Collective obligations and agents: Who gets the blame?

Abstract

This work addresses the issue of obligations directed to groups of agents. Our main concern consists in providing a formal analysis of the structure connecting collective obligations to individual ones: which individual agent in a group should be held responsible if an obligation directed to the whole group is not fulfilled? To this aim, concepts from planning literature (like plan and task allocation) are first used in order to conceptualize collective agency, and then formalized by means of a dynamic deontic logic framework. Within this setting, a formal account of the notion of coordination, intended as management of interdependencies among agents' activities, is also provided.