Responsibility Judgments: Steps towards a formalization

International audienceThe concept of responsibility refers to different, although related, meanings. Judgments about responsibility, demerit or merit may involve several facets, such as causality, intentionality, awareness of consequences, as well as utility and deontic notions. The proposed approach relies on a recent modeling of causality ascription by agents put in face of a sequence of reported events, on the basis of their own beliefs regarding the normal course of things. The study intends to cover situations, where something bad, or good, happened, and the action of an agent caused it, or could have prevented it. Moreover, the expected consequences of the action may have taken place or not, the action may be costly or beneficial to the agent, and the action may have different deontic status. On the basis of these different concerns, we are interested in this paper in describing how responsibility, merit or blame can be attributed by agents about the actions of other agent