Gideon Yaffe, he is co-editor of Rational and Social Agency: Essays on the Philosophy of Michael Bratman (Oxford, forthcoming).
Contact

Debbie Wilson, Dept. of Philosophy, 757-221-2716