Responsibility Anticipation
Definition
Responsibility anticipation is the ex ante evaluation of which outcomes an agent may be responsible for if it chooses a strategy before the interaction unfolds. Instead of assigning blame after a realized history, it asks how much avoidable value satisfaction or violation a strategy could leave attributable to the agent under possible choices by others.
Why It Matters
For agents with multiple goals or values, ordinary outcome ranking can miss whether an agent did what it could under strategic uncertainty. Responsibility anticipation is useful for Strategic Reasoning because it compares strategies by the avoidable outcomes they expose the agent to, and for Decision Theory because it recasts regret and dominance as responsibility-sensitive criteria.
Formalism / Key Objects
In Parker2024 - Responsibility in a Multi-Value Strategic Setting, a moral action system nabla = (G, s_0, k, Omega) combines a multiagent transition system, start state, finite horizon, and prioritized LTLf value base. If H_1 = Play((sigma_i, sigma_-i), nabla) and H_2 = Play((sigma_i', sigma_-i), nabla), a basic responsibility set is:
The paper uses worst-case single-history responsibility sets for anticipation. Minimizing passive responsibility coincides with symbolic regret minimization, while minimizing inexcusable passive responsibility coincides with choosing a non-dominated strategy.
Connections
- Multi-Value Responsibility Anticipation is the focused annex for the formal definitions and equivalence results.
- Actual Causality is nearby because both ask whether an outcome depended on an agent’s choices, but responsibility anticipation is prospective and strategy-level rather than retrospective and event-level.
- Linear Temporal Logic supplies the finite-trace value formulas used to evaluate histories.
- Opponent Shaping is adjacent when responsibility-conscious strategy choice must account for other agents as adaptive learners rather than fixed strategy sources.
Common Confusions
- Responsibility anticipation is not the same as expected utility unless probabilities over others’ strategies and scalar utilities are supplied.
- Being responsible for several values separately does not imply responsibility for their conjunction; the counterfactual alternative must support the relevant set jointly.
- An excuse in this setting is a formal strategic defense of a choice, not a psychological claim about intent.