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Practical reasoning using values: an argumentative approach based on a hierarchy of values

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Abstract

Values are at the heart of human decision-making. They are used to decide whether something or some state of affairs is good or not, and they are also used to address the moral dilemma of the right thing to do under given circumstances. Both uses are present in several everyday situations, from the design of a public policy to the negotiation of employee benefit packages. Both uses of values are specially relevant when one intends to design or validate that artificial intelligent systems behave in a morally correct way. In real life, the choice of policy components or the agreed upon benefit package are processes that involve argumentation. Likewise, the design and deployment of value-driven artificial entities may be well served by embedding practical reasoning capabilities in these entities or using argumentation for their design and certification processes. In this paper, we propose a formal framework to support the choice of actions of a value-driven agent and arrange them into plans that reflect the agent’s preferences. The framework is based on defeasible argumentation. It presumes that agent values are partially ordered in a hierarchy that is used to resolve conflicts between incommensurable values.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are indebted to the anonymous reviewers for their in-depth constructive comments and suggestions that have help to significantly improve the paper. Teze acknowledges partial support by CONICET, Universidad Nacional del Sur (UNS), and Universidad Nacional de Entre Ríos (UNER), Argentina. Perelló-Moragues is supported with an AGAUR industrial doctoral grant sponsored by FCC AQUALIA, IIIA-CSIC, and UAB. Godo, Perelló-Moragues and Noriega acknowledge the AppPhil project (funded by Caixa Bank, RecerCaixa 2017) and the Spanish FEDER/ MINECO project CIMBVAL (TIN2017-89758-R). Godo’s work is also supported by the Spanish FEDER/ MINECO project RASO (TIN2015-71799-C2-1-P).

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Correspondence to Juan C. L. Teze.

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Teze, J.C.L., Perelló-Moragues, A., Godo, L. et al. Practical reasoning using values: an argumentative approach based on a hierarchy of values. Ann Math Artif Intell 87, 293–319 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10472-019-09660-8

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