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According to Act Consequentialism, an act is right if and only if its outcome is not worse than the outcome of any alternative to that act. This view, however, leads to deontic paradoxes if the alternatives to an act are all other acts that can be done in the situation. A typical response is to only apply this rightness criterion to maximally specific acts and to take the alternatives to a maximally specific act to be the other maximally specific acts that can be done in the situation. (This view can then be supplanted by a separate account for the rightness of acts that are not maximally specific.) This paper defends a rival view, Binary Act Consequentialism, where, for any voluntary act, that act is right if and only if its outcome is not worse than the outcome of not doing that act. Binary Act Consequentialism, which dates back to Jeremy Bentham, has few supporters. A number of seemingly powerful objections have been considered fatal. In this paper, I rebut these objections and put forward a positive argument for the view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Around the turn of the 20th century, Keynes and Johnson extended the well-known square of opposition to an octagon of opposition, in order to account for subject negation (e.g., statements like 'all non-S are P'). The main goal of this paper is to study the logical properties of the Keynes-Johnson (KJ) octagons of opposition. In particular, we will discuss three concrete examples of KJ octagons: the original one for subject-negation, a contemporary one from knowledge representation, and a third one (hitherto not yet studied) from deontic logic. We show that these three KJ octagons are all Aristotelian isomorphic, but not all Boolean isomorphic to each other (the first two are representable by bitstrings of length 7, whereas the third one is representable by bitstrings of length 6). These results nicely fit within our ongoing research efforts toward setting up a systematic classification of squares, octagons, and other diagrams of opposition. Finally, obtaining a better theoretical understanding of the KJ octagons allows us to answer some open questions that have arisen in recent applications of these diagrams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Mandarin Chinese, the expression nǐ kànzhe bàn ba can be employed in either 'you-decide use' (you assess and decide by yourself), whereby the speaker disclaims his/her deontic authority to the recipient in decision-making, or 'I-claim use' (you have to assess and decide cautiously), whereby he/she claims a higher degree of deontic authority than the recipient when determining a proposed action. Focusing on the 'I-claim use' of nǐ kànzhe bàn ba, this study examines how this expression is manipulated by customers to negotiate solutions for their complaints with customer service representatives in Chinese e-shopping platforms. Utilising naturally occurring data from Taobao service encounters spanning about one year, this study employs a discursive approach and finds that this expression fulfills one of a number of pragmatic functions: (1) when there is no mutual agreement on the complaint proposals, the customers deploy it to upgrade their deontic authority to orient to their own unilateral solution and refrain from further negotiations; (2) when expressing a negative evaluation, the customers use it to pre-empt potential complainables that reflect their strong deontic authority; or (3) following non-substantive rectification on the part of the agent, the customers use it to express diluted deontic authority in order to display disaffiliation and solicit more substantive proposals. By analyzing the use of this expression in e-shopping service encounters, our study contributes to understanding how deontic authority is exercised in negotiating solutions to complaints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amie Thomasson's Norms and Necessity offers a non-factualist theory of the language of metaphysical necessity, centering on the idea that statements of necessity express semantic norms. This article identifies a potential problem for the view by distinguishing two kinds of conditional necessity, investigates a solution derived from a well-known parallel pair of conditional necessities in deontic logic, but finds it is not up to the job. The last part of the paper suggests a different route, largely in keeping with the underlying ideas behind Thomasson's approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autonomous behaviors may raise ethical issues that agents must consider in their reasoning. Some approaches use deontic logics, while others consider a value-based argumentation framework. However, no work combines both modal logic and argumentation to reason about ethics. Hence, we propose a new argumentation framework where arguments are built from a n-ary multi-modal logic. It allows to express different kinds of operators, e.g. nullary choice or moral worth operators, dyadic deontic operators or mental states. However the standard attacks based on logical contradictions are no longer sufficient to catch an intuitive meaning for attacks. Hence, we enrich standard attacks by characterizing how oppositions between modal operators arise. Furthermore we show the standard logic-based attacks have a quasi-symmetry property, i.e. when an argument attacks another, this argument is necessarily attacked by another one. Our modal attacks do not have this property, which is highly relevant to decide a dilemma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many real-world agents recognise that they impose harms by choosing to emit carbon, for example, by flying. Yet many do so anyway, and then attempt to make things right by offsetting those harms. Such offsetters typically believe that, by offsetting, they change the deontic status of their behaviour, making an otherwise impermissible action permissible. Do they succeed in practice? Some philosophers have argued that they do, since their offsets appear to reverse the adverse effects of their emissions. But we show that they do not. In practice, standard carbon offsetting does not reverse the harms of the original action, nor does it even benefit the same group as was harmed. Standard moral theories hence deny that such offsetting succeeds. Indeed, we show that any moral theory that allows offsetting in this setting faces a dilemma between allowing any wrong to be offset, no matter how grievous, and recognising an implausibly sharp discontinuity between offsettable actions and non-offsettable actions. The most plausible response is to accept that carbon offsetting fails to right our climate wrongs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the standard theory of deontic modals, 'ought' is understood as expressing a propositional operator. However, this view has been called into question by Almotahari and Rabern's puzzle about deontic 'ought', according to which the ethical principle that one ought to be wronged by another person rather than wrong them is intuitively coherent but the standard theory makes it incoherent. In this paper, I take up Almotahari and Rabern's challenge and offer a refinement of the standard theory to handle the puzzle. I propose that 'ought' is evaluated relative to contextual parameters (e.g. Kratzer's conversational backgrounds, Finlay and Snedegar's alternative sets) and those contextual parameters are sensitive to agents as well as possible worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We combine linear temporal logic (with both past and future modalities) with a deontic version of justification logic to provide a framework for reasoning about time and epistemic and normative reasons. In addition to temporal modalities, the resulting logic contains two kinds of justification assertions: epistemic justification assertions and deontic justification assertions. The former presents justification for the agent's knowledge and the latter gives reasons for why a proposition is obligatory. We present two kinds of semantics for the logic: one based on Fitting models and the other based on neighborhood models. The use of neighborhood semantics enables us to define the dual of deontic justification assertions properly, which corresponds to a notion of permission in deontic logic. We then establish the soundness and completeness of an axiom system of the logic with respect to these semantics. Further, we formalize the Protagoras versus Euathlus paradox in this logic and present a precise analysis of the paradox, and also briefly discuss Leibniz's solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite increasing interest in studying arguments from deontic authority of the general form "(1) δ is a deontic authority in institution Ω ; (2) according to δ , I should do α , C: therefore, (3) I should do α ", the state of the art models are not capable of grasping their complexity. The existing sets of critical questions assigned to this argumentation scheme seem to conflate two problems: whether a person is subject to an authority of an institution in the first place and whether the command issued within the context of a particular institution is eventually binding. For this reason, we introduce (1) a set of Basic Critical Questions to scrutinize the former issue, and (2) a set of more detailed questions related to specific features, also referred to as "parameters", of institutional environments (Intra-Institutional Critical Questions). We identify major elements of institutional environments in which authoritative utterances are made and the crucial parameters of arguments from deontic authority. The selected evidence from the decisions of the Polish Supreme Administrative Court helps us show how these parameters may be used to reconstruct subtypes of this argument scheme, with their associated sets of critical questions. In specific institutional contexts, such detailed schemes are capable of grasping the complexity of appeals to deontic authority and thus should be used rather than general schemes. The reconstruction of argumentation schemes with critical questions shows how particular arguments may successfully be attacked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a systematic analysis of the well-known notions of weak and strong permission in input/output (I/O) logic. We extend the account of permission initially put forward by Makinson and Van der Torre to the whole family of I/O systems developed during the last two decades. The main contribution is a series of characterization results for strong permission, based on establishing the so-called non-repetition property. We also study an input/output logic not yet covered in the literature. It supports reasoning by cases—a natural feature of human reasoning. The output is not closed under logical entailment. At the same time, it avoids excess output using a consistency check—a technique familiar from non-monotonic logic. This makes it well suited for contrary-to-duty reasoning. The axiomatic characterization is in terms of a generalized OR rule. We discuss the implications of all this for our understanding of the notion of the coherence of a normative system. Topics for future research are identified. 1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an extension of Defeasible Deontic Logic to deal with the Pragmatic Oddity problem. The logic applies three general principles: (i) the Pragmatic Oddity problem must be solved within a general logical treatment of contrary-to-duty (CTD) reasoning; (ii) non-monotonic methods must be adopted to handle CTD reasoning; (iii) logical models of CTD reasoning must be computationally feasible and, if possible, efficient. The proposed extension of Defeasible Deontic Logic elaborates a preliminary version of the model proposed by Governatori and Rotolo [ 15 ]. The previous solution was based on particular characteristics of the (constructive, top-down) proof theory of the logic. However, that method introduces some degree of non-determinism. To avoid the problem, we provide a bottom-up characterization of the logic. The new characterization offers insights for the efficient implementation of the logic and allows us to establish the computational complexity of the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different notions of the consistency of obligations collapse in standard deontic logic. In justification logics, which feature explicit reasons for obligations, the situation is different. Their strength depends on a constant specification and on the available set of operations for combining different reasons. We present different consistency principles in justification logic and compare their logical strength. We propose a novel semantics for which justification logics with the explicit version of axiom D , |$\textbf {jd}$|⁠ , are complete for arbitrary constant specifications. Consistency is sometimes formulated in terms of permission. We therefore study permission in the context of justification logic, introducing a notion of free-choice permission for the first time. We then discuss the philosophical implications with regard to some deontic paradoxes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the anxiety expressed by von Wright over the status of the deontic permission, P, as an independent normative category, given the interdefinability between P and O at the foundation of deontic logic. Two concerns are noted: the reducibility of P to O, and the inadequacy of P to convey a full permission in a social setting. Drawing on resources from the Hohfeldian analytical framework, the relational and aggregate features of permission are explored, and an aggregate conception of permission, P, is recognized. With the assistance of insights from Demey and Smessaert on duals, Hansson on formalization, and Soames on interdefinability, it is concluded that the interdefinability thesis can be defended without threatening the independent status of P. Additional grounds for reaching this conclusion are provided from a detailed analysis of the relationship between P and P. Some implications of the more expansive notion of permission, P, are considered with regard to the resources of deontic logic and their application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is logic normative for belief? A standard approach to answering this question has been to investigate bridge principles relating claims of logical consequence to norms for belief. Although the question is naturally an epistemic one, bridge principles have typically been investigated in isolation from epistemic debates over the correct norms for belief. In this paper we tackle the question of whether logic is normative for belief by proposing a Kripkean model theory accounting for the interaction between logical, doxastic, epistemic and deontic notions and using this model theory to show which bridge principles are implied by epistemic norms that we have independent reason to accept, for example, the knowledge norm and the truth norm. We propose a preliminary theory of the interaction between logical, doxastic, epistemic and deontic notions that has among its commitments bridge principles expressing how logic is normative for belief. We also show how our framework suggests that logic is exceptionally normative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In some places far from Peru with the absence of the Notary Public, but with the presence of the Justice of the Peace, there is legal insecurity in the registry because it is not possible to carry out legal transactions on the real estate. This is what happens in the border province of Purús. Law 29824 reduced the Notarial powers of Justices of the Peace to only grant deed of transfer of possession of real estate that does not exceed 50 Procedural Reference Units (PRU), on the other hand, Law 27755 that creates the Land Registry, in its article 7, stipulates the use of registration forms to register real estate, as long as it does not exceed the economic value of 20 Tax Units (TU). This means that in some remote parts of the province, some citizen should enter into a legal transaction on their property, however, they cannot do so because they do not have a Notary Public, even if they do have a Justice of the Peace Lawyer, who could replace him (her), but who by law is disqualified from doing this job. That is why this article aims to design a recommendation system that allows the citizen to make the correct decision about what to do in each case, in addition to the fact that the system can serve to instruct the Justice of the Peace Lawyer of these communities to teach the citizen on the procedures to follow. This recommendation system is based on deontic logic, which is a variant of modal logic dedicated to reasoning about concepts related to conduct, especially has application in the legal field. The recommender system is a computer program that can be based on a model that serves to support individuals in recommending what action to take based on their needs or desires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that 'dirty hands' (DH) scenarios, where an agent is forced to do wrong in order to do right, are conceptually coherent. The charge of incoherence is a widespread and common criticism made by deontologists and consequentialists alike. They argue that DH theorists erroneously assume the existence of real moral dilemmas and then compound this error by claiming that it is possible to engage in justified moral wrongdoing. However, such critics argue that there are only prima facie moral dilemmas and hence it is not only irrational and obtuse to argue for DH scenarios, but also undermines our search for sound moral judgments in very difficult situations. Given the gravity of these charges, surprisingly little has been written in defence of DH as a coherent and necessary part of our moral vocabulary. If there can be no successful defence of the possibility of DH, then all talk of such scenarios become futile. This paper responds to two influential and what initially appear to be strongly plausible arguments used by critics of DH. I call these the 'Arguments from Deontic Logic' and the 'All-Things-Considered Argument'. I present three responses which seek to raise serious doubts about their efficacy. I then support the possibility of DH by exploring what we can learn about our moral reality from the moral emotion of 'tragic remorse'. This approach endorses the role of emotions in determining moral knowledge. It also rejects the view that ethical theories ought to dismiss DH experiences as incoherent in favour of questionable theoretical a priori assumptions, which seek a reductionist account of our moral reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first and greatest commandment according to Jesus, and so the one most central to Christian practice, is the command to love God. We argue that this commandment is best interpreted in aretaic rather than deontic terms. In brief, we argue that there is no obligation to love God. While bad , failure to seek and enjoy a union of love with God is not in violation of any general moral requirement. The core argument is straightforward: relations of intimacy should not be morally imposed upon autonomous beings. We contend that such reasoning applies to human beings' relationship to God. So, even if our ultimate end is to enjoy communion with God, God has no right that human beings seek a relationship with him. If this is correct, then the command to 'love God' is not the sort of moral principle that can be supported by threats of hellfire or other forms of coercion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What exactly do we need to do in order to make a promise, or to exercise some other normative power? On a view relied on by many philosophers writing on promising, consent, and related phenomena, the answer is that we must communicate a suitable kind of intention. On this view, power-conferring principles assert that specific normative consequences, determined in part by the content of the communicated intention, attach to such communicative acts, and these principles need not be socially practised or accepted to be true. The paper offers a defense of this convention-independent view against the forceful challenge developed by Jed Lewinsohn in 'The "Natural Unintelligibility" of Normative Powers'. Lewinsohn appeals to action-theoretic considerations to show that the relevant type of communicative act could not be performed under conditions of rationality and full information, and that therefore promissory power and other normative powers require the existence of social rules conferring such powers. The defense of the view targeted by Lewinsohn turns partly on the exact content of plausible constraints on the intelligibility of actions done with a particular aim, and partly on the question just how the social acceptance of power-conferring rules should be thought to matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automated Vehicles (AVs) are designed and programmed to follow traffic rules. However, there is no separate and comprehensive regulatory framework dedicated to AVs. The current Queensland traffic rules were designed for humans. These rules often contain open texture expressions, exceptions, and potential conflicts (conflict arises when exceptions cannot be handled in rules), which makes it hard for AVs to follow. This paper presents an automatic compliance checking framework to assess AVs behaviour against current traffic rules by addressing these issues. Specifically, it proposes a framework to determine which traffic rules and open texture expressions need some additional interpretation. Essentially this enables AVs to have a suitable and executable formalization of the traffic rules. Defeasible Deontic Logic (DDL) is used to formalize traffic rules and reasoning with AV information (behaviour and environment). The representation of rules in DDL helps effectively in handling and resolving exceptions, potential conflicts, and open textures in rules. 40 experiments were conducted on eight realistic traffic scenarios to evaluate the framework. The evaluation was undertaken both quantitatively and qualitatively. The evaluation result shows that the proposed framework is a promising system for checking Automated Vehicle interpretation and compliance with current traffic rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of meta-rules in logic, i.e. rules whose content includes other rules, has recently gained attention in the setting of non-monotonic reasoning: a first logical formalisation and efficient algorithms to compute the (meta)-extensions of such theories were proposed in Olivieri et al. (2021, Computing defeasible meta-logic. In JELIA 2021 , LNCS, vol. 12678, pp. 69–84. Springer.). This work extends such a logical framework by considering the deontic aspect. The resulting logic will not just be able to model policies but also tackle well-known aspects that occur in numerous legal systems. The use of Defeasible Logic to model meta-rules in the application area we just alluded to has been investigated. Within this line of research, the study mentioned above was not focusing on the general computational properties of meta-rules. This study fills this gap with two major contributions. First, we introduce and formalise two variants of Defeasible Deontic Logic (DDL) with meta-rules to represent (i) defeasible meta-theories with deontic modalities and (ii) two different types of conflicts among rules: Simple Conflict DDL and Cautious Conflict DDL. Second, we advance efficient algorithms to compute the extensions for both variants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, using Mark Schroeder’s (2008a) expressivist semantic framework for normative language as a case study, I will identify difficulties that even an expressivist semantic theory capable of addressing the Frege-Geach problem will encounter in handling the logical possibility of moral dilemmas. To this end, I will draw on a classical puzzle formulated by McConnell (1978) that the logical possibility of moral dilemmas conflicts with some of the prima facie plausible axioms of the standard deontic logic, which include obligation implies permission. On the tentative assumption that proponents of ethical expressivism should be generally committed to securing the logical possibility of moral dilemmas in their semantic theories, I will explore whether and how expressivists can successfully invalidate obligation implies permission within the framework developed by Schroeder. The case study eventually reveals that this can indeed be a hard task for expressivists. Generalizing from the case study, I will suggest that the source of the difficulty ultimately lies in the mentalist assumption of the expressivist semantic project that the logico-semantic relations exhibited by normative sentences should be modeled in terms of the psychological attitudes that speakers express by uttering them. My final goal will be to show that the difficulty expressivists face in dealing with the logical possibility of moral dilemmas is a reflection of the more general problem that their commitment to the mentalist assumption prevents them from flexibly adopting or dropping axioms in their semantic theories to get the right technical results.

This document is an editorial introducing a special issue of the Journal of Logic and Computation. The issue features five papers that were originally presented at the 15th International Conference 'Deontic Logic and Normative Systems' (DEON) in 2021. The conference focused on the theme of 'Norms in Social Perspective' and explored the application of deontic logic to the social dimension of normative reasoning. The papers in the special issue cover topics such as consistency and permission in deontic justification logic, modular orders on defaults in formal argumentation, a bottom-up defeasible deontic logic, permissive and regulative norms in deontic logic, and proof theory for the logics of bringing-it-about. The authors express their gratitude to the contributors, referees, and the editorial office for their assistance in preparing the issue. [Extracted from the article]

Spanish third-person reflexive clitic se allows for passive and impersonal uses that can sometimes be pragmatically interpreted as directive in spite of their declarative form, e.g. Eso no se hace 'That is not done'. This paper explores the grammatical, semantic and referential factors that promote such an interpretation, using a corpus of oral and written Peninsular media discourse and adopting a qualitative approach. Deontic readings are shown to be connected with more general uses of reflexive constructions as evidential and/or modal markers. Agent defocusing and imperfective verbal aspect construct an objective viewpoint of discourse whereby the event is detached from particular communicative circumstances. At the same time, contextual elements acting as space builders counter such objectivity by guiding the interpretation of the utterance as primarily concerning the direct participants. The analysis suggests that the inherent meanings of grammatical constructions are at the basis of their pragmatic potential in specific contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies some normative relations that hold between actions, their preconditions and their effects, with particular attention to connecting what are often called 'ought to be' norms with 'ought to do' norms. We use a formal model based on a form of transition system called a 'coloured labelled transition system' (coloured LTS) introduced in a series of papers by Sergot and Craven. Those works have variously presented a formalism (an 'action language') nC+ for defining and computing with a (coloured) LTS, and another, separate formalism, a modal language interpreted on a (coloured) LTS used to express its properties. We consolidate these two strands. Instead of specifying the obligatory and prohibited states and transitions as part of the construction of a coloured LTS as in nC+, we represent norms in the modal language and use those to construct a coloured LTS from a given regular (uncoloured) one. We also show how connections between norms on states and norms on transitions previously treated as fixed constraints of a coloured LTS can instead be defined within the modal language used for representing norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to expressivists, normative language expresses desire‐like states of mind. According to noncognitivists, normative beliefs have a desire‐like functional role. What is the relation between these two doctrines? It is widely assumed that expressivism commits you to noncognitivism, and vice versa. This paper opposes that assumption. I advance a view that combines a noncognitivist psychology with a descriptivist semantics for normative language. While this might seem like an ungainly hybrid, I argue that it has important advantages over more familiar metaethical positions. The noncognitivist aspect of the theory captures all of the explanatory benefits standardly associated with expressivism. At the same time, the descriptivist element allows us to avoid the semantic headaches for expressivism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the relationship between ethical actions and the reasons behind them, exploring whether actions' ethical properties are explained by the ethical properties of non-actions or by other factors. Topics include contrasting perspectives on this explanation from Kantians and Mooreans; an argument against the Deontic Primacy of Actions; and the role of judgment-sensitive attitudes in determining an agent's ethical obligations and actions.

In a recent paper, under the auspices of an unorthodox variety of bilateralism, we introduced a new kind of proof-theoretic semantics for the base modal logic K, whose values lie in the closed interval [0,1] of rational numbers [14]. In this paper, after clarifying our conception of bilateralism - dubbed "soft bilateralism" - we generalize the fractional method to encompass extensions and weakenings of K. Specifically, we introduce well-behaved hypersequent calculi for the deontic logic D and the non-normal modal logics E and M and thoroughly investigate their structural properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an approach for legal compliance checking in the Semantic Web which can be effectively applied for applications in the Linked Open Data environment. It is based on modeling deontic norms in terms of ontology classes and ontology property restrictions. It is also shown how this approach can handle norm defeasibility. Such methodology is implemented by decidable fragments of OWL 2, while legal reasoning is carried out by available decidable reasoners. The approach is generalised by presenting patterns for modeling deontic norms and norms compliance checking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we use proof-theoretic methods, specifically sequent calculi, admissibility of cut within them and the resultant subformula property, to examine a range of philosophically-motivated deontic logics. We show that for all of those logics it is a (meta)theorem that the Special Hume Thesis holds, namely that no purely normative conclusion follows non-trivially from purely descriptive premises (nor vice versa). In addition to its interest on its own, this also illustrates one way in which proof theory sheds light on philosophically substantial questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

kk states that knowing entails knowing that one knows, and K ¬ K states that not knowing entails knowing that one does not know. In light of the arguments against kk and K ¬ K ⁠ , one might consider modally qualified variants of those principles. According to weak kk , knowing entails the possibility of knowing that one knows. And according to weak K ¬ K ⁠ , not knowing entails the possibility of knowing that one does not know. This paper shows that weak kk and weak K ¬ K are much stronger than they initially appear. Jointly, they entail kk and K ¬ K ⁠. And they are susceptible to variants of the standard arguments against kk and K ¬ K ⁠. This has interesting implications for the debate on positive introspection and for deeper issues concerning the structure and limits of knowability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commanders gain authority from obedience and lose authority from disobedience. We should expect commanders to therefore devise commands that reduce the probability of disobedience. To aid recognition of these techniques for reducing the risk of disobedience, I focus on the extreme of case of commands that reduce the probability to zero. Each of my ten commandments illustrates a logical technique for engineering out disobedience. Once you master these safety measures, you can confidently legislate your own universal maxims. Your innovations will be good news for Immanuel Kant's characterization of morality in terms of categorical imperatives. The commandments also raise interesting questions about responsibility for necessities and the nature of rule following. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this paper, we apply relating semantics to the widely discussed problem of free choice between permitted actions or situations in normative systems. Leaving aside contexts in which the free choice principle is obviously unacceptable (weak permission understood as an absence of prohibition) or uncontroversially valid (strong permission within systems with a closed repertoire of actions or situations), we concentrate on free choice for explicit permissions. In order to construct a formal representation of explicit permissions, we introduce a special constant, |$\texttt {permit}$|⁠ , which is analogous to the constant |$\texttt {violation}$| used in the Andersonian–Kangerian approach to deontic logic with respect to prohibition and obligation. Consequently, we define a permission operator on the basis of the |$\texttt {permit}$| constant and a relation of legitimization. The general idea is that |$P \varphi $| is true if and only if |$\texttt {permit}$| is true, which means that a permission is actually issued and |$\varphi $| is legitimized by |$\texttt {permit}$|⁠. The intuitive notion of legitimization is formally represented by an operator of relating implication: a non-classical implication that is semantically defined by adding a constraint to the classical meaning of implication to the effect that arguments are related by a special relation. The properties of this relation are based on an informal, intuitive meaning of legitimization and determine the properties of the permission operator. We show that the resulting permission operator possesses the free choice property and avoids certain unwanted consequences that follow from alternative approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous work across multiple disciplines has shown thatnorms have a powerful impact on behavior. Little is known,however about how norms are represented in the mind. Herewe examine whether people’s norm representations come inreliably identifiable grades of strength. Classical models ofnorms distinguished between the broad deontic categories ofprescriptions, permissions, and prohibitions. Four studiesdemonstrate that people consistently and consensuallydistinguish between deontic expressions that denote grades ofprohibition (e.g., frowned upon < unacceptable < forbidden)and grades of prescription (e.g., called for < expected

We present the architecture of Houdini-2.0, a reasoning system that computes the extension of a defeasible deontic theory given as input, the process of computing the consequences of the rules expressed in the theory itself. The decision process is a sceptical, non-monotonic, and it allows us to determine which prescriptive behaviours are in force (obligations, permissions, prohibitions) along with propositional ones. The system is based on pre-existing algorithmic solutions, and it is implemented as an online platform to deploy the results of a computation in several use cases, including those that pertain legal domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]