Philosophy

Our proposal concerns the investigation of logical properties of the dynamics of motivational attitudes like desires, intentions and obligations. We motivate the research from both a computer science and a philosophical perspective. Within the general research question we identify 4 themes that can suitably be approached in a dialectical interaction between philosophy and computer science.

Strategic reasoning representation is a key issue in the theoretical study and the implementation of Multi Agent System. To this purpose a language is developed that can explicitly describe the dynamics of strategies, the preferences and their interaction. The relation with Pauly's Coalition Logic is studied and a full reduction is shown, together with the characterization of gametheoretical concept such as undominated choice.

The aim of the work is to provide a deontic language to regulate closed-world interaction. To do so we use Coalition Logic enriched with a preference order over the outcomes of agents' choices. We take the perspective of a deontic language being agent-oriented, that is mandating choices that only belong to agents or coalitions. We formalize this intuition by identifying those interactions in which Nature does not play an active role. We apply the formal tools to games.

This paper concerns the formal semantic analysis of imperative sentences. It is argued that such an analysis cannot be deferred to the semantics of propositions, under any of the three commonly adopted strategies: the performative analysis, the sentence radical approach to propositions, and the (nondeclarative) mood-as-operator approach. Whereas the first two are conceptually problematic, the third faces empirical problems: various complex imperatives should be analysed in terms of semantic operators over simple imperatives. One particularly striking case is the Dutch pluperfect imperative. It is argued that this construction should be analysed as a genuine counterfactual imperative. On the constructive side, in the last part of the paper a formal semantic analysis of imperatives is presented, in the framework of Update Semantics. On this analysis, imperatives are sui generis semantic entities, on a par with propositions. The analysis also includes an account of the counterfactual imperatives.

In the last decades logics for describing coalitional power in Multi Agent Systems have flourished. Alur's Alternating-Time Temporal Logic (ATL) [1], Pauly's Coalition Logic (CL) [5], Belnap's STIT Logic [2], are only a few influential examples of them. Roughly speaking they are all multimodal logics equipped with an operator [C]φ to express the fact that a certain coalition of agents C can cooperate to achieve φ, where φ can be a property of a reachable outcome-like in Coalition Logic-or a temporal formula holding at certain paths-like in ATL and STIT. This work has shed light on the logical properties of interaction, giving a formal semantics to notions like "coordination" and "strategy" and allowing to reason on how agents can work together to achieve a desirable property. Nevertheless, as it happens in many real and artificial cases, things can go wrong and a desirable property may not be reached. One issue is then to find out which agent or group is responsible for such failure, in order to identify or punish it, or even remove it from the system. In CL, ATL and STIT, the environment is explicitly represented as the coalition made by the empty set of agents and, being a coalition, it can also be responsible. This is reflected in many applications, in which the environment has some interference in the course of events that will take place. In some of these situations it is impossible to understand just observing the final outcome whether the environment or the agents made or ruled out a certain choice. For this reason an issue is to identify those situations in which it is possible to safely formulate a regulation system such that a violation occurs if and only if some agent made it occur. To address this issue we provide a language to reason about Closed Interactions, i.e. all those situations in which the outcomes of an interaction can be determined by the agents themselves and in which the environment cannot interfere with what they are able to determine. Our viewpoint is that if we want to design Multi Agent Systems were responsibility can be assured, we need to focus on those interactions in which the power of the empty coalition is limited.

The aim of the work is to provide a language to reason about closedworld interaction, that is all those situations in which the outcomes of an interaction can be determined by the agents themselves and in which Nature does not play an active role. We formalize this intuition by identifying all such interactions and axiomatizing their logic. We apply the formal tools to reason about games and their regulation.

Contents 1 Preface by Johan van Benthem vii 2 Continuous fragment of the µ-calculus by Gaëlle Fontaine 3 On the Minimality of Definite Telltale Sets in Finite Identification of Languages by Nina Gierasimczuk and Dick de Jongh 4 Twelve Angry Men: A Dynamic-Epistemic Study of Awareness, Implicit and Explicit Information by Davide Grossi and Fernando R. Velázquez-Quesada 5 Relevant Epistemic Logic by Ondrej Majer and Michal Peliš 6 Toward a Dynamic Logic of Questions by Johan van Benthem and Ş tefan Minicȃ 7 Inquisitive Logic by Ivano Ciardelli and Floris Roelofsen 8 Trust and the Dynamics of Testimony by Wesley H. Holliday 9 Joint Revision of Belief and Intention by Thomas Icard, Eric Pacuit and Yoav Shoham 10 Cooperation in Normal Modal Logics by Cédric Dégremont and Lena Kurzen 11 Specifying strategies in terms of their properties by R. Ramanujam and Sunil Simon

To assume that the ranking [of a xed pair of alternative social states] does not change with any changes in individual values is to assume [...] that there exists an objective social good dened independently of individual desires. [...] Such a philosophy could be and was used to justify government by the elite, secular or religious, although we shall see below that the connection is not a necessary one.

Deontic logic is standardly conceived as the logic of true statements about the existence of obligations and permissions. In his last writings on the subject, G. H. von Wright criticized this view of deontic logic, stressing the rationality of norm imposition as the proper foundation of deontic logic. The present paper is an attempt to advance such an account of deontic logic using the formal apparatus of update semantics and dynamic logic. That is, we first define norm systems and a semantics of norm performatives as transformations of the norm system. Then a static modal logic for norm propositions is defined on that basis. In the course of this exposition we stress the performative nature of (i) free choice permission, (ii) the sealing legal principle and (iii) the social nature of permission. That is, (i) granting a disjunctive permission means granting permission for both disjuncts; (ii) non-prohibition does not entail permission, but the authority can declare that whatever he ...

The text below is part of a process that you are invited to join. The text is the introduction to a longer article that summarizes the discussions during a meeting of coordinators of EU funded projects in ethics of science and engineering. The meeting took place in Budapest in November 2005. The first version of the full article is online on {www.opragen.co.uk (Science and Engineering Ethics)} and on www.embeddingethics.net. The second version of this summary article will be published in the October 2006 issue of Science and Engineering Ethics. While the first version does not contain bibliographic references, in the second version notes and bibliographic references will be added, including references to publications and websites of the many EU funded projects and of other original research that is already mentioned in the summary article.

This paper presents an approach for ethical evaluation of biotechnology, which is illustrated by cloning in dairy cattle breeding. The approach for ethical decision-making that was followed, the so-called network model, started with determining fundamental moral principles that together constitute a framework for the detection of ethical issues in a given situation. In terms of human ethics, four fundamental principles have been defined: beneficence, non-maleficence, justice and autonomy. In the context of animal biotechnology, the same four fundamental moral principles as in humans are considered, except that autonomy is replaced by respect for the integrity of the animal. Based on a Dutch advisory committee concerning animal biotechnology, two additional principles were considered: irreversibility and veriflability. For each individual case, moral decision-making means balancing of moral intuitions, moral principles and morally relevant facts. The final outcome on moral acceptabil...

Compensating farmers out of public funds for financiallosses due to adverse weather conditions and animaldiseases is fairly common in most Western countries.This government policy differs from that towardsentrepeneurs in other economic branches. Whatjustifies this differential treatment? In the firstpart of this article, three theories of justice arepresented that offer a general framework for dealingwith problems of compensatory justice. In the secondpart, the possibilities of justifiying differentialtreatment of agriculture within each of these theoriesare explored. It is concluded that compensatorypractices in agriculture require fundamentalrethinking in view of the changing technological,economic, and cultural conditions of agriculture.

The leading question of this article is whether it is acceptable, from a moral point of view, to take wild animals that are ill out of their natural habitat and temporarily bring them under human control with the purpose of curing them. To this end the so-called 'seal debate' was examined. In the Netherlands, seals that are lost or ill are rescued and taken into shelters, where they are cured and afterwards reintroduced into their natural environment. Recently, this practice has been criticised because it is thought to interfere with the wildness of the animals and population. In this research, the moral assumptions behind the arguments of both the proponents and opponents of sheltering have been analysed within a morally pluralistic framework. It is concluded that sheltering on too large a scale would be contrary to the efforts of the last few decades to maintain an independent or wild seal population, which means that a certain amount of caution is called for. However, in the current situation there is no decisive reason to completely prohibit shelters either. Good arguments can even be given in favour of sheltering. It also becomes clear that the acceptability of sheltering wild animals depends on the specific circumstances in which an animal is encountered.

Animal experimentation in scientific research and similarity between animals and humans, but radical toxicological testing is, more than many people are moral dissimilarity. Basically it is this ethical tension aware of, an important pillar of our society. Our that is the motivation behind the drive for reduction society is nowadays alternatively described as a of animal experiments that we have witnessed over knowledge society, a welfare society or a risk the last years. society. In all these respects animal experiments are Hagelin et al. in this issue present results combinimportant. ing the annual number of animals used in experiments with the scientific output, the latter as mea-See p. 212 sured by the annual number of animal research papers published in scientific journals [1]. For The With respect to animal experiments, Western cul-Netherlands their results show that a 23% reduction ture holds two views that are somewhat in conflict. in animals used in experiments over the last 7 years On the one hand, people regard themselves as being is accompanied by a 3% increase in scientific output. intrinsically different from, and superior to, animals It should be pointed out that the absolute numbers and from this difference perceive a right to use provided by Hagelin et al. are not very meaningful. animals as goods. On the other hand, the significance Unavoidably, relatively large numbers of animals are of animal experiments in the life sciences can be culled by suppliers who must be certain of stock to explained by the fact that humans and animals are, in meet a variable demand. Are these animals counted? important respects, biologically alike. If this was not Animals that are killed without undergoing an exthe case, animals could not model the systems in periment, for instance to harvest tissues, are counted humans that medical scientists are interested in. This by some countries but not by others. These and other parallelism, however, creates ethical tension, because reasons may underlie the five-fold difference beit seems inconsistent to claim significant biological tween the numbers that Hagelin et al. found in the UK [2] and in The Netherlands [1]. If Hagelin et al. had retrieved the actual information concerning the number of animals used in the published studies, they would probably have reached much lower, and