Reasoning with preferences and values

This paper is concerned with supporting practical thinking. This involves reasoning with a decision maker’s preferential and ethical orderings of the different courses of action that could be pursued. The paper rejects the use of a numeric utility function and argues for a logic programming approach for decision support. The basic properties of a logic model for reasoning with preferences and ethical values is defined. The paper then considers the problem of trading-off conflicting preferences and values. It proposes a principle of cooperating preferences and values after a review of several other approaches.