P3: Normative judgments in collective decision-making
Normative approaches to collective decision-making are prevalent, not only in (moral) philosophy, but also in economics and political theory. Yet, they remain in the realm of theory. It is neither clear whether collective decisions are guided by the postulated norms in practice nor how a group achieves an agreement on those norms in the first place, in particular if there is normative uncertainty or if there are mutually exclusive normative principles. A specific case concerns the use of AI tools in collective decision-making processes.
The project is a vital contribution to the still scanty research linking normative theories with empirical data on collective decision-making. It deals with the open questions of how diverse normative judgments can be transformed into a group judgment and which characteristics of interactions within the group foster or hamper the emergence of a collective normative judgment. These questions can be studied at different levels: from the level of individuals through the evolution of normative judgments to the level of groups, as well as from some, potentially more homogenous, sub-group levels to the level of the entire group.
Objectives
- To investigate the recognition of normative principles at the group level.
- To study how individuals deal with conflicting norms and normative uncertainty.
- To explore the normative foundation for using AI in collective decision-making.