Deontic Rules Research Articles

Fine-tuning GPT-3 for legal rule classification

In this paper, we propose a Legal Rule Classification (LRC) task using one of the most discussed language model in the field of Artificial Intelligence, namely GPT-3, a generative pretrained language model. We train and test the proposed LRC task on the GDPR encoded in LegalDocML (Palmirani and Vitali, 2011) and LegalRuleML (Athan et al., 2013), two widely used XML standards for the legal domain. We use the LegalDocML and LegalRuleML annotations provided in Robaldo et al. (2020) to fine-tuned GPT-3. While showing the ability of large language models (LLMs) to easily learn to classify legal and deontic rules even on small amount of data, we show that GPT-3 can significantly outperform previous experiments on the same task. Our work focused on a multiclass task, showing that GPT-3 is capable to recognize the difference between obligation rules, permission rules and constitutive rules with performances that overcome previous scores in LRC.

Practices and Practicing

This paper concerns the question of what it is that philosophers have been talking about, or ought to have been talking about, when they talk about ‘a practice’. This issue is complicated by the fact that, in English at least, there are several rather distinct senses of the word ‘practice’, in two of which ‘practice’ is used as a noun, and another two senses in which ‘practice’ is used as a verb. And all of these uses, both nominal and verbal, are actually quite distinct from, but clearly related to, what philosophers have been interested in when they discuss ‘a practice’.
 In Two Concepts of Rules John Rawls offered a definition of ‘practice’ that has been influential on later philosophical discussions of what it is to be a practice: «I use the word ‘practice’ throughout as a sort of technical term meaning any form of activity specified by a system of rules which defines offices, roles, moves, penalties, defenses, and so on, and which gives the activity its structure. As examples one may think of games and rituals, trials and parliaments». It is a central thesis of Two Concepts of Rules that consequentialist and deontic rules, (or norms), are both essentially involved in the institution and evaluation of practices. It is the thesis of this present paper, however, that if one focuses on the process of practicing a practice in order to develop and maintain the ability to successfully occupy an office in a Rawlsian practice, one can see that Rawls both misidentified the character of those norms and mislocated their targets

Classroom norms as resources: Deontic rule formulations and children's local enactment of authority in the peer group

The paper explores children's peer co-construction and negotiation of classroom norms, focusing on rule formulations as a resource to assume an authoritative position in the group hierarchy. Drawing from a larger ethnographic research documented with video recordings in two primary schools in northern Italy, this study adopts a CA-informed approach to analyze children's situated deployment of rules (here, rules regarding academic tasks) after peers’ behavior that is deemed inappropriate. As the analysis illustrates, children formulate ethical and procedural rules with the deontic modality (must, i.e. the Italian dovere) in order to a) sanction peers’ previous conduct and/or b) account for a previous action that has been problematized. In the discussion it is argued that such practices are relevant to children's socialization to expected ways of behaving in the classroom and to the local negotiation of authoritative positions and valued identities within the peer group.

A Semantically Rich Framework to Automate Cloud Service Level Agreements

Consumers evaluate and choose cloud-based services based on the Service Level Agreements (SLA). These agreements list the service terms and metrics to be agreed upon by the service providers and the customers. Current cloud SLAs are text documents that require significant manual effort to parse and determine if providers meet the SLAs. Moreover, due to the lack of standardization, providers differ in the way they define the terms and metrics, making it more difficult to compare different provider SLAs. We have developed a novel framework to significantly automate the process of extracting knowledge embedded in cloud SLAs and representing it in a semantically rich knowledge graph helping the user to make a calculated decision in choosing a provider. Our framework captures the key terms, measures, and deontic rules, in the form of obligations and permissions present in the cloud SLAs. In this paper, we discuss our framework, technique, and challenges in automating the cloud services agreement. We also describe our results and their validation against well-established standards.

How and why we reason from is to ought

Originally identified by Hume, the validity of is–ought inference is much debated in the meta-ethics literature. Our work shows that inference from is to ought typically proceeds from contextualised, value-laden causal utility conditional, bridging into a deontic conclusion. Such conditional statements tell us what actions are needed to achieve or avoid consequences that are good or bad. Psychological research has established that people generally reason fluently and easily with utility conditionals. Our own research also has shown that people’s reasoning from is to ought (deontic introduction) is pragmatically sensitive and adapted to achieving the individual’s goals. But how do we acquire the necessary deontic rules? In this paper, we provide a rationale for this facility linked to Evans’s (Thinking twice: two minds in one brain, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010) framework of dual mind rationality. People have an old mind (in evolutionary terms) which derives its rationality by repeating what has worked in the past, mostly by experiential learning. New mind rationality, in contrast, is evolutionarily recent, uniquely developed in humans, and draws on our ability to mentally simulate hypothetical events removed in time and place. We contend that the new mind achieves its goals by inducing and applying deontic rules and that a mechanism of deontic introduction evolved for this purpose.

The Logic of the Knowledge Norm of Assertion

The knowledge norm of assertion is the subject of a lively debate on when someone is in a position to assert something. However, not much has been said about the logic that underlies such debate. In this paper, I propose a formalisation of the knowledge norm in a deontic logic that aims to be explanatory and conceptually sound. Afterwards, I investigate some problems that this formalisation makes visible. This reveals some significant limitations of the underlying logic: it can neither contain Axiom 4 (transitivity) nor Axiom C4 (density). Moreover, sentences of the form p and I have not asserted that p appear to licence a violation of deontic rules.

Most of the patients continue smoking after the chronic pancreatitis diagnosis

Children are usually confronted with situations in which their desires to do something conflict with deontic rules in the personal domain. Based on a dual process approach, this study pointed out that, children's processing of personal domain deontic rules was a dual process only in conflict situations, and only until their adolescence. The dual-process model was the one featuring the serial processing of the heuristic and deliberate systems, and two different types of intuitive parallel processes inside the heuristic system. Accordingly, this research explained, from the perspective of dual process, that, although children of different age groups universally displayed the irrational responses of violating deontic rules in the personal domain to meet their desires in situations in which their desires conflicted with deontic rules, reasons for this differed.

The model of children's dual process of personal domain deontic rules in conflict situations

Children are usually confronted with situations in which their desires to do something conflict with deontic rules in the personal domain. Based on a dual process approach, this study pointed out that, children's processing of personal domain deontic rules was a dual process only in conflict situations, and only until their adolescence. The dual-process model was the one featuring the serial processing of the heuristic and deliberate systems, and two different types of intuitive parallel processes inside the heuristic system. Accordingly, this research explained, from the perspective of dual process, that, although children of different age groups universally displayed the irrational responses of violating deontic rules in the personal domain to meet their desires in situations in which their desires conflicted with deontic rules, reasons for this differed.

Lógica deóntica y algoritmos adaptativos: La relevancia del beneficio explícito en las versiones de la tarea de selección

Social contract theory argues that to properly execute thematic versions of the selection task one has to specify, in the rules of such versions, an explicit benefit that can only be achieved in exchange for meeting a requirement. By contrast, from the point of view deontic logic, it is sufficient that the rule is expressed in terms of a deontic rule. In this paper, I analyze an experiment presented by Cosmides, Barrett and Tooby with the goal of demonstrating that, for social contract theory, an explicit benefit is indeed necessary. My purpose is to check whether the outcomes of that experiment support the thesis of social contract theory and invalidate the assumptions of the approach of deonticlogic. I conclude that although the experiment by Cosmides, Barrett and Tooby does show that the idea of deontic logic is questionable, it does not really demonstrate that social contract theory is the correct one. Key words: adaptive algorithms, deontic logic, explicit benefit, selection task, social contract.

Concrete problems in the abstract deontic selection task—And how to solve them

The abstract deontic selection task was introduced by Cheng and Holyoak with the aim of demonstrating that people possess abstract reasoning schemas for processing deontic rules about what an individual must, must not, may, or need not do. Solving this task requires people to detect possible rule violators. The average solution rate across several studies, while being substantially higher than that with abstract nondeontic tasks, did not reach the level obtained with concrete deontic tasks. A task analysis based on the deontic principles by Beller uncovers several problems with the formulation of the original task. They concern the presentation of the deontic rule as well as the instructions (focusing on rule following) and result in a specific selection behaviour. Three experiments replicate the difficulties with the original task and show that task performance increases when the formulation problems are resolved. The best performance was obtained with a task that combined a genuine violation detection instruction with a genuine permission rule. Interestingly, permissions are weak deontic rules that, if taken literally, cannot be violated in a deontic sense. Therefore, people must interpret these rules as implying a strong deontic constraint (i.e., a ban), which then constitutes the basis for solving the task. The results provide novel insights into the interpretation of deontic rules and into the role that these content-specific, but abstract, tasks can play for the study of reasoning processes.

Deontic Logic Based Ontology Alignment Technique for E-Learning

The recent explosion in web services usage and information technology has led to the challenging issue of Ontology Construction and Alignment in order to enhance the semantics of web documents in E-Learning scenarios. In such a circumstance, it is necessary to provide an effective solution for Ontology Alignment that can help in student performance evaluation. The authors propose a rule-based solution for evaluating the students using Ontology Alignment techniques. For this purpose, they make use of the rules based on Deontic Logic and hence make a positive attempt in analyzing the presence of some of the non-dominant categorization of words like determiners, time clauses and modal verbs occurring in the text documents using Standard Deontic rules. The experiments have been carried out on evaluating the learning of C programming language using an E-Learning framework. From these evaluations, it has been observed that the proposed evaluation technique improves the accuracy of student evaluation significantly.

The price of your soul: neural evidence for the non-utilitarian representation of sacred values

Sacred values, such as those associated with religious or ethnic identity, underlie many important individual and group decisions in life, and individuals typically resist attempts to trade off their sacred values in exchange for material benefits. Deontological theory suggests that sacred values are processed based on rights and wrongs irrespective of outcomes, while utilitarian theory suggests that they are processed based on costs and benefits of potential outcomes, but which mode of processing an individual naturally uses is unknown. The study of decisions over sacred values is difficult because outcomes cannot typically be realized in a laboratory, and hence little is known about the neural representation and processing of sacred values. We used an experimental paradigm that used integrity as a proxy for sacredness and which paid real money to induce individuals to sell their personal values. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we found that values that people refused to sell (sacred values) were associated with increased activity in the left temporoparietal junction and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, regions previously associated with semantic rule retrieval. This suggests that sacred values affect behaviour through the retrieval and processing of deontic rules and not through a utilitarian evaluation of costs and benefits.

Journalists' codes and media law in Serbia: Insufficient self-defining

1. Journalists' codes of ethics include rules mainly relating to the same groups of issues concerning the work of journalists, but do vary in contents, systematics and scope. There is no singular self-understanding of the identity of the profession, partly because the contents of the ethical rules of journalism are influenced by other normative and value systems, which vary in different environments. 2. A journalists' code has a number of functions. Among others, its rules help journalists to discuss their actions articulately, within the profession, whilst others use them to assess the work of journalists and their ability to comply with their own norms. Institutional support to codes, e.g. through a press council, authorised to sanction violations of the rules, increases the effectiveness of such rules. 3. Journalists' ethical rules cannot be equated with the general rules of moral nor with the rules of positive law. Some forms of discrepancy between the legal norms and journalists' ethical norms are shown on the example of the 2006Journalists' Code of the Independent Journalists' Association and Journalists' Association: when ethical responsibility exists even without the legal one, and vice versa, when there is a legal responsibility but not an ethical one. Media law should constitute only the ethical minimum - everything else should be left to auto-regulation, to autonomous rules of the journalists' profession. Solid limits of de-judification of journalists' work lie in the responsibility of the state to legally regulate the matter of journalists' work in line with the guarantees of both freedom of the media and other values that may be violated in the course of journalist's work. The extent of legal regulation of journalist's work depends on how developed the deontic rules are and the extent to which they are observed. Advocating for a radical legal de-regulation, particularly by journalists, during the drafting of the Republic of Serbia Public Information Act in 2003 is hence more difficult to understand keeping in mind the lack of simultaneous advocacy for a substantial strengthening of auto-regulation. 4. The rules of journalists' code are not directly legally binding, and when in conflict with statutory rules, they have less force. Despite that, they are undoubtedly important for the law and for a judge. This is particularly true when the court has to apply norms that direct it (as the Serbian media law of 2003 does) to establish whether something is in accordance with the rules of the journalists' profession, in particular concerning the so-called due journalists' attention. This is why deontic rules, provided they are sufficiently specific and are published, not only facilitate the completion of their tasks to journalists, but also help lawyers complete theirs. 5. After the fall of the authoritarian regime in 2000, journalists' codes in Serbia are more developed than before, but still lack a number of rules. This is due to the lack of readiness on the part of the journalists to publicly state, to a more substantial extent, precisely how they understand themselves, and consequently, make a certain image of a journalist self-binding, and do this not only in terms of principle, but more specifically and in more detail. The example of the NUNS (independent journalist's association) and UNS (journalists' association) Code of Ethics of 2006 shows that such, insufficiently developed code is not a satisfactory indicator judges when assessing the work of journalists. Out of some forty rules comprising the Code, some are expressed twice, whilst a considerable number of them are rules that are in fact already in force as legal norms, which are binding on everyone, not only on members of the journalist profession. Even though these rules are not redundant in the Code, barely twenty rules that are stricto sensu ethical rules of the journalist profession do not suffice for auto-regulation to render the heteronomous legal regulation and heteronomous application of the general legal regime to journalist's work superfluous.

The Price of Your Soul: Neural Evidence for the Non-Utilitarian Representation of Sacred Values

Sacred values, such as those associated with religious or ethnic identity, underlie many important individual and group decisions in life, and individuals typically resist attempts to trade-off their sacred values in exchange for material benefits. Deontological theory suggests that sacred values are processed based on rights and wrongs irrespective of outcomes, while utilitarian theory suggests they are processed based on costs and benefits of potential outcomes, but which mode of processing an individual naturally uses is unknown. The study of decisions over sacred values is difficult because outcomes cannot typically be realized in a laboratory, and hence little is known about the neural representation and processing of sacred values. We utilized an experimental paradigm that used integrity as a proxy for sacredness and which paid real money to induce individuals to sell their personal values. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we found that values that people refused to sell (sacred values) were associated with increased activity in the left temporoparietal junction and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, regions previously associated with semantic rule retrieval. This suggests that sacred values affect behavior through the retrieval and processing of deontic rules and not through a utilitarian evaluation of costs and benefits.

Social cognition is not reducible to theory of mind: When children use deontic rules to predict the behaviour of others

The objective of this paper is to discuss whether children have a capacity for deontic reasoning that is irreducible to mentalizing. The results of two experiments point to the existence of such non-mentalistic understanding and prediction of the behaviour of others. In Study 1, young children (3- and 4-year-olds) were told different versions of classic false-belief tasks, some of which were modified by the introduction of a rule or a regularity. When the task (a standard change of location task) included a rule, the performance of 3-year-olds, who fail traditional false-belief tasks, significantly improved. In Study 2, 3-year-olds proved to be able to infer a rule from a social situation and to use it in order to predict the behaviour of a character involved in a modified version of the false-belief task. These studies suggest that rules play a central role in the social cognition of young children and that deontic reasoning might not necessarily involve mind reading.

Age differences in understanding precedent-setting decisions and authorities’ responses to violations of deontic rules

To examine age trends in precedent-setting decisions and the effects of these decisions on perceptions of authorities, preadolescents and adolescents were presented with deontic rule infractions that occurred in the absence or presence of mitigating circumstances. In Study 1, in the absence of mitigating circumstances, adolescents recommended punishing rule violations more than preadolescents; when mitigating circumstances were present, adolescents recommended punishing infractions less than preadolescents. In Study 2, before and after receiving information that authorities had punished or permitted rule violations, participants indicated their beliefs in authority legitimacy, rule strength, and rule deterrence value. In the absence of mitigating circumstances, beliefs strengthened when infractions were punished and beliefs weakened when infractions were permitted. When mitigating circumstances were present and authorities punished violations, preadolescents’ legitimacy and deterrence beliefs strengthened. Adolescents’ deterrence beliefs strengthened, but their beliefs in authority legitimacy weakened. When justifiable infractions were permitted, preadolescents’ legitimacy and deterrence beliefs weakened, whereas adolescents’ beliefs strengthened. Discussion focuses on age differences in legitimacy beliefs and understanding the consequences of setting precedents and on the relevance of the findings to theories of deontic reasoning, moral judgments, and epistemological development.

Adaptive specializations, social exchange, and the evolution of human intelligence

Blank-slate theories of human intelligence propose that reasoning is carried out by general-purpose operations applied uniformly across contents. An evolutionary approach implies a radically different model of human intelligence. The task demands of different adaptive problems select for functionally specialized problem-solving strategies, unleashing massive increases in problem-solving power for ancestrally recurrent adaptive problems. Because exchange can evolve only if cooperators can detect cheaters, we hypothesized that the human mind would be equipped with a neurocognitive system specialized for reasoning about social exchange. Whereas humans perform poorly when asked to detect violations of most conditional rules, we predicted and found a dramatic spike in performance when the rule specifies an exchange and violations correspond to cheating. According to critics, people's uncanny accuracy at detecting violations of social exchange rules does not reflect a cheater detection mechanism, but extends instead to all rules regulating when actions are permitted (deontic conditionals). Here we report experimental tests that falsify these theories by demonstrating that deontic rules as a class do not elicit the search for violations. We show that the cheater detection system functions with pinpoint accuracy, searching for violations of social exchange rules only when these are likely to reveal the presence of someone who intends to cheat. It does not search for violations of social exchange rules when these are accidental, when they do not benefit the violator, or when the situation would make cheating difficult.

First things first: Order bias in deontic disjunctions

In this paper we examine the way disjunctive choices work in conversational context. We focus on disjunctive deontic rules, such as ‘you must either submit an essay or attend an exam’. According to the Gricean maxim of orderliness, a derivative of the maxim of manner, people should interpret the first-mentioned option as the one preferred by the speaker. Two experiments demonstrated order bias, a non-logical preference for the first-mentioned option in the disjunctive situations of obligatory choice and free choice permissions, but not in the non-disjunctive situation of obligatory consequences. Order bias influences interpretations of the speaker's preferences, but not of the recipient's preferences; it was mainly a function of the nature of the situation, while linguistic form had only limited effect. We offer a general theoretical framework for order bias as a communicative device, constraining both interpretation and generation of utterances.

Deontic reasoning reviewed: psychological questions, empirical findings, and current theories

Deontic reasoning is concerned with questions of whether actions are forbidden or allowed, obligatory or not obligatory. This article reviews empirical findings and psychological theories on deontic reasoning with regard to three questions that have guided psychological research during the last decades: How do people's deontic capabilities develop? How well do people perform in deontic reasoning tasks? And how do they represent deontic rules? In conclusion, it is discussed why deontic reasoning-despite astonishing, early developing competencies-is still a complex cognitive activity.

Trauma-related predictors of deontic reasoning: A pilot study in a community sample of children

Objective Deontic reasoning (i.e., reasoning about duties and obligations) is essential to navigating interpersonal relationships. Though previous research demonstrates links between deontic reasoning abilities and trauma-related factors (i.e., dissociation, exposure to multiple victimizations) in adults, studies have yet to examine deontic reasoning abilities in children exposed to trauma. Given that social and safety rules (exemplars of deontic reasoning rules) may appear arbitrary for children in the face of trauma exposure, particularly interpersonal violence perpetrated by adults (i.e., caregivers, close relatives), we predicted that the ability to detect violations of these rules would vary as a function of trauma exposure type (no, non-interpersonal, and interpersonal). Additionally, given previous research linking dissociation and deontic reasoning in adults, we predicted that higher levels of dissociation would be associated with more errors in deontic problems. Methods Children exposed to interpersonal violence (e.g., sexual abuse by an adult family member, witnessing domestic violence, or physical abuse in the home) were compared to children exposed to non-interpersonal trauma (e.g., motor vehicle accident, natural disaster) or no trauma on their ability to detect violations of deontic and descriptive rules in a Wason Selection Task and assessed for their level of dissociative symptoms. Results Dissociation (but not trauma exposure type) predicted errors in deontic (but not descriptive) reasoning problems after controlling for estimated IQ, socio-economic status, and children's ages. Conclusions The current study provides preliminary evidence that deontic reasoning is associated with dissociation in children. This pilot study points to the need for future research on trauma-related predictors of deontic reasoning. Practice implications Deontic rules are essential to navigating interpersonal relationships; errors detecting violations of deontic rules have been associated with multiple victimizations in adulthood. Future research on violence exposure, dissociation, and deontic reasoning in children may have important implications for intervention and prevention around interpersonal functioning and later interpersonal risk.