Practical Reasoning Using Values Giving Meaning to Values

Each person holds numerous values that represent what is believed to be important. As a result, our values influence our behavior and play a role in practical reasoning. Various argumentation approaches use values to justify actions, but they assume a function that determines what values a state or action promotes and demotes. However, this is often open for debate, since values are abstract and can be interpreted in many ways. After giving an overview of how values are defined in social psychology, this paper defines values as preferences and introduces several argument schemes to reason about preferences. These schemes are used to give meaning to values and to determine whether values are promoted or demoted. Furthermore, value systems are used for practical reasoning and allow resolving conflicts when pursuing your values. An example is given of how the new argument schemes can be used to do practical reasoning using values.