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.