How Group Lives Go Well

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Beverley, John, Hurley, Regina
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Beverley, John
Hurley, Regina
author_facet Beverley, John
Hurley, Regina
contents This paper explores the ontological space of group well being, proposing a framework for representing collective welfare, group functions, and long term contributions within an ontology engineering context. Traditional well being theories focus on individual states, often relying on hedonistic, desire satisfaction, or objective list models. Such approaches struggle to account for cases where individual sacrifices contribute to broader social progress, a critical challenge in modeling group flourishing. To address this, the paper refines and extends the Counterfactual Account (CT) of well being, which evaluates goodness of an event by comparing an individual's actual well being with a hypothetical counterpart in a nearby possible world. While useful, this framework is insufficient for group level ontologies, where well being depends on functional persistence, institutional roles, and historical impact rather than immediate individual outcomes. Drawing on Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), the paper introduces a model in which group flourishing is evaluated in terms of group functional, where members bear roles and exhibit persistence conditions akin to biological systems or designed artifacts. This approach enables semantic interoperability for modeling longitudinal social contributions, allowing for structured reasoning about group welfare, social institutions, and group flourishing over time.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_19968
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How Group Lives Go Well
Beverley, John
Hurley, Regina
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Science and Game Theory
This paper explores the ontological space of group well being, proposing a framework for representing collective welfare, group functions, and long term contributions within an ontology engineering context. Traditional well being theories focus on individual states, often relying on hedonistic, desire satisfaction, or objective list models. Such approaches struggle to account for cases where individual sacrifices contribute to broader social progress, a critical challenge in modeling group flourishing. To address this, the paper refines and extends the Counterfactual Account (CT) of well being, which evaluates goodness of an event by comparing an individual's actual well being with a hypothetical counterpart in a nearby possible world. While useful, this framework is insufficient for group level ontologies, where well being depends on functional persistence, institutional roles, and historical impact rather than immediate individual outcomes. Drawing on Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), the paper introduces a model in which group flourishing is evaluated in terms of group functional, where members bear roles and exhibit persistence conditions akin to biological systems or designed artifacts. This approach enables semantic interoperability for modeling longitudinal social contributions, allowing for structured reasoning about group welfare, social institutions, and group flourishing over time.
title How Group Lives Go Well
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.19968