Professor Vargas has been selected as a Dean’s Scholar because of his project on moral responsibility, which has received extensive national and international recognition. His project concerns the network of practices, attitudes, and beliefs bound up with moralized blaming. His work defends the appropriateness of our holding one another responsible for our actions, against the growing body of skepticism from philosophical and experimental quarters.
Professor Vargas’s project has culminated in his manuscript,
Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, which is under contract with Oxford, the premier publisher of English‑language Philosophy. His work has produced more than twenty publications, including one jointly authored book and Building Better Beings, and he has presented his work in the United States and internationally.
He has been recognized by the Stanford Center for Ethics, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. His scholarship has had a significant impact in his field, including being featured in several sessions at the upcoming 2012 Pacific Division of American Philosophical Association and cited in various professional reference books such as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Professor Vargas holds a Joint-Ph.D. in Philosophy and Humanities from Stanford University and became a member of USF’s faculty in 2002.
