Plenty of Blame to Go Around: A Qualitative Approach to Attribution of Moral Responsibility

Abstract : We present a computational model of blame attribution. Recently Mao and Gratch, following Attribution theory, created a computational model that assigned blame to an agent for a negative occurrence. Their model made categorical judgments, and could only assign blame to a single agent. Our model extends this work, using QP theory to provide a continuous model for the parameters involved in attribution and directly capturing the constraints postulated by Attribution theory. This allows our model to infer relative amounts of blame in a situation in a manner that is consistently overall with relative amounts of blame attributed in a psychological experiment.

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