Blameworthiness in Strategic Games

There are multiple notions of coalitional responsibility. The focus of this paper is on the blameworthiness defined through the principle of alternative possibilities: a coalition is blamable for a statement if the statement is true, but the coalition had a strategy to prevent it. The main technical result is a sound and complete bimodal logical system that describes properties of blameworthiness in one-shot games

Knowledge and Blameworthiness

Blameworthiness of an agent or a coalition of agents is often defined in terms of the principle of alternative possibilities: for the coalition to be responsible for an outcome, the outcome must take place and the coalition should have had a strategy to prevent it. In this article we argue that in the settings with imperfect information, not only should the coalition have had a strategy, but it also should have known that it had a strategy, and it should have known what the strategy was. The main technical result of the article is a sound and complete bimodal logic that describes the interplay between knowledge and blameworthiness in strategic games with imperfect information

On blame-freeness and reciprocity: an experimental study

The theory of reciprocity is predicated on the assumption that people are willing to reward nice or kind acts and to punish unkind ones. This assumption raises the question as to how to define kindness. In this paper we offer a new definition of kindness that we call blame-freeness." Put most simply, blame-freeness states that in judging whether player i has been kind or unkind to player j in a socialsituation, player j would have to put himself in the strategic position of player i, while retaining his preferences, and ask if he would have acted in a manner that was worse than i did under identical circumstances. If j would have acted in a more unkind manner than i acted, then we say that j does not blame i for his behavior. If, however, j would have been nicer than i was, then we say that "j blames i" for his actions (i´s actions were blameworthy). We consider this notion a natural, intuitive and empirically relevant way to explain the motives of people engaged in reciprocal behavior. After developing the conceptual framework, we then test this concept in a laboratory experiment involving tournaments and find significant support for the theory."Altruism, blame, reciprocity.

Blameworthiness in Security Games

Security games are an example of a successful real-world application of game theory. The paper defines blameworthiness of the defender and the attacker in security games using the principle of alternative possibilities and provides a sound and complete logical system for reasoning about blameworthiness in such games. Two of the axioms of this system capture the asymmetry of information in security games.Comment: 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-20), February 7-12, 2020, New York, New York, US

The Place of the Trace: Negligence and Responsibility

One popular theory of moral responsibility locates responsible agency in exercises of control. These control-based theories often appeal to tracing to explain responsibility in cases where some agent is intuitively responsible for bringing about some outcome despite lacking direct control over that outcome’s obtaining. Some question whether control-based theories are committed to utilizing tracing to explain responsibility in certain cases. I argue that reflecting on certain kinds of negligence shows that tracing plays an ineliminable role in any adequate control-based theory of responsibility

Pure politicking! Racialised blame games and moral panic in the case of a South African high school

This study combines two discourse analytic frameworks, and explores the utility of this combination for unpacking journalistic opinions written in response to a polarising and racialised event in South African education: the Overvaal High School incident. It uncovers strategic constructions of racism within politicised blame games, in the context of Overvaal, and discloses how blame-assertion and blame-denial became implicated in framings of moral panic. Methodologically, this study relies on the concept race trouble, as well as a practical model of argumentation. In conjunction, these two approaches supply insight into both the calculated construction of racism, as well as the incorporation of these constructions into arguments aimed at rationalising blame-assertion and blame-denial. The results are interpreted within theorisations of moral panic. The findings showcase how arguments are produced to blame an individual politician for escalating racial antagonism around Overvaal, instead of offering a deeply historicised and contextualised account of the incident. Consequently, the arguments that shaped the opinion pieces, and the framing of racism involved in these arguments, ultimately obfuscate inquiry into structural determinants of racial inequity. Implicitly, this framing of racism and its incorporation into argumentation and blame games, produce a form of moral panic, in which South Africans racialised as white are construed as embattled by self-serving (black) politicians. Such politicians are vilified, or rendered as folk devils, and the results indicate how this process evades penetrating analyses of racialisation and its intersection with unequal education

Smithian Answers to Some Experimental Puzzles

This paper draws attention to the increased use of Adam Smith’s work in the experimental economics literature. It also offers examples of how studying Adam Smith can help formulate possible answers to some otherwise counter-intuitive (if the intuition is based on the Rational-Choice paradigm) experimental results. The first part of the paper presents a short account of how, in recent years, the field has come to recognize the importance of considering other-regarding preferences as well as self-regarding preferences and how it is noticing the wealth of Adam Smith, who dealt with both. The central section of the paper offers examples of how the Smithian apparatus can provide plausible explanatory stories for data from experimental games such as, but not limited to, the Ultimatum Game, the Dictator Game and the Trust Game, which usually cannot be explained using only strict Rational Choice. Smithian resentment, love of praiseworthiness and dread of blameworthiness on the other hand seem to be plausible explanations for the seemingly irrational punishment and generosity observed in these experimental games. Concluding remarks end the essay

Three essays on applied epistemology

This dissertation contains three essays, each of which discusses a distinct way in which the particular status our beliefs have should affect the way we treat others. In the first essay, I begin with an account of epistemic damage—a proposal about how to measure epistemic harm. Second, I give an account of expected epistemic damage, which allows us to draw a principled line from epistemic harm to moral blameworthiness. Third, I use the notion of expected epistemic damage to solve a dilemma I pose for the dominant account of lying. I critique, and offer a replacement for, a widely-accepted necessary condition on lying—that the speaker believes the negation of what they assert. In the second essay, I argue that when people behave in a way that we believe is morally impermissible but toward which they are morally indifferent, we ought to pay them to forgo that behavior. People have legal entitlements to act in some ways that others regard as morally impermissible. But people exercise these entitlements, nevertheless. When they do, others have a defeasible reason to stop them. The circumstances will dictate whether they should, and, if so, the best method: one might convince them that what they are doing is wrong; one might explain that people will dislike them if they persist; one might ask them nicely, or threaten them. Or, one could pay them. In the third essay, I address arguments in both the philosophical and legal literature according to which statistical evidence cannot alone be sufficient evidence for a judgment in a civil trial or a conviction in a criminal trial. I argue that this dominant view is mistaken. Broadly, the argument relies on the presumption that any probative evidence ought to be given its due. I argue that the very many arguments presented against the sufficiency of statistical evidence are not strong enough to overcome this presumption.Philosoph

On Apology and Consilience

This article chimes in on the current debate about the proper relationship between apology and the law. Several states are considering legislation designed to shield apologies from the courtroom, and mediators are increasing their focus on the importance of apologies. The article develops an evolutionary economic analysis of apology that combines the tools of economics, game theory and biology to more fully understand its role in dispute resolution. When the analysis is applied to the uses of apology before and at trial, a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between apology and the law emerges