Higher-Order Responsibility

Abstract

In ethics, individual responsibility is often defined through Frankfurt's principle of alternative possibilities. This definition is not adequate in a group decision-making setting because it often results in the lack of a responsible party or "responsibility gap". One of the existing approaches to address this problem is to consider group responsibility. Another, recently proposed, approach is "higher-order" responsibility. The paper considers the problem of determining whether higher-order responsibility up to a given degree is sufficient to close the responsibility gap and analyses the computational complexity of this problem.