Causality, Responsibility, and Blame: A Structural-Model Approach

Abstract This talk will provide an overview of work that I havedone with Hana Chockler, Orna Kupferman, and Judea Pearl [1, 2, 10, 9] on defining notions such as causality,explanation, responsibility, and blame. I first review the Halpern-Pearl definition of causality--what it means that Ais a cause of B--and show how it handles well some stan-dard problems of causality. This definition of causality (like most in the literature), views causality as an all-or-nothingconcept. Either A is a cause of B or it is not. I show how itcan be extended to take into account the degree of responsibility of A for B. For example, if someone wins an election11-0, each person is less responsible for his victory than if he had won 6-5. Finally, I show how this notion of degreeof responsibility can be used to provide insight into model checking notions such as coverage