Improving bioethical decision-making with a little help from legal argumentation

The most appropriate method for clinical decision-making is deliberation. The deliberative procedure aims to achieve wise and prudent decisions about health care taking into account facts, values and norms. Since deliberative reasoning is shared by healthcare professions, ethics and law, this paper introduces the structure and features of the bioethical deliberative procedure and suggests to improve it with some contributions from legal science and theories of argumentation.El método más adecuado para la toma de decisiones biomédicas es la deliberación. El procedimiento deliberativo pretende alcanzar decisiones prudentes y razonables tras tomar en consideración hechos, valores y normas. Al ser la racionalidad deliberativa un rasgo compartido por las profesiones asistenciales, la ética y el derecho, el presente artículo expone la estructura y las características del método bioético deliberativo y propone mejorarla mediante algunas contribuciones de la ciencia jurídica y las teorías de la argumentación

A structured argumentation framework for detaching conditional obligations

We present a general formal argumentation system for dealing with the detachment of conditional obligations. Given a set of facts, constraints, and conditional obligations, we answer the question whether an unconditional obligation is detachable by considering reasons for and against its detachment. For the evaluation of arguments in favor of detaching obligations we use a Dung-style argumentation-theoretical semantics. We illustrate the modularity of the general framework by considering some extensions, and we compare the framework to some related approaches from the literature.Comment: This is our submission to DEON 2016, including the technical appendi

A Critical Discussion Game for Prohibiting Fallacies

The study of fallacies is at the heart of argumentation studies. In response to Hamblin’s devastating critique of the state of the theory of fallacies in 1970, both formal dialectical and informal approaches to fallacies developed. In the current paper, we focus on an influential informal approach to fallacies, part of the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation. Central to the pragma-dialectical method for analysing and evaluating argumentative discourse is the ideal model of a critical discussion. In this discussion model, a dialectical perspective on argumentation is combined with a pragmatic take on communicative interaction. By formalising and computationally implementing the model of a critical discussion, we take a first step in the development of software to computationally model argumentative dialogue in which fallacies are prohibited along the pragmadialectical norms. We do this by defining the Critical Discussion Game, a formal dialogue game based on the pragma-dialectical discussion model, executable on an online user-interface which is part of a larger infrastructure of argumentation software