Cotton gravity is not predictive

It is well known that the theory of Cotton gravity proposed by Harada is trivially solved by all isotropic and homogeneous cosmologies. We show that this under-determination is more general. More precisely, the degree of arbitrariness in the solutions increases with the degree of symmetry. The inverse problem of finding the matter source generating a given spacetime geometry is similarly indeterminate in the case of highly symmetric configurations. We give two simple examples. The first is that of static spherically symmetric solutions, which depend on an arbitrary function of the radial coordinate. The second is that of anisotropic cosmologies, which depend on an arbitrary function of time.