Logics of Responsibility

Abstract

The study of responsibility is a complicated matter. The term is used in different ways in different fields, and it is easy to engage in everyday discussions as to why someone should be considered responsible for something. Typically, the backdrop of these discussions involves social, legal, moral, or philosophical problems. A clear pattern in all these spheres is the intent of issuing standards for when---and to what extent---an agent should be held responsible for a state of affairs. This is where Logic lends a hand. The development of expressive logics---to reason about agents' decisions in situations with moral consequences---involves devising unequivocal representations of components of behavior that are highly relevant to systematic responsibility attribution and to systematic blame-or-praise assignment. To put it plainly, expressive syntactic-and-semantic frameworks help us analyze responsibility-related problems in a methodical way. This thesis builds a formal theory of responsibility. The main tool used toward this aim is modal logic and, more specifically, a class of modal logics of action known as stit theory. The underlying motivation is to provide theoretical foundations for using symbolic techniques in the construction of ethical AI. Thus, this work means a contribution to formal philosophy and symbolic AI. The thesis's methodology consists in the development of stit-theoretic models and languages to explore the interplay between the following components of responsibility: agency, knowledge, beliefs, intentions, and obligations. Said models are integrated into a framework that is rich enough to provide logic-based characterizations for three categories of responsibility: causal, informational, and motivational responsibility. The thesis is structured as follows. Chapter 2 discusses at length stit theory, a logic that formalizes the notion of agency in the world over an indeterministic conception of time known as branching time. The idea is that agents act by constraining possible futures to definite subsets. On the road to formalizing informational responsibility, Chapter 3 extends stit theory with traditional epistemic notions (knowledge and belief). Thus, the chapter formalizes important aspects of agents' reasoning in the choice and performance of actions. In a context of responsibility attribution and excusability, Chapter 4 extends epistemic stit theory with measures of optimality of actions that underlie obligations. In essence, this chapter formalizes the interplay between agents' knowledge and what they ought to do. On the road to formalizing motivational responsibility, Chapter 5 adds intentions and intentional actions to epistemic stit theory and reasons about the interplay between knowledge and intentionality. Finally, Chapter 6 merges the previous chapters' formalisms into a rich logic that is able to express and model different modes of the aforementioned categories of responsibility. Technically, the most important contributions of this thesis lie in the axiomatizations of all the introduced logics. In particular, the proofs of soundness & completeness results involve long, step-by-step procedures that make use of novel techniques.