Responsibility and blame: a structural-model approach

TL;DR

This paper extends the Halpern-Pearl causality framework to quantify the degree of responsibility and blame of an agent for an event, considering epistemic states and providing a nuanced causality measure.

Contribution

It introduces a formal measure of responsibility and blame within the structural-model causality framework, accounting for degrees of causality and agents' knowledge states.

Findings

Defines a quantitative measure of responsibility for causality.

Introduces a notion of blame based on epistemic states.

Provides a formal framework for nuanced causality analysis.

Abstract

Causality is typically treated an all-or-nothing concept; either A is a cause of B or it is not. We extend the definition of causality introduced by Halpern and Pearl [2001] to take into account the degree of responsibility of A for B. For example, if someone wins an election 11--0, then each person who votes for him is less responsible for the victory than if he had won 6--5. We then define a notion of degree of blame, which takes into account an agent's epistemic state. Roughly speaking, the degree of blame of A for B is the expected degree of responsibility of A for B, taken over the epistemic state of an agent.