Higher-Order Responsibility
This addresses a foundational issue in ethics for group decision-making, but it is incremental as it builds on existing approaches like group responsibility.
The paper tackles the problem of closing the responsibility gap in group decision-making by analyzing whether higher-order responsibility up to degree d is sufficient, and finds that this problem is Π_{2d+1}-complete.
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 deciding if higher-order responsibility up to degree $d$ is enough to close the responsibility gap. The main technical result is that this problem is $Π_{2d+1}$-complete.