Taxonomy
Disposition of conflict
Collapse
When the AI's norms conflict, the system resolves the conflict into a single output, with no trace or acknowledgment of the disagreement that produced it. The plurality is thereby aggregated, averaged, or adjudicated away.
Root: arXiv 2402.05070.
Disposition of conflict
Contest
The conflict between norms is preserved and kept procedurally live. Either the output itself carries the disagreement, or the decision stays open to challenge through a standing channel.
Root: Pettit (1997) on contestatory control; Mouffe (2000) on agonism.
Disposition of conflict
Partition
The conflict is neither resolved nor sustained but routed around. Multiple normative orders are kept intact, and a rule assigns which one governs a given case.
Root: von Savigny (1849); Lijphart (1977); Santos (2002) on interlegality.
Locus of authority
Codified
The norms the AI ought to follow exist as an explicit written specification, set prior to deployment and, in principle, complete before any particular case arises. Authority resides in this specification.
Root: Hart, The Concept of Law (1961).
Locus of authority
Case-accumulated
The norms reside in a growing body of past decided cases. No case is decided by a rule stated in advance; what the AI should do is whatever the accumulated decisions have held.
Root: Levi (1949); Jonsen & Toulmin (1988).
Locus of authority
Customary
The norms reside in regularities of practice (what agents in the population actually do), never written down and never adjudicated. There is no authoritative moment at which a norm gets explicitly stated.
Root: Burke (1790); Lewis (1969); Hayek (1973).
Locus of authority
Dispositional
The norms reside in the AI's trained character rather than in any external artifact. There is no rule to consult and nothing to look up, only the disposition itself.
Root: Aristotelian hexis: virtue as stable disposition rather than rule-following.
Locus of authority
Procedural
No norms persist between decisions. What the AI should do is whatever a specified procedure (a vote, a deliberation, a debate) yields at the moment of decision.
Root: Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (1992).
Scroll the grid sideways to reach the last column.
Reading the diagrams
Every regime carries a diagram of what it does, and every approach one of its own — the regime's figure with that approach's move cut into it. A color says what kind of thing a box is, and says the same thing in all of them; an arrow says what one thing does to another.
Scroll the diagram sideways to see all of it.