Making a Difference Responsibility, Causality and

In this thesis, I develop a general framework of how people attribute respon-sibility. In this framework, people’s responsibility attributions are modelled in terms of counterfactuals defined over a causal representation of the situ-ation. A person is predicted to be held responsible to the extent that their action made a difference to the outcome. Accordingly, when attributing responsibility we compare what actually happened with the outcome in a simulated counterfactual world in which the person’s action had been dif-ferent. However, a person can still be held responsible for an outcome even if their action made no difference in the actual situation. Responsibility attributions are sensitive to whether a person’s action would have made a difference in similar counterfactual situations. Generally, responsibility de-creases with the number of events that would have needed to change from the actual situation in order to generate a counterfactual situation in which the person’s action would have been pivotal. In addition to how close a per