The latest APA Newsletter on Hispanic/Latino Issues in Philosophy contains a terrific interview with fellow Flickerer Manuel Vargas. Along with some nice revelations about his philosophical biography, it also contains some pretty intriguing reflections about his APA-award winning book Building Better Beings:
"I now think that the book, if it is still read in ten years, will look a bit like a product of a transitional era in the development of work on responsibility that has only recently begun to separate itself from work on free will. The older free will literature was one principally propelled by worries in metaphysics, mind, and agency. Central to it was an attempt to capture some or another privileged notion of ability, and capturing ordinary intuitions tends to figure prominently in that literature. The first part of Building Better Beings is an attempt to navigate those issues, and it deals with some methodological headaches that arise from competing conceptions of how to resolve those traditional puzzles. The second part of Building Better Beings is almost exclusively about moral responsibility. It takes up fundamentally normative concerns connected to moral blame, the nature of moral responsibility, and the kinds of agency it requires. So the second part of the book is really part of a newer literature that tends to be pursued by people grounded in normative theory. Instead of being gripped by mostly metaphysical worries—including what powers we have when we deliberate about what to do, or what it would mean to be a causal origin of things in some deep sense—this newer literature is largely about whether there is an adequate justification for treating each other the way we do when we blame. I find both sets of questions interesting and profitably undertaken with some understanding of the other. But if I’m right, philosophical work on free will and moral responsibility will become increasingly disconnected, making a book like this an artifact of a transitional period in what came to be two conversations."
I, for one, think Manuel is exactly right, and I wonder if other Flickerers agree. In any case, please read the entire interview if for no more than the fact that Manuel's knack for talking about stuff in cool and accessible ways is on full display (I hope the link works).
Rest easy, Manuel. I'll be reading your book in ten years time, which is approximately when I'll get around to it given the stack of reading currently in my office.
Posted by: Matt King | 06/09/2016 at 02:25 PM
Better late than never!
Posted by: Manuel "Read KT's Interview" Vargas | 06/12/2016 at 06:51 PM
What gets my goat Manuel is that your sharp claim about the transitional place of BBB in your predicted forking paths (deja vu!) of FW and MR going forward hasn't produced controversy here so far. But maybe the medium here didn't produce enough of a message, or that message is now just taken for granted. But I doubt the latter disjunct.
Posted by: V. Alan "No Marshall McLuhan" White | 06/12/2016 at 11:46 PM
Well, I suspect that it is neither the medium nor the message, but rather the context of summer and the blog having entered a lull period. At least, that's what I'm telling myself!
Posted by: Manuel "Summertime" Vargas | 06/14/2016 at 04:18 PM