Professor Martin van Hees
Small Group Project 2018-19
Moral Responsibility and Mechanism Design
This project contributes to the analysis of and aims to help solve the so-called many hands problem: the allocation of moral responsibility in a multi-agent setting. The existing literature on the many hands problem focuses mainly on the difficulties when agents want to establish who is responsible for some outcome in which they were involved but in which many others were as well. The approach here is different by assuming that the individuals responsible for the outcome are predetermined. However, due to the lack of information and inability (because of high costs) to gather evidence, these individuals cannot always be easily identified.
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Biography
Martin van Hees is Dean of Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences since 2026. Previously he has held chairs in Groningen and Amsterdam. He acted as Dean of the John Stuart Mill College (VU) and of Amsterdam University College (UvA and VU). From 2020 until 2026 he served as member of the Board of the KNAW and as chair of its Humanities Division. His research has a strong interdisciplinary focus, combining insights and methods from philosophy, economics and decision theory. A central theme in it is the analysis of freedom and responsibility, with particular attention to the influence and importance of the institutional contexts in which people act.
Biographical details correct as of 11.05.26