Ethical reasoning for norm-based systems

Most often, both agents and human societies use norms to coordinate their on-going activities. Nevertheless, choosing the 'right' set of norms to regulate these societies constitutes an open problem. Firstly, intrinsic norm relationships may lead to inconsistencies in the chosen set of norms. Secondly, and more importantly, there is an increasing demand of including ethical considerations in the decision making process. This work focuses on choosing the 'right' norms by considering moral values together with society's partial preferences over these moral values and the extent to which candidate norms promote them. This ethical criteria along with other considerations, such as norm relationships and cost, build our decision making problem. We can then encode it as a linear program, and hence solve it with state-of-the art solvers. Furthermore, we empirically test several optimisation scenarios to determine the solver's performance and the characteristics of the problem that affect its hardness.Peer reviewe