A logical and philosophical analysis of helping

Helping is not much considered in the literature of analytic social philosophy. According to Tuomela (2000), when A helps an agent B, A contributes to the achievement of B's goal, and B accepts A's contribution to the goal. We take a rather different tack: helping is one sided, triggered by an attempt, and subjective. It is one sided because we can provide our help to someone without her accepting it. She could be unaware of our helping, or unwilling to receive it. Helping is based on trying because it is agent B (supposedly) trying to do something that triggers A's action of helping (Warneken and Tomasello 2009). Finally, helping is subjective since in helping B, agent A can wrongly interpret B's goals. This analysis will be driven by a formal, logical approach, based on the modal logics of agency. This will assist us in taking sensible philosophical choices, avoiding blatant inconsistencies and will have also the potential to serve as a computational engine for implementing concrete societies of cooperating autonomous agents.