A Computational Model of Moral and Legal Responsibility via Simplicity Theory

Giovanni Sileno, Antoine Saillenfest, Jean-Louis Dessalles

Abstract: Responsibility, as referred to in everyday life, as explored in moral philosophy and debated in jurisprudence, is a multiform, ill-defined but inescapable notion for reasoning about actions. Its presence in all social constructs suggests the existence of an underlying cognitive base. Following this hypothesis, and building upon simplicity theory, the paper proposes a novel computational approach.