The intuitive background of normative legal discourse and its formalization

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One of the motivations for the construction of a great many deontic logics has been the discovery of purely formal analogies with other modal logics. It is a well known fact that the first systems of deontic logic (von Wright, 1951a and 1951b) originated in the observation of strong analogies between the deontic operators P and O and the modal alethic operators of possibility and necessity (M and N), and the same is true for many later systems. But deontic logic may also be viewed as a rational reconstruction of the main features of norms and certain normative concepts, typical of the normative (legal and moral) discourse. On this view, a formal system must be supplemented by a sound interpretational analysis in order to make it clear what concepts are the explicanda of such a rational reconstruction. The clarification of the explicanda provides the adequacy criteria for the different systems of deontic logic. This does not mean that when confronted with two rival systems, in the sense that in one of them there is a principle (axiom, definition, rule of inference) which does not occur in the other, we must reject one of the systems. It may well be the case that, instead of being two different reconstructions of the same explicandum, they attempt to reconstruct different concepts hidden behind the ambiguity of the normative discourse. But in any case what is important is to delimit their areas of application and so to clarify as far as possible the corresponding explicanda.