BACKGROUND Empirical-ethical research constitutes a relatively new field which integrates socio-empirical research and normative analysis. As direct inferences from descriptive data to normative conclusions are problematic, an ethical framework is needed to determine the relevance of the empirical data for normative argument. While issues of normative-empirical collaboration and questions of em...

Norms are known to be a major factor determining humans behavior. It’s also shown that norms can be quite effective tool for building agent-based societies. Various normative architectures have been proposed for designing normative multi-agent systems (NorMAS). Due to human nature of the concept norms, many of these architectures are built based on theories in social sciences. Tipping point the...

For millennia, philosophers have speculated about the origins of ethics. Recent research in evolutionary psychology and the neurosciences has shed light on that question. But this research also has normative significance. A standard way of arguing against a normative ethical theory is to show that in some circumstances the theory leads to judgments that are contrary to our common moral intuitio...

In The Sources of Normativity, Christine Korsgaard argues that in order to avoid the threat of moral skepticism, our moral theories must show how the claims they make about the nature of our actions obligate us to act morally. A theory that can justify the normativity of morality in this way answers what Korsgaard calls “the normative question.” Although Korsgaard claims that only Kantian theor...

When agents make decisions, they have to deal with norms regulating the system. In this paper we therefore propose a rule-based qualitative decision and game theory combining ideas from multiagent systems and normative systems. Whereas normative systems are typically modelled as a single authority that imposes obligations and permissions on the agents, our theory is based on a multiagent struct...

This article critically examines Jürgen Habermas’s theory of democracy as developed in Between Facts and Norms. In particular, it focuses on the concept of communicative power and argues that there is a crucial ambiguity in Habermas’s use of this concept. Since communicative power is the key normative resource that is supposed to counter the norm-free steering media of money and administrative ...

What place is there for virtue theory in theological ethics? Many question the normative significance of virtue theory in theological ethics today, leaving it to rule-based ethics to provide action-guidance. There are three key objections to the normativity of virtue theory: that virtue theory is about agents rather than actions, that virtue theory has nothing to say directly about the morality...

In this paper we are interested in developing goal-based normative agent architectures. We ask ourselves the question what a normative goal is. To answer this question we introduce a qualitative normative decision theory based on belief (B) and obligation (O) rules. We show that every agent which makes optimal decisions – which we call a BO rational agent – acts as if it is maximizing its achie...