Manuel Vargas is Professor of Philosophy and Law at the University of San Francisco, where he has taught courses in philosophy, psychology, Latin American Studies, the Honors Program in the Humanities, the St. Ignatius Institute, and the School of Law.

Vargas 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). Vargas' main philosophical interests include the nature of moral agency, the philosophy of law, Latin American philosophy (especially historical work on race and identity), and questions of philosophical methodology.

His research on responsible agency has been recognized with year-long research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the Stanford Humanities Center. He has also been a Visiting Fellow at the McCoy Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford University, and has held visiting appointments at the University of California, Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology. Vargas was also a recipient of the first American Philosophical Association Prize in Latin American Thought.

At USF, he was the winner of the 2012 Distinguished Research Award, a university-wide award given annually to a single faculty member in the university for outstanding research accomplishment. In its inaugural year (2012) he also received USF's College of Arts and Sciences Dean's Scholar Award, for "exceptional scholarly work of great academic value and impact." He has also twice held USF's annual NEH Chair in the Humanities, (2005-6, 2013-2014), been awarded a Davies Professorship (2012), and was a winner of the Provost Office's Faculty Team Innovation Award (with Saera Khan, psychology) for development of USF's Program on Mind and Agency (2011-2012).

Vargas currently serves on the national Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association, as the divisional representative of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association.

Before receiving his Joint-Ph.D. in Philosophy and Humanities from Stanford University (2001), he worked as a baker and a professional video game tester.