2017/10/11 by Naveen Sundar Govindarajulu, Govindarajulu, Naveen Sundar, Selmer Bringsjord +1
Decision Sciences · Neuroscience · Social Sciences · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Ethics in Business and Education #Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1710.04161
openalex publication_date 2017/10/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We present a novel formalization of counterfactual conditionals in a quantified modal logic. Counterfactual conditionals play a vital role in ethical and moral reasoning. Prior work has shown that moral reasoning systems (and more generally, theory-of-mind reasoning systems) should be at least as expressive as first-order (quantified) modal logic (QML) to be well-behaved. While existing work on moral reasoning has focused on counterfactual-free QML moral reasoning, we present a fully specified and implemented formal system that includes counterfactual conditionals. We validate our model with two projects. In the first project, we demonstrate that our system can be used to model a complex moral principle, the doctrine of double effect. In the second project, we use the system to build a data-set with true and false counterfactuals as licensed by our theory, which we believe can be useful for other researchers. This project also shows that our model can be computationally feasible.