Abstract

I develop and explore the main themes of Vargas's recent book. The first section of my review lays out Vargas's case for revisionism about moral responsibility: the idea that our thinking about moral responsibility is internally inconsistent, so we need to purge core problematic elements. In the section section, I develop Vargas's own revisionist position. Vargas argues that the practice of blaming people aims at agency cultivation: trying to train people to be more sensitive to moral considerations. I explore similarities between Vargas's model of blame and the classical model, also knows as the 'morality's enforcer' or 'economy of threats' model. I argue that Vargas's revisionism shares the core problem of this model: it has difficulty making sense of the warrant of blaming people who are and will be continue to be unresponsive to blame. Finally, I briefly explore Vargas's discussion of the situationist literature and his argument that manipulation cases don't threaten our being morally responsible for what we do.