Abstract
The philosophical literature that tackles foundational questions about normativity often appeals to normative reasons—or considerations that count in favor of or against actions—and their interaction. The interaction between normative reasons is usually made sense of by appealing to the metaphor of (normative) weight scales. This paper substitutes an argumentation-theoretic model for this metaphor. The upshot is a general and precise model that is faithful to the philosophical ideas.
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Notes
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It’s worth noting two features of our model that might turn out to be either advantages or drawbacks. First, we represent reasons with negative polarity—reasons that speak against actions—only indirectly. In our model, any reason is always a reason for an option. So, it is a reason against an option only in so far as it adds to the final weight of an alternative option. Second, it is sometimes claimed that reasons can switch their polarity when combined [8]. Thus, in an (in)famous example, Prakken and Sartor [8] describe the effects of heat and rain on your going jogging: taken by themselves, the facts that it is raining and that it is hot constitute reasons for you not to go jogging, but, taken in combination, they speak in favor of going jogging. If these cases exist, our model cannot account for them. However, given that their existence is disputed (see e.g., [3, 7, 9]), our model may well gives the correct verdict here.
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Acknowledgement
Vincent de Wit and Aleks Knoks acknowledge financial support from the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR). Knoks was supported through the project OPEN O20/14776480, de Wit through the project PRIDE19/14268506. We also thank our three anonymous referees for their generous comments.
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Streit, D., de Wit, V., Knoks, A. (2023). Reasons in Weighted Argumentation Graphs. In: Alechina, N., Herzig, A., Liang, F. (eds) Logic, Rationality, and Interaction. LORI 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14329. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45558-2_19
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