6 accepted papers
As more and more decisions that have a significant ethical dimension are being outsourced to AI systems, it is important to have a definition of _moral responsibility_ that can be applied to AI systems. Moral responsibility for an outcome of an agent who performs some action is commonly taken to inv…
In earlier work we defined a qualitative notion of harm: either harm is caused, or it is not. For practical applications, we often need to quantify harm; for example, we may want to choose the least harmful of a set of possible interventions. We first present a quantitative definition of harm in a d…
As autonomous systems rapidly become ubiquitous, there is a growing need for a legal and regulatory framework to address when and how such a system harms someone. There have been several attempts within the philosophy literature to define harm, but none of them has proven capable of dealing with wit…
The aim of this paper is to offer the first systematic exploration and definition of equivalent causal models in the context where both models are not made up of the same variables. The idea is that two models are equivalent when they agree on all "essential" causal information that can be expressed…
Beckers & Vennekens recently proposed a definition of actual causation that is based on certain plausible principles, thereby allowing the debate on causation to shift away from its heavy focus on examples towards a more systematic analysis. This paper contributes to that analysis in two ways. First…
Scientific models describe natural phenomena at different levels of abstraction. Abstract descriptions can provide the basis for interventions on the system and explanation of observed phenomena at a level of granularity that is coarser than the most fundamental account of the system. Beckers and Ha…