THEORY-122: Moral responsibility requires the normative competence to recognise and act on the True and the Good, which identification with one's own motives does not supply

The evidence is second-hand

The primary texts are unread. No lawful copy of Wolf’s “Asymmetrical Freedom”, “Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility” or Freedom Within Reason could be found (see their status notes). This account is reported through the secondary sources named below. It quotes them, and it quotes nothing from Wolf except where a secondary source quotes her, which is marked. The owner authorised filing it on this evidence on 2026-10-03.

Source

• Wolf, “Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility” (1987/88), LIT-690, Deferred, unread: the essay in which, by every report, the JoJo case and the sanity condition are stated.
• Wolf, Freedom Within Reason (1990), LIT-685, Deferred, unread: the book-length Reason View.
• McKenna and Coates, SEP Compatibilism, LIT-291, §4.3, read in NOTE-270.
• Talbert, SEP Moral Responsibility, LIT-691, §§3.1.1 and 3.2, read in NOTE-548.

What the sources report

The condition. McKenna and Coates (LIT-291, §4.3) report that for Wolf “free will concerns an agent’s ability to act in accord with the True and the Good”, that “the crucial question for Wolf concerns whether an agent is able to act upon moral reasons”, and that, unlike Frankfurt’s, her conditions “require an anchor external to the agent’s internal psychological states”. They cite Freedom Within Reason (LIT-685) and the papers of 1980 and 1987 (LIT-688, LIT-690) as where she develops it.

Why identification is not enough. Talbert (LIT-691, §3.1.1) reports Wolf’s case against what she calls Real Self views. The 1987 essay (LIT-690) calls them deep-self views and names Watson 1975, Frankfurt 1971 and Taylor 1976 as examples. On such a view an agent is responsible for what issues from her real self, her will governed by her values or higher-order desires. Wolf grants that this explains why the hypnotised and the compulsive are excused. Her objection is that it is silent on how the real self came to be, and that blame and praise judge the agent herself. That requires, in Talbert’s report of the book (p. 75), not only that she can form her actions on her values but that she can form her values on the basis of what is True and Good.

JoJo. Talbert (LIT-691, §3.2) gives the case. JoJo, raised by an evil dictator, becomes the same sadistic tyrant, is “happy to be the sort of person that he is”, and is moved by the desires he wants to be moved by. He meets the structural conditions. But his upbringing left him “unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of his behavior”, and Talbert says it is “JoJo’s impaired moral competence that does the real excusing work”. LIT-690 records the same reading from Holton’s MIT lecture handout, which names the condition sanity.

Two conditions, not one. As LIT-685 records from the openings of its chapters, the book’s account keeps the Real Self View’s condition, being able to govern one’s behaviour by one’s values, and adds a second, being able to form and revise those values in the light of the True and the Good. So identification is necessary on this view, and not sufficient.

Two other read surveys place the view the same way. Dryden’s IEP Autonomy (LIT-297, NOTE-266, §2.b) classes Wolf’s normative competence as a strong substantive condition, against content-neutral hierarchical accounts. Buss and Westlund (LIT-296, NOTE-267, n. 4) list Wolf, with Fischer and Ravizza, among reasons-responsive views.

What this does not say

• It does not say whether the ability includes being able to do otherwise. Wolf’s answer differs for praise and for blame, and that answer is THEORY-118, which carries this account further. This account is only the competence condition that both halves share.
• It does not say identification is unnecessary. The Reason View adds to the Real Self View and does not replace it.
• It does not locate the defect in JoJo’s history. By the reports, the upbringing matters only because it left a present incapacity. That is what separates it from a historical condition, and it is what the promote_when asks a reading to confirm.
• It does not escape manipulation. McKenna and Coates (LIT-291, §4.3) place Wolf “at the same crossroads as is Frankfurt”: a manipulator who leaves the competence intact produces an agent the view must count responsible, or the view must say what is wrong with manipulation. That is THEORY-040’s forced choice, and this account takes neither branch.
• It assumes there is a True and a Good to be recognised. LIT-690 reports from Holton that Wolf closes the essay on this worry herself: the view assumes a moral objectivity, and may fold rationality too easily into truth.
• It is not a claim about autonomy. THEORY-054 places autonomy in integration, content-neutrally. JoJo, fully integrated, is the case where the two would diverge, but they answer different questions, so no rivals is declared.

Relations

To Fischer and Ravizza (THEORY-121): no relation declared. The two are close. Both make responsibility a matter of responsiveness to reasons rather than of identification. Talbert (LIT-691, §2.3) counts Wolf (1990) among the reasons-responsiveness views, and his §3.2 lists Fischer and Ravizza (1998) among those who join Wolf in holding that impaired moral competence undermines responsibility. Fischer and Ravizza’s moderate responsiveness includes receptivity to moral reasons (LIT-691, §2.3), which is a competence condition of the same kind. I considered three relations:

• rivals: no. The scheme’s test is that the two cannot both be right. This claim and THEORY-121 can both be true: an agent could need moral competence and also need an owned, moderately responsive mechanism. Their disagreement is over alternatives for blame, which is the rivalry declared between THEORY-118 and THEORY-121.
• extends: no. Neither account is reported to build on the other. Fischer’s reasons-responsiveness begins in his 1987 chapter (LIT-687), in the same volume as Wolf’s “Sanity”, and the reports give each its own line of descent: Frankfurt cases for Fischer, the critique of deep-self views for Wolf. Declaring extends would invent a lineage.
• None. The kinship is stated here in prose, with its evidence.

To THEORY-029: none. That account says no attitude makes a motive one’s own by its order alone. Wolf’s objection is a different one: grant that JoJo’s motives are wholeheartedly his own, and he is still not responsible. An account could answer the regress and still fail JoJo.

To THEORY-040: none. The Reason View is one of the mesh accounts that THEORY-040’s forced choice covers, as noted above. This claim makes no assertion about manipulation, so it neither instances nor contradicts THEORY-040.

• Rivals THEORY-120, Frankfurt’s hierarchical account, read first-hand from 1971 (LIT-692). On it, JoJo identifies wholeheartedly with his desires and so is free. On the Reason View he is not responsible, because he lacks normative competence.