The rights of agents

Abstract

Many agents are conceived to achieve certain goals on behalf of their owners by interacting with other agents. In order to make these agents behave so as not to violate other agent's rights (or, more uncontroversially: the rights of the owners of other agents), we have to build into agents an attitude about such rights. To do this, we need a language to represent and reason about rights. The contribution of this paper is to offer formal and informal arguments in favour of employing the notion of rights when characterizing agent behaviour. A language for analysing rights-relations between two agents is proposed, and a sample analysis is performed on an example which is both relevant and realistic.