Joseph Halpern Publishes “Towards Formal Definitions of Blameworthiness, Intention, and Moral Responsibility”

05 Apr 2018

CHAI’s Joseph Halpern and his colleague Max Kleiman-Weiner at Cornell University published this paper in the Proceedings of the Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-18). The abstract reads:

We provide formal definitions of degree of blameworthiness and intention relative to an epistemic state (a probability over causal models and a utility function on outcomes). These, together with a definition of actual causality, provide the key ingredients for moral responsibility judgments. We show that these definitions give insight into commonsense intuitions in a variety of puzzling cases from the literature.