Modelling State Intervention

In previous work we have looked at how agents reason in situations of conflict of interest, using an approach based on an argument scheme for practical reasoning and associated critical questions. In this paper we add the possibility of the State intervening to attempt to improve the outcome. We model the State as another agent in the scenario, with its own repertoire of actions, and its own interests represented as an ordering on values. Where arguments are directed towards different agents with their own different interests it is not possible to use standard means of determining the acceptability of arguments, since these methods evaluate arguments from a single perspective. We therefore adopt the approach of simulating the reasoning of the agents using a procedural version of the argument scheme and associated questions. We present our work through consideration of an extended example, draw some conclusions and identify directions for future work.