Reasoning with preferences and values

摘要

This paper is concerned with supporting practical thinking. This involves reasoning with a decision maker's preferential and ethical orderings of the different courses of action that could be pursued. We reject the use of a numeric utility function and argue for a logic programming approach for decision support. The basic properties of a logic model for reasoning with preferences and ethical values is defined. The paper then considers the problem of trading-off conflicting preferences and values. We propose a principle of cooperating preferences and values after a review of several other approaches.