Automating Argumentation for Deliberation in Cases of Conflict of Interest

One approach to deliberation about the choice of what to do in a particular situation is to use an argument scheme based on the practical syllogism to supply a presumptive reason for the action, which is then subjected to a process of critical questioning to see if the presumption can be maintained. In this paper we describe an implemented realisation of this approach. We describe a representation which permits the instantiation of the argument scheme and the generation and consideration of critical questions to it. In order to automate the process we supply operational interpretations of the argument scheme, the critical questions and rebuttals to those questions. Our realisation is illustrated with a detailed example of a particular case.