arXiv subjects

Sarah Hiller

Publications and source records attributed to Sarah Hiller.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2022

An Axiomatic Approach to Formalized Responsibility Ascription

A formalized and quantifiable responsibility score is a crucial component in many aspects of the development and application of multi-agent systems and autonomous agents. We can employ it to inform decision making processes based on ethical considerations, as a measure to ensure redundancy that helps us in avoiding system failure, as well as for verifying that autonomous systems remain trustworthy by testing for unwanted responsibility voids in advance. We follow recent proposals to use probabilities as the basis for responsibility ascription in uncertain environments rather than the deterministic causal views employed in much of the previous formal philosophical literature. Using an axiomatic approach we formally evaluate the qualities of (classes of) proposed responsibility functions. To this end, we decompose the computation of the responsibility a group carries for an outcome into the computation of values that we assign to its members for individual decisions leading to that outcome, paired with an appropriate aggregation function. Next, we discuss a number of intuitively desirable properties for each of these contributing functions. We find an incompatibility between axioms determining upper and lower bounds for the values assigned at the member level. Regarding the aggregation from member-level values to group-level responsibility we are able to axiomatically characterize one promising aggregation function. Finally, we present two maximally axiom compliant group-level responsibility measures -- one respecting the lower bound axioms at the member level and one respecting the corresponding upper bound axioms.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2021

Quantifying Responsibility with Probabilistic Causation -- The Case of Climate Action

Many real-world situations of ethical and economic relevance, such as collective (in)action with respect to the climate crisis, involve not only diverse agents whose decisions interact in complicated ways, but also various forms of uncertainty, including both quantifiable risk and unquantifiable ambiguity. In such cases, an assessment of moral responsibility for ethically undesired outcomes or of the responsibility to avoid these is challenging and prone to the risk of under- or over determination. In contrast to existing approaches that employ notions of causation based on combinations of necessity and sufficiency or certain logics that focus on a binary classification of `responsible' vs `not responsible', we present a set of quantitative metrics that assess responsibility degrees in units of probability. To this end, we adapt extensive-form game trees as the framework for representing decision scenarios and evaluate the proposed responsibility functions based on the correct representation of a set of analytically assessed paradigmatic example scenarios. We test the best performing metrics on a reduced representation of a real-world decision scenario and are able to compute meaningful responsibility scores.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2020

Degrees of individual and groupwise backward and forward responsibility in extensive-form games with ambiguity, and their application to social choice problems

Many real-world situations of ethical relevance, in particular those of large-scale social choice such as mitigating climate change, involve not only many agents whose decisions interact in complicated ways, but also various forms of uncertainty, including quantifiable risk and unquantifiable ambiguity. In such problems, an assessment of individual and groupwise moral responsibility for ethically undesired outcomes or their responsibility to avoid such is challenging and prone to the risk of under- or overdetermination of responsibility. In contrast to existing approaches based on strict causation or certain deontic logics that focus on a binary classification of `responsible' vs `not responsible', we here present several different quantitative responsibility metrics that assess responsibility degrees in units of probability. For this, we use a framework based on an adapted version of extensive-form game trees and an axiomatic approach that specifies a number of potentially desirable properties of such metrics, and then test the developed candidate metrics by their application to a number of paradigmatic social choice situations. We find that while most properties one might desire of such responsibility metrics can be fulfilled by some variant, an optimal metric that clearly outperforms others has yet to be found.

econ.TH↗