Talk: Sander Beckers (ILLC)

Title:

A Causal Analysis of Harm

Abstract:

As autonomous systems rapidly become ubiquitous, there is a growing need for a legal and regulatory framework that addresses when and how such a system harms someone. There have been several attempts within the philosophy literature to define harm, but none of them has proven capable of dealing with the many examples that have been presented, leading some to suggest that the notion of harm should be abandoned and “replaced by more well-behaved notions”. As harm is generally something that is caused, most of these definitions have involved causality at some level. Yet surprisingly, none of them makes use of causal models and the definitions of actual causality that they can express. In this talk I formally define a qualitative notion of harm that uses causal models and is based on a well-known definition of actual causality. Given that we often need to quantify harm, I also offer a quantitative definition that builds on the qualitative one.