How Group Lives Go Well
This addresses the challenge of representing collective welfare for ontology engineering, but it is incremental as it refines an existing counterfactual account.
The paper tackles the problem of modeling group well-being, which traditional individual-focused theories struggle with, by proposing a framework based on Basic Formal Ontology to evaluate group flourishing in terms of functional persistence and historical impact.
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.