Logics of Responsibility

The study of responsibility is a complicated matter. The term is used in different ways in different fields, and it is easy to engage in everyday discussions as to why someone should be considered responsible for something. Typically, the backdrop of these discussions involves social, legal, moral, or philosophical problems. A clear pattern in all these spheres is the intent of issuing standards for when---and to what extent---an agent should be held responsible for a state of affairs. This is where Logic lends a hand. The development of expressive logics---to reason about agents' decisions in situations with moral consequences---involves devising unequivocal representations of components of behavior that are highly relevant to systematic responsibility attribution and to systematic blame-or-praise assignment. To put it plainly, expressive syntactic-and-semantic frameworks help us analyze responsibility-related problems in a methodical way. This thesis builds a formal theory of responsibility. The main tool used toward this aim is modal logic and, more specifically, a class of modal logics of action known as stit theory. The underlying motivation is to provide theoretical foundations for using symbolic techniques in the construction of ethical AI. Thus, this work means a contribution to formal philosophy and symbolic AI. The thesis's methodology consists in the development of stit-theoretic models and languages to explore the interplay between the following components of responsibility: agency, knowledge, beliefs, intentions, and obligations. Said models are integrated into a framework that is rich enough to provide logic-based characterizations for three categories of responsibility: causal, informational, and motivational responsibility. The thesis is structured as follows. Chapter 2 discusses at length stit theory, a logic that formalizes the notion of agency in the world over an indeterministic conception of time known as branching time. The idea is that agents act by constraining possible futures to definite subsets. On the road to formalizing informational responsibility, Chapter 3 extends stit theory with traditional epistemic notions (knowledge and belief). Thus, the chapter formalizes important aspects of agents' reasoning in the choice and performance of actions. In a context of responsibility attribution and excusability, Chapter 4 extends epistemic stit theory with measures of optimality of actions that underlie obligations. In essence, this chapter formalizes the interplay between agents' knowledge and what they ought to do. On the road to formalizing motivational responsibility, Chapter 5 adds intentions and intentional actions to epistemic stit theory and reasons about the interplay between knowledge and intentionality. Finally, Chapter 6 merges the previous chapters' formalisms into a rich logic that is able to express and model different modes of the aforementioned categories of responsibility. Technically, the most important contributions of this thesis lie in the axiomatizations of all the introduced logics. In particular, the proofs of soundness & completeness results involve long, step-by-step procedures that make use of novel techniques

Doing Without Action Types

This paper explores the analysis of ability, where ability is to be understood in the epistemic sense—in contrast to what might be called a causal sense. There are plenty of cases where an agent is able to perform an action that guarantees a given result even though she does not know which of her actions guarantees that result. Such an agent possesses the causal ability but lacks the epistemic ability. The standard analysis of such epistemic abilities relies on the notion of action types—as opposed to action tokens—and then posits that an agent has the epistemic ability to do something if and only if there is an action type available to her that she knows guarantees it. We show that these action types are not needed: we present a formalism without action types that can simulate analyzes of epistemic ability that rely on action types. Our formalism is a standard epistemic extension of the theory of “seeing to it that”, which arose from a modal tradition in the logic of action

Doing Without Action Types

This paper explores the analysis of ability, where ability is to be understood in the epistemic sense—in contrast to what might be called a causal sense. There are plenty of cases where an agent is able to perform an action that guarantees a given result even though she does not know which of her actions guarantees that result. Such an agent possesses the causal ability but lacks the epistemic ability. The standard analysis of such epistemic abilities relies on the notion of action types—as opposed to action tokens—and then posits that an agent has the epistemic ability to do something if and only if there is an action type available to her that she knows guarantees it. We show that these action types are not needed: we present a formalism without action types that can simulate analyzes of epistemic ability that rely on action types. Our formalism is a standard epistemic extension of the theory of “seeing to it that”, which arose from a modal tradition in the logic of action

Internado en Psicología Organizacional 1 - PS337 - 202102

Descripción: El curso Internado en Psicología Organizacional 1, de carácter práctico, está dirigido a los estudiantes del décimo primer ciclo y busca consolidar el desarrollo de las competencias generales y específicas aplicadas al campo de la Psicología Organizacional. En este periodo, el estudiante se inserta en una nueva experiencia, la de aplicación de sus conocimientos a situaciones reales durante sus rotaciones organizacionales, fase que le permite concluir su formación universitaria y en la que deberá ejercer roles pre profesionales en una institución del campo organizacional. Una vez concluidos los 5 años de estudio, el estudiante debe estar en condiciones de demostrar las competencias del perfil profesional, desarrolladas integrando el aprendizaje teórico con la experiencia práctica. El espacio de Internado en Psicología Organizacional 1 ofrece al estudiante el acompañamiento académico que se realiza a través de la asesoría de las diferentes funciones y actividades que debe desempeñar como psicólogo organizacional, en el mundo laboral pre profesional de la especialidad. Es requisito cumplir horas de prácticas distribuidas de la siguiente manera: horas de actividades en aula, trabajo individual, prácticas con simulación y prácticas de campo. Es importante respetar las condiciones establecidas 1en el reglamento de Internado y las de rotación, aceptando que son ineludibles y configuran parte de los objetivos de este curso, es por ello que, hay que cumplir a cabalidad con las funciones o tareas que le sean asignadas en este espacio pre profesional, así como con las actividades de asesoría correspondientes en la Universidad, asistiendo a todas las actividades programadas. Propósito: El curso Internado en Psicología Organizacional 1 ha sido diseñado con el propósito de permitir al futuro psicólogo integrar teoría y práctica, de manera que se evidencie el nivel de logro alcanzado en las diferentes competencias del perfil profesional que ha venido desarrollando a través de los años de su formación académica, haciéndose énfasis en las Competencias generales de: Pensamiento Crítico y Ciudadanía (nivel de logro 3) y en las competencias específicas de Fundamento teórico conceptual, Desarrollo Personal y Autoconocimiento, Análisis Social y Sistémico, Diagnóstico y diseño e Intervención y Evaluación, en el nivel de logro más alto con relación a la especialidad de Psicología Organizacional, teniendo como curso requisito haber aprobado todos los cursos hasta el décimo nivel

Global variation in postoperative mortality and complications after cancer surgery: a multicentre, prospective cohort study in 82 countries

© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an Open Access article under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licenseBackground: 80% of individuals with cancer will require a surgical procedure, yet little comparative data exist on early outcomes in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs). We compared postoperative outcomes in breast, colorectal, and gastric cancer surgery in hospitals worldwide, focusing on the effect of disease stage and complications on postoperative mortality. Methods: This was a multicentre, international prospective cohort study of consecutive adult patients undergoing surgery for primary breast, colorectal, or gastric cancer requiring a skin incision done under general or neuraxial anaesthesia. The primary outcome was death or major complication within 30 days of surgery. Multilevel logistic regression determined relationships within three-level nested models of patients within hospitals and countries. Hospital-level infrastructure effects were explored with three-way mediation analyses. This study was registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT03471494. Findings: Between April 1, 2018, and Jan 31, 2019, we enrolled 15 958 patients from 428 hospitals in 82 countries (high income 9106 patients, 31 countries; upper-middle income 2721 patients, 23 countries; or lower-middle income 4131 patients, 28 countries). Patients in LMICs presented with more advanced disease compared with patients in high-income countries. 30-day mortality was higher for gastric cancer in low-income or lower-middle-income countries (adjusted odds ratio 3·72, 95% CI 1·70–8·16) and for colorectal cancer in low-income or lower-middle-income countries (4·59, 2·39–8·80) and upper-middle-income countries (2·06, 1·11–3·83). No difference in 30-day mortality was seen in breast cancer. The proportion of patients who died after a major complication was greatest in low-income or lower-middle-income countries (6·15, 3·26–11·59) and upper-middle-income countries (3·89, 2·08–7·29). Postoperative death after complications was partly explained by patient factors (60%) and partly by hospital or country (40%). The absence of consistently available postoperative care facilities was associated with seven to 10 more deaths per 100 major complications in LMICs. Cancer stage alone explained little of the early variation in mortality or postoperative complications. Interpretation: Higher levels of mortality after cancer surgery in LMICs was not fully explained by later presentation of disease. The capacity to rescue patients from surgical complications is a tangible opportunity for meaningful intervention. Early death after cancer surgery might be reduced by policies focusing on strengthening perioperative care systems to detect and intervene in common complications. Funding: National Institute for Health Research Global Health Research Unit

Effects of hospital facilities on patient outcomes after cancer surgery: an international, prospective, observational study

© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an Open Access article under the CC BY 4.0 licenseBackground: Early death after cancer surgery is higher in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) compared with in high-income countries, yet the impact of facility characteristics on early postoperative outcomes is unknown. The aim of this study was to examine the association between hospital infrastructure, resource availability, and processes on early outcomes after cancer surgery worldwide. Methods: A multimethods analysis was performed as part of the GlobalSurg 3 study—a multicentre, international, prospective cohort study of patients who had surgery for breast, colorectal, or gastric cancer. The primary outcomes were 30-day mortality and 30-day major complication rates. Potentially beneficial hospital facilities were identified by variable selection to select those associated with 30-day mortality. Adjusted outcomes were determined using generalised estimating equations to account for patient characteristics and country-income group, with population stratification by hospital. Findings: Between April 1, 2018, and April 23, 2019, facility-level data were collected for 9685 patients across 238 hospitals in 66 countries (91 hospitals in 20 high-income countries; 57 hospitals in 19 upper-middle-income countries; and 90 hospitals in 27 low-income to lower-middle-income countries). The availability of five hospital facilities was inversely associated with mortality: ultrasound, CT scanner, critical care unit, opioid analgesia, and oncologist. After adjustment for case-mix and country income group, hospitals with three or fewer of these facilities (62 hospitals, 1294 patients) had higher mortality compared with those with four or five (adjusted odds ratio [OR] 3·85 [95% CI 2·58–5·75]; p<0·0001), with excess mortality predominantly explained by a limited capacity to rescue following the development of major complications (63·0% vs 82·7%; OR 0·35 [0·23–0·53]; p<0·0001). Across LMICs, improvements in hospital facilities would prevent one to three deaths for every 100 patients undergoing surgery for cancer. Interpretation: Hospitals with higher levels of infrastructure and resources have better outcomes after cancer surgery, independent of country income. Without urgent strengthening of hospital infrastructure and resources, the reductions in cancer-associated mortality associated with improved access will not be realised. Funding: National Institute for Health and Care Research