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.

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. The project will also explore practical policy issues that take into consideration individual vulnerability in the democratic decision-making process. The vulnerabilities examined range from biological, physical and mental vulnerability, to individual and collective vulnerabilities due to social structures.

Objectives

• To explore normative theories and empirical data on collective decision-making.
• To investigate the recognition of normative principles at the group level.
• To study how individuals deal with conflicting norms and normative uncertainty.