mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Towards Formal Definitions of Blameworthiness, Intention, and Moral Responsibility

arXiv 1810.05903 ↗First posted 13 Oct 2018cs.AI cs.CYcited by 32

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Abstract (arXiv)

We provide formal definitions of degree of blameworthiness and intention relative to an epistemic state (a probability over causal models and a utility function on outcomes). These, together with a definition of actual causality, provide the key ingredients for moral responsibility judgments. We show that these definitions give insight into commonsense intuitions in a variety of puzzling cases from the literature.

Key facts. Cited by 32 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2018.

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Citing papers per year: 2021: 3; 2022: 6; 2023: 11; 2024: 7; 2025: 2; 2026: 3.

32 papers.

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  1. 2024AI Sandbagging: Language Models can Strategically Underperform on Evaluationscited by 131
  2. 2024Robust agents learn causal world modelscited by 81
  3. 2023Honesty Is the Best Policy: Defining and Mitigating AI Deceptioncited by 40
  4. 2024AI Alignment with Changing and Influenceable Reward Functionscited by 33
  5. 2022Counterfactual harmcited by 29
  6. 2022Discovering Agentscited by 28
  7. 2022Path-Specific Objectives for Safer Agent Incentivescited by 20
  8. 2023Reasoning about Causality in Gamescited by 20
  9. 2023Partial Counterfactual Identification of Continuous Outcomes with a Curvature Sensitivity Modelcited by 14
  10. 2021On Blame Attribution for Accountable Multi-Agent Sequential Decision Makingcited by 13
  11. 2023Human Control: Definitions and Algorithmscited by 10
  12. 2021Definitions of intent suitable for algorithmscited by 8
20 more
  1. 2022Actual Causality and Responsibility Attribution in Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Processescited by 8
  2. 2024Measuring Goal-Directednesscited by 7
  3. 2023Anticipating Responsibility in Multiagent Planningcited by 4
  4. 2024Counterfactual Effect Decomposition in Multi-Agent Sequential Decision Makingcited by 4
  5. 2023Towards Computationally Efficient Responsibility Attribution in Decentralized Partially Observable MDPscited by 3
  6. 2021Extending counterfactual accounts of intent to include oblique intentcited by 2
  7. 2023Analyzing Intentional Behavior in Autonomous Agents under Uncertaintycited by 2
  8. 2024Causal Responsibility Attribution for Human-AI Collaborationcited by 2
  9. 2025Who Gets Credit or Blame? Attributing Accountability in Modern AI Systemscited by 2
  10. 2025Learning "Partner-Aware" Collaborators in Multi-Party Collaborationcited by 2
  11. 2026Counterfactual Reasoning for Causal Responsibility Attribution in Probabilistic Multi-Agent Systemscited by 2
  12. 2022Moral reinforcement learning using actual causationcited by 1
  13. 2023Toward A Logical Theory Of Fairness and Biascited by 1
  14. 2023Agent-Specific Effects: A Causal Effect Propagation Analysis in Multi-Agent MDPscited by 1
  15. 2022Utility Functions for Human/Robot Interactioncited by 0
  16. 2023Experiments with Detecting and Mitigating AI Deceptioncited by 0
  17. 2023Causal Kripke Modelscited by 0
  18. 2024The Benefits of Power Regularization in Cooperative Reinforcement Learningcited by 0
  19. 2026Teleological Inference in Structural Causal Models via Intentional Interventionscited by 0
  20. 2026Causal Foundations of Collective Agencycited by 0