217 research outputs found
Prioritized Conditional Imperatives:Problems and a New Proposal
The sentences of deontic logic may be understood as describing what
an agent ought to do when faced with a given set of norms. If these
norms come into conflict, the best the agent can be expected to do
is to follow a maximal subset of the norms. Intuitively, a priority
ordering of the norms can be helpful in determining the relevant
sets and resolve conflicts, but a formal resolution mechanism has
been difficult to provide. In particular, reasoning about
prioritized conditional imperatives is overshadowed by problems such
as the `order puzzle\u27 that are not satisfactorily resolved by
existing approaches. The paper provides a new proposal as to how
these problems may be overcome
Deontic Logic and Natural Language
There has been a recent surge of work on deontic modality within philosophy of language. This work has put the deontic logic tradition in contact with natural language semantics, resulting in significant increase in sophistication on both ends. This chapter surveys the main motivations, achievements, and prospects of this work
The Role of Deontic Logic in the Specification of Information Systems
In this paper we discuss the role that deontic logic plays in the specification of information systems, either because constraints on the systems directly concern norms or, and even more importantly, system constraints are considered ideal but violable (so-called `soft¿ constraints).\ud
To overcome the traditional problems with deontic logic (the so-called paradoxes), we first state the importance of distinguishing between ought-to-be and ought-to-do constraints and next focus on the most severe paradox, the so-called Chisholm paradox, involving contrary-to-duty norms. We present a multi-modal extension of standard deontic logic (SDL) to represent the ought-to-be version of the Chisholm set properly. For the ought-to-do variant we employ a reduction to dynamic logic, and show how the Chisholm set can be treated adequately in this setting. Finally we discuss a way of integrating both ought-to-be and ought-to-do reasoning, enabling one to draw conclusions from ought-to-be constraints to ought-to-do ones, and show by an example the use(fulness) of this
Designing Normative Theories for Ethical and Legal Reasoning: LogiKEy Framework, Methodology, and Tool Support
A framework and methodology---termed LogiKEy---for the design and engineering
of ethical reasoners, normative theories and deontic logics is presented. The
overall motivation is the development of suitable means for the control and
governance of intelligent autonomous systems. LogiKEy's unifying formal
framework is based on semantical embeddings of deontic logics, logic
combinations and ethico-legal domain theories in expressive classic
higher-order logic (HOL). This meta-logical approach enables the provision of
powerful tool support in LogiKEy: off-the-shelf theorem provers and model
finders for HOL are assisting the LogiKEy designer of ethical intelligent
agents to flexibly experiment with underlying logics and their combinations,
with ethico-legal domain theories, and with concrete examples---all at the same
time. Continuous improvements of these off-the-shelf provers, without further
ado, leverage the reasoning performance in LogiKEy. Case studies, in which the
LogiKEy framework and methodology has been applied and tested, give evidence
that HOL's undecidability often does not hinder efficient experimentation.Comment: 50 pages; 10 figure
Multiagent Deontic Logic and its Challenges from a Normative Systems Perspective
This article gives an overview of several challenges studied in deontic logic, with an emphasis on challenges involving agents. We start with traditional modal deontic logic using preferences to address the challenge of contrary-toduty reasoning, and STIT theory addressing the challenges of non-deterministic actions, moral luck and procrastination. Then we turn to alternative normbased deontic logics detaching obligations from norms to address the challenge of Jørgensen’s dilemma, including the question how to derive obligations from a normative system when agents cannot assume that other agents comply with their norms. We discuss also some traditional challenges from the viewpoint of normative systems: when a set of norms may be termed ‘coherent’, how to deal with normative conflicts, how to combine normative systems and traditional deontic logic, how various kinds of permission can be accommodated, how meaning postulates and counts-as conditionals can be taken into account,how sets of norms may be revised and merged, and how normative systems can be combined with game theory. The normative systems perspective means that norms, not ideality or preference, should take the central position in deontic semantics, and that a semantics that represents norms explicitly provides a helpful tool for analysing, clarifying and solving the problems of deontic logic. We focus on the challenges rather than trying to give full coverage of related work, for which we refer to the handbook of deontic logic and normative systems
A structured argumentation framework for detaching conditional obligations
We present a general formal argumentation system for dealing with the
detachment of conditional obligations. Given a set of facts, constraints, and
conditional obligations, we answer the question whether an unconditional
obligation is detachable by considering reasons for and against its detachment.
For the evaluation of arguments in favor of detaching obligations we use a
Dung-style argumentation-theoretical semantics. We illustrate the modularity of
the general framework by considering some extensions, and we compare the
framework to some related approaches from the literature.Comment: This is our submission to DEON 2016, including the technical appendi
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