Argumentation for Normative Reasoning

An agent’s behaviour is governed by multiple factors, including its beliefs/desires/intentions, its reasoning processes and societal influences acting upon it, such as norms. In this paper we propose an extensible argumentation inspired reasoning procedure, and show how it may be used to perform normative reasoning. . The language used by our procedure is built around defeasible, nonmonotonic rules called argument schemes. The evaluation of the interactions between argument schemes and predicates is performed using a novel argumentation based technique. We show how issues such as normative conflict, priorities over norms, and the effects of norms may be represented using the framework, and how the agent may use these to reason effectively.