Moral Values in Norm Decision Making

Most often, both agents and human societies use norms to coordinate their on-going activities. Nevertheless, choosing the 'right' set of norms to regulate these societies constitutes an open problem. Firstly, intrinsic norm relationships may lead to inconsistencies in the chosen set of norms. Secondly, and more importantly, there is an increasing demand of including ethical considerations in the decision making process. This paper focuses on choosing the 'right' norms by considering moral values together with society's partial preferences over these values and the extent to which candidate norms promote them. The resulting decision making problem can then be encoded as a linear program, and hence solved by state-of-the art solvers. Furthermore, we empirically test several optimisation scenarios so to determine the system's performance and the characteristics of the problem that affect its hardness.