Deontic Paradoxes Research Articles

Binary act consequentialism

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.

Deontic Paradoxes in ASP with Weak Constraints

Deontic Paradoxes in ASP with Weak Constraints

Deontic Paradoxes in Mīmāṃsā Logics: There and Back Again

Centered around the analysis of the prescriptive portion of the Vedas, the Sanskrit philosophical school of Mīmāṃsā provides a treasure trove of normative investigations. We focus on the leading Mīmāṃsā authors Prabhākara, Kumārila and Maṇḍana, and discuss three modal logics that formalize their deontic theories. In the first part of this paper, we use logic to analyze, compare and clarify the various solutions to the śyena controversy, a two-thousand-year-old problem arising from seemingly conflicting commands in the Vedas. In the second part, the formalized Mīmāṃsā theories are analyzed and employed to provide alternative perspectives on well-known paradoxes from the contemporary field of deontic logic. Thus, we go from logic to Mīmāṃsā and back again.

Consistency and permission in deontic justification logic

Abstract 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.

Defeasibility applied to Forrester’s paradox

Deontic logic is a logic often used to formalise scenarios in the legal domain. Within the legal domain there are many exceptions and conflicting obligations. This motivates the enrichment of deontic logic with not only the notion of defeasibility, which allows for reasoning about exceptions, but a stronger notion of typicality that is based on defeasibility. KLM-style defeasible reasoning is a logic system that employs defeasibility while Propositional Typicality Logic (PTL) is a logic that does the same for the notion of typicality. Deontic paradoxes are often used to examine logic systems as the paradoxes provide undesirable results even if the scenarios seem intuitive. Forrester’s paradox is one of the most famous of these paradoxes. This paper shows that KLM-style defeasible reasoning and PTL can be used to represent and reason with Forrester’s paradox in such a way as to block undesirable conclusions without completely sacrificing desirable deontic properties.

Deontic Paradoxes and Tableau System for Kalinowski’s Deontic Logic K1

In 1953, Jerzy Kalinowski published his paper on the logic of normative sentences. The paper is recognized as one of the first publications on the formal system of deontic logic. The aim of this paper is to present a tableau system for Kalinowski’s deontic logic and to discuss some of the topics related to the paradoxes of deontic logic.

Combinative consequentialism and the problem of act versions

In the 1960’s, Lars Bergstrom and Hector-Neri Castaneda noticed a problem with alternative acts and consequentialism. The source of the problem is that some performable acts are versions of other performable acts and the versions need not have the same consequences as the originals. Therefore, if all performable acts are among the agent’s alternatives, act consequentialism yields deontic paradoxes. A standard response is to restrict the application of act consequentialism to certain relevant alternative sets. Many proposals are based on some variation of maximalism, that is, the view that act consequentialism should only be applied to maximally specific acts. In this paper, I argue that maximalism cannot yield the right prescriptions in some cases where one can either (i) form at once the intention to do an immediate act and form at a later time the intention to do a succeeding act or (ii) form at once the intention to do both acts and where the consequences of (i) and (ii) differ in value. Maximalism also violates normative invariance, that is, the condition that if an act is performable in a situation, then the normative status of the act does not depend on what acts are performed in the situation. Instead of maximalism, I propose that the relevant alternatives should be the exhaustive combinations of acts the agent can jointly perform without performing any other act in the situation. In this way, one avoids the problem of act versions without violating normative invariance. Another advantage is that one can adequately differentiate between possibilities like (i) and (ii).

Von Wright’s Therapy to Jørgensen’s Syndrome

In his last papers about deontic logic, von Wright sustained that there is no genuine logic of norms. We argue in this paper that this striking statement by the father of deontic logic should not be understood as a death sentence to the subject. Rather, it indicates a profound change in von Wright’s understanding about the epistemic and ontological role of logic in the field of norms. Instead of a logical constructivism of deontic systems revealing a necessary structure of prescriptive discourse, which marked his earlier efforts, he adopted the view that such systems should be seem as mere objects of comparison, i.e. as providing practical standards of rationality for norm-giving activity. Within such view he proposed an interpretation of standard deontic logic in such a way to free deontic logicians from the philosophical difficulties related to the so-called Jorgensen’s dilemma and deontic paradoxes. This effort, as we claim in the present paper, is an application of Wittgenstein’s therapeutic method to dissolve philosophical difficulties caused by the use of logical tools to model relations between norms.

The Concept of Moral Obligation

The principal aim of this book is to develop and defend an analysis of the concept of moral obligation. The analysis is neutral regarding competing substantive theories of obligation, whether consequentialist or deontological in character. What it seeks to do is generate solutions to a range of philosophical problems concerning obligation and its application. Amongst these problems are deontic paradoxes, the supersession of obligation, conditional obligation, prima facie obligation, actualism and possibilism, dilemmas, supererogation, and cooperation. By virtue of its normative neutrality, the analysis provides a theoretical framework within which competing theories of obligation can be developed and assessed. This study is a major contribution to metaethics that will be of particular interest to all philosophers concerned with normative ethical theory.

Contrary-to-duty reasoning with preference-based dyadic obligations

In this paper we introduce Prohairetic Deontic Logic (PDL), a preferencedbased dyadic deontic logic. In our preferencedbased interpretation of obligations “a should be (done) if b is (done)” is true if (1) no ¬a ∧ b state is as preferable as an a ∧ b state and (2) the preferred b states are a states. We show that this representation solves different problems of deontic logic. The first part of the definition is used to formalize contrarydtodduty reasoning, which, for example, occurs in Chisholm’s and Forrester’s notorious deontic paradoxes. The second part is used to make deontic dilemmas inconsistent.

Conditional deontic logic augmented with defeasible reasoning

Deontic logic, developed as a logic of normative reasoning, is often too rigid to be applied to practical normative systems. First, it fails to reason about situations in the presence of deontic conflicts. Also, it suffers from various logical paradoxes. A possible approach to solve problems of deontic conflicts is to establish preference hierarchies of norms and reasoning about the nonmonotonicity. This paper provides a mechanism to establish such hierarchies and augments conditional deontic logic with defeasible reasoning in order to maintain consistency in the presence of deontic conflicts and resolve deontic paradoxes.

Conditional obligation, deontic paradoxes, and the logic of agency

A variant of Belnap's stit-semantics due to Horty and von Kutschera is used to develop a semantics of obligation. A partial completeness result is stated. The semantics is then used to discuss conditional obligation as well as two paradoxes of deontic logic. The paper argues for the importance of an analysis of agency for deontic logic.

The Robbery Paradox

James E. Tomberlin [6] has recently argued that the logical systems of conditional obligation proposed by Azizah al-Hibri [1] and Peter Mott [5] are incapable of resolving at least one variant of the notorious contrary to duty imperative paradox, formulated originally by Chisholm [2]. Tomberlin concedes that these systems offer the very best of the' “conditional obligation approach” to deontic logic and concludes his critical discussion with the pessimistic remark that “the best of this approach is simply not good enough. Deontic logic … is obliged to turn elsewhere for its proper formulation and resolution of the deontic paradoxes” ([6], 373). Below I argue that Tomberlin's three central arguments against al-Hibri and Mott are fallacious.

Prescripciones y normas: la teoría de Castañeda

Resumen

Contrary-to-Duty Imperatives and Conditional Obligation

Evidently, deontic logicians agree with Russell; and, as Butler forewarned, morality is thereby menaced. Since its inception a little over fifty years ago with Ernst Mally's Grundgesetze des Sollens: Elemente der Logik des Willens [ 12], deontic logic has been supplied with a wealth of puzzles-usually referred to as deontic paradoxes in the literature.1 True, the majority of these paradoxes evaporate comfortably enough under close scrutiny2 and yet, some-most notably, the Contrary-toDuty Imperative Paradox and certai^n strengthened versions of the Good Samaritan Paradox-threaten recalcitrance. Of these troublesome cases, my plan, in the present paper, is to focus on the Contrary-to-Duty Imperative Paradox; accordingly, I want to examine how various systems of deontic logic fare against this fascinating puzzle. But which systems of deontic logic, exactly? Because of the large number of available systems, together with understandable space limitations, I am forced to be selective. So forced, I have selected three systems for examination; quite by design, each is representative of the by now highly fashionable conditional obligation approach in deontic logic; although, as we shall see, there are important differences among the three. In particular, for our systems of conditional obligation, I will take up van Fraassen's dyadic system [17], Mott's monadic system [13],

Ought, Time, and the Deontic Paradoxes

Ought, Time, and the Deontic Paradoxes

On the Structure of Codes of Conduct

The purpose of this essay is to analyse the relation of adequacy which holds between a code of conduct or system of maxims and a world in which the maxims are capable of being obeyed; to define in terms of this relation and the familiar notion of semantic consequence the concept of being obligatory and other deontic characteristics; and thus to provide a new and simple interpretation of standard deontic logic which is not only logically sound, but also acceptable as a standard of correct reasoning by lawyers and others concerned with obligations founded in codes of conduct. This interpretation will, among other things, enable us to dispense with iterated deontic operators to which no useful legal or normative meaning can be attached; to diagnose and to render innocuous a class of alleged deontic paradoxes, first pointed out by Alf Ross; to analyse the loss and restoration of adequacy of a system of maxims to the world for which it was intended; and lastly to clarify the relation between primary maxims and obligations (which do not involve any reference to maxims or obligations) on the one hand and secondary maxims and obligations (which do involve such a reference) on the other.