Where responsibility takes you Logics of agency, counterfactuals and norms

This dissertation brings together logics of agency, counterfactuals, and norms in order to address important issues arising from a formal analysis of the notion of causal responsibility. We work within two modal traditions in the logic of action: STIT logic (the logic of “seeing to it that”) and dynamic logic, specifically Propositional Dynamic Logic and Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL).
Part I aims at modeling the agency of individuals and groups in causing certain results and studying the logical and epistemic features of counterfactual statements about actions that could have been (but have not been) done. We start, in Chapter 3, by including causal notions in STIT. This allows us to formalize three tests for causal responsibility and fruitfully analyze a number of key examples. Chapter 4 extends the framework from Chapter 3 and investigates the philosophical and logical implications of three new STIT-semantics for counterfactuals. By combining ideas from STIT, epistemic logic, and subject matter semantics, Chapter 5 advances a model of the mental activity used to evaluate counterfactual statements (i.e., imagination) and studies how it generates knowledge.
Part II of the dissertation focuses on normative reasoning. Chapter 6 presents a dynamic deontic logic to reason about what ought to be done when violating some norms is inevitable. Chapter 7 zooms in on a main category of such situations: those involving normative conflicts. Using techniques from DEL, we design a system to capture the dynamics leading to a conflict and key differences between conscientious objection and civil disobedience.