Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of van Hees and Braham’s conception of causal responsibility in terms of NESS-conditions in formal models of collective action; NESS means ‘Necessary Element of a Sufficient Set’. In particular, the paper looks at their dictatorship result which arises from imposing uniformresponsibility on game forms which are augmented with a probabilistic component. Analogs for uniform NESS-responsibility are formulated within Belnap et al.’s stit models of agency—for both the instantaneous and past-looking versions. In the case of instantaneous stit theory, NESS-responsibility has dstit as a special case, and the probabilistic component is unnecessary for deriving a full dictatorship result. For pastlooking agency, NESS-responsibility has astit as a special case, but uniformity, while not dictatorial, is shown to have a counterintuitive necessary condition: busy choosers.