Zoë Johnson King is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. She previously worked at the University of Southern California and New York University and studied at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and the University of Cambridge. She specializes in moral psychology, metaethics, ethics, epistemology, and their interactions, with a particular focus on what it means to try to be a good person despite living in a disappointing, confusing, and profoundly unjust world. In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, she discusses her book on praiseworthiness, explaining why philosophical attention has focused too narrowly on blame, how traditions from Hume to Kant shape her account of moral agency, and why the ethics of praise matters deeply for everyday life. What is your work about? Why did you feel the need to write this work? My book, as the title suggests, about praiseworthiness. There is an enormous literature in philosophy—and in cognate fields, like law and psychology—that is ostensibly about moral agency and moral responsibility in general, …