How Group Lives Go Well

2025-04-28

AI Summary

Traditional well-being theories, rooted in methodological individualism, fail to formalize how individual sacrifice contributes to collective prosperity and societal progress. Method: We propose the first ontology framework for collective well-being, extending counterfactual welfare theory to the group level and integrating it with the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). Our approach formally models group flourishing through functional persistence, incorporating collective functions, institutional roles, and historical continuity. Contribution/Results: Leveraging ontology engineering, formal semantics, and group function theory, the framework enables logical reasoning about cross-temporal social contributions, institutional evolution, and emergent collective capacities. It supports interoperable, cross-domain knowledge integration and provides a semantic infrastructure for long-term causal analysis of societal advancement—thereby transcending individualist welfare paradigms and establishing a rigorous, scalable foundation for modeling collective flourishing.

Technology Category

• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Ontologies
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Satisfiability Modulo Theories
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Conceptual Inference and Reasoning

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Scalable techniques for the creation, curation, publication, maintenance, and consumption of large, Web-based, structured, reusable, knowledge graphs and ontologies
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization

Abstract

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.

Problem

• Exploring group well-being ontology beyond individual-focused models
• Extending Counterfactual Account for group-level functional persistence
• Modeling group flourishing via roles and historical impact

Innovation

• Extends Counterfactual Account for group well-being
• Uses Basic Formal Ontology for group functions
• Models group flourishing via functional persistence