Conflicting Imperatives and Dyadic Deontic Logic

Abstract

Often a set of imperatives or norms seems satisfiable from the outset, but conflicts arise when ways to fulfill all are ruled out by unfortunate circumstances. Semantic methods to handle normative conflicts were devised by B. van Fraassen and J. F. Horty, but these are not sensitive to circumstances. The present paper extends these resolution mechanisms to circumstantial inputs, defines according dyadic deontic operators, and provides a sound and (weakly) complete axiomatic system for such a deontic semantics.KeywordsMoral DilemmaDeontic LogicAxiom SchemeConsistent SubsetProposition LetterThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.