A logical analysis of responsibility attribution: emotions, individuals and collectives

TLDR

Responsibility attribution is essential for understanding attribution emotions such as guilt, pride, moral approval, and disapproval, as well as for concepts of collective responsibility and collective guilt. The article aims to provide a logical analysis of responsibility attribution, exploring how agents ascribe responsibility to themselves or to others. The authors extend the STIT logic with three knowledge modalities linked to choice timing—before choice, after choice but before others’ choices are known, and after all choices are public—to analyze responsibility attribution. The study shows that the satisfiability problem for the extended logic is decidable.

Abstract

The aim of this article is to provide a logical analysis of the concept of responsibility attribution; that is, how agents ascribe responsibility about the consequences of actions, either to themselves or to other agents. The article is divided in two parts. The first part investigates the importance of the concept of responsibility attribution for emotion theory in general and, in particular, for the theory of attribution emotions such as guilt, pride, moral approval and moral disapproval. The second part explores the collective dimension of responsibility attribution and attribution emotions, namely the concepts of collective responsibility and collective guilt. The proposed analysis is based on an extension of the logic STIT (the logic of ‘Seeing To It That’) with three different types of knowledge and common knowledge modal operators depending on the time of choice: before one’s choice, after one’s choice but before knowing the choices of other agents, and after the choices of all agents have become public. Decidability of the satisfiability problem of the logic is studied in the article.