Manuel Vargas, Dept. of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego—Contemporary approaches to agency and responsibility have tended to be individualistic in two ways, that is, in focusing on individual agents and in prioritizing the psychological states of those agents. Such pictures have tended to say comparatively little about, for example, the enculturation of agents, the significance of institutions for stabilizing the social meanings of actions, and in taking account of how existing patterns of social meanings alter the scope of agency.

In contrast, the accounts of mid-20th century Mexican existentialists, tended to place a special emphasis on the cultural specificity of agency, and to emphasize the way in which agency could be both constrained and sustained by the arrangements of institutions and operative social norms. I argue for a reconciliation of these approaches. As a case study, I focus on Harry Frankfurt’s approach to culpability and coercion, and contrasting Mexican accounts of an action’s “echo,” in the work of Jorge Portilla and Rosario Castellanos. I argue that the latter accounts provide important supplementary tools for illuminating complex cases of culpability.