Counterfactual Conditionals in Quantified Modal Logic

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new formal system for counterfactual conditionals within quantified modal logic, enhancing moral reasoning models and demonstrating practical applications and computational feasibility.

Contribution

It provides the first fully specified and implemented formalization of counterfactuals in QML for moral reasoning, including validation through complex moral principles and dataset creation.

Findings

Model can represent the doctrine of double effect

System can generate true and false counterfactuals

Approach is computationally feasible

Abstract

We present a novel formalization of counterfactual conditionals in a quantified modal logic. Counterfactual conditionals play a vital role in ethical and moral reasoning. Prior work has shown that moral reasoning systems (and more generally, theory-of-mind reasoning systems) should be at least as expressive as first-order (quantified) modal logic (QML) to be well-behaved. While existing work on moral reasoning has focused on counterfactual-free QML moral reasoning, we present a fully specified and implemented formal system that includes counterfactual conditionals. We validate our model with two projects. In the first project, we demonstrate that our system can be used to model a complex moral principle, the doctrine of double effect. In the second project, we use the system to build a data-set with true and false counterfactuals as licensed by our theory, which we believe can be useful for other researchers. This project also shows that our model can be computationally feasible.