Revisionism and Some Remaining Issues 291freedom- capacities can be characterized exclusively in terms of intrinsic states
of agents that do not situationally vary (204–9). Drawing upon the work of phi-
losophers like John Doris (2002), Vargas argues that our understanding of
reasons- responsiveness must be open to the thought that agents gain or lose
reasons- responsive capacities depending on their situational contexts (Vargas,
2013: 213–14). The result is a kind of externalism about free agency, one that
varies with environmental factors. As Vargas sees it, a well- informed under-
standing of our human psychology puts pressure on any good theory of free
agency to respect the fact that persons are not atoms that preserve their agential
character unaltered across variation in situational contexts. This constitutes an
especially interesting and insightful idea for upgrading a range of more conven-
tional compatibilist views.
At this juncture, we wish to distinguish Vargas’s intriguing compatibilist pro-
posal from his arguments for its playing a role in his revisionist prescriptive
thesis. Here we will present just one objection. As Kelly McCormick (2013) has
argued, Vargas justifies the moral responsibility system by virtue of its promot-
ing a distinctive form of agency. But then his normative justification for why we
should revise rather than eliminate rests solely on whether agency of this sort is
so valuable that it ought to be promoted. McCormick describes this as a “buck-
passing” strategy (McCormick, 2013: 13–14). As she notes, it is one thing to
acknowledge, as Vargas does, that as a psychological matter we are disposed to
value agency of this sort (surely this Strawsonian point is right). And it is even
another to contend that it is valuable. But it is a much stronger thesis to contend
that all things considered we should act in a way that promotes this value
(14–15).
We will not pursue this matter further here except to note that, once the
dispute is limited exclusively to the prescriptive issue, then settling the all-
things-considered question about what we should do will have to be weighed
against the alternatives offered by the nonrevisionist skeptic. Vargas seems to
share with Strawson (1962) the conviction that the gains and losses to human
life would clearly favor preservation of the responsibility system. But depending
upon how the skeptic develops her eliminativist alternative, the losses to human
life might be few and the gains might be many. This, at any rate, is how skeptics
Pereboom (1995, 2001, 2014) and Caruso (2012) have argued. (See Section 11.6
for a discussion of how the moral skeptic might weigh these costs and benefits.)
12.1.3. Vargas’s Radical Conceptual Thesis
Now consider Vargas’s contention that what free will and moral responsibility
are might depart from what the folk concepts of them are. As McKenna has put
it, there is a worry that, unlike, say, water and our concept of it:
What moral responsibility is cannot come apart from the concept in such a
way that there is, so to speak, something for moral responsibility to be
beyond our concept of it. (McKenna, 2009b: 11)