Source
Harry Harland (2020), The Journal of Ethics 24:401–425, LIT-991, read in full in NOTE-847: §3.1 (Vargas’s test) and §3.2 (the redundancy and inversion arguments), with §4.
What was actually shown
The target. Vargas’s agency cultivation model justifies praise and blame by their effects on a valuable form of agency, responsiveness to moral considerations. Its free-will condition is counterfactual: an agent who failed to respond to a moral consideration M in circumstances C had the capacity if she would detect M, and act on it, “in a suitable proportion” of worlds “relevantly similar” to C (Vargas 2013: 213–214). Relevance and proportion are fixed by what is “at least co-optimal for the cultivation of moral considerations-responsive agency” (2013: 214–221). And responsibility is “a function of what the justified norms of moral influence say” (2013: 103).
The redundancy argument. To apply the test to Jones, one must give its parameters a value. They have no value until one decides “whether it is good policy to blame similar people for similar wrongdoings”. Once that is decided, the model already says whether to hold Jones responsible, so “the work necessary to give the counterfactual test meaning makes that very test redundant”. Harland works it for psychopaths, kleptomaniacs, disruptive pupils, religious bigots and alcoholics: in each, the verdict follows from how the class responds to blame.
The inversion. So “a wrongdoer’s blameworthiness is logically prior to his free will”. On the model, the statement that he has free will is “a roundabout way of saying” that the model gives “good (freedom-independent) reasons to hold him responsible”. Harland diagnoses the source: the test is asked both to track who is improved by blame and to preserve the folk view that responsibility needs the ability to do otherwise.
What could have come out otherwise. The argument depends on a reading of Vargas: that the parameters are fixed only by the system’s aims. Footnote 7 records that McGeer read Vargas the other way, with capacities “ontologically prior to, and conceptually independent of” their role in the system, and that Vargas rejected her reading. If he had accepted it, the test would have content of its own and the argument would fail.
What this does not say
- It does not say that freedom is irrelevant to holding people responsible. The abstract says so unconditionally. The body restricts it: “if we embrace ACM, enquiries into an agent’s counterfactual freedom will become superfluous”. On accounts where avoidability is a metaphysical condition, as in THEORY-118 and THEORY-119, the argument has no grip.
- It does not say that forward-looking accounts are false. It says one such account cannot also have a free-will condition that does independent work. Harland’s case that the model is no advance on the older moral influence theory (§2) is a separate argument and not part of this account.
- It does not show that the test can never sort individuals. The argument proceeds class by class, with each class’s response to blame known in advance. If the test is what sorts individuals into classes, or the parameters are calibrated once and then applied by facts about each agent, the test keeps work to do. This is the reader’s objection; Harland does not consider it.
- It rests on Harland’s Vargas. Building Better Beings is not held here. Every quotation of Vargas is Harland’s.
- It says nothing about ownership. Whose the will is does not come up in the paper.
Connections
- QUESTION-068 (Deferred; bears on it, does not answer it). The question asks whether accountability needs conditions, such as avoidability, that ownership does not supply. This account says that on an influence-based justification an avoidability condition calibrated to the practice is not a further condition: it is fixed by the ethics of holding responsible. So the question’s avoidability option has content only on accounts that ground it outside the practice.
- THEORY-118 and THEORY-119. Both treat the ability to do otherwise as a metaphysical condition on blame, for and against. This account concerns a view on which it is not, and leaves their dispute where it is.
- THEORY-122. Harland’s alternative to Vargas’s notion of agency, reflective scrutiny of one’s convictions, is a normative-competence condition of THEORY-122’s kind. Harland raises it as a dilemma, not as his view.
- THEORY-147. Harland separates the reasons to hold someone accountable from her moral agency. That fits THEORY-147’s independence of accountability from other kinds of responsibility, without adding a positive account.