Deontic Theory Research Articles

I feel morally elevated by my organization’s CSR, so I contribute to it

While research addressing the micro-foundations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has often built on the deontic theory of justice to explain why employees care about their organization’s CSR, the mechanisms underlying this deontic path have seldom been examined. Therefore, we study moral elevation, an other-directed moral emotion that, according to deontic theory of justice, could help us understand why employees may react positively to their organization’s CSR even when it does not offer employees significant self-centered benefits. We advance that moral elevation substantiates the deontic mechanism put forward to explain why CSR translates into employees’ behavior supporting this CSR. We carry out an experiment and a survey that provide support for this hypothesis. By identifying moral elevation as a mechanism underlying the deontic path, our research provides empirical support for the deontic argument in micro-CSR research that employees care about CSR because CSR is the moral thing to do.

Breach not only affects you: the influence of coworker psychological contract breach by the supervisor on third-party perceptions of supervisor interactional justice

Understanding and effectively responding to employee psychological contract (PC) breach is a critical task for human resource (HR) managers. Drawing on social information processing theory and the deontic theory of justice and using two separate studies, Study 1 (an experiment) and Study 2 (a two-wave field study), the study proposes and tests a conceptualization that helps to explicate the implications of PC breach from the perspective of the third-party employee. Specifically, supporting our hypotheses, we found that when a third-party observer perceives a coworker’s PC breach perpetrated by their common focal supervisor that this negatively influences the third-party’s perceptions of the supervisor’s interactional justice (i.e., both interpersonal and informational) and that such a relationship is moderated by the extent of the third-party’s guanxi with the supervisor. Moreover, our findings further reveal that when a third-party observer with high guanxi with the supervisor also has a high power distance orientation (PDO), that the negative effects associated with the perceived coworker PC breach will be weakened. The study not only responds to scholars’ calls but it improves understanding of how the relational context may distort third-party perceptions of social treatment and justice-related behavior. Implications to theory, practice, and future research are discussed.

The architecture of a reasoning system for Defeasible Deontic Logic

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.

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.

Deontic Concepts and Their Clash in Mīmāṃsā: Towards an Interpretation

AbstractThe article offers an overview of the deontic theory developed by the philosophical school of Mīmāṃsā, which is, and has been since the last centuries BCE, the main source of normative concepts in Sanskrit thought. Thus, the Mīmāṃsā deontics is interesting for any historian of philosophy and constitutes a thought‐provoking occasion to rethink deontic concepts, taking advantage of centuries of systematic reflections on these topics. Some comparison with notions currently used in Euro‐American normative theories and metaethical principles is offered in order to show possible points of contact and deep divergences. In more detail, after an introduction explaining the methodology and aims of our work, we discuss how Mīmāṃsā authors distinguished and defined some fundamental deontic concepts, such as different types of prescriptions and prohibitions. We then discuss how Mīmāṃsā authors approached the problem of conflicts among commands without jeopardising the validity of the normative text issuing them. In the second part of the article we introduce our formal apparatus, which is construed around the main taxonomic and conceptual distinctions used in the first part. Our formal rendering captures the most important features of the Mīmāṃsā theory and can thus serve as a concise and rigorous presentation of it for scholars working in deontic logic.

Defending the motivational theory of desire

In this paper I offer a defense of the motivational theory of desire. According to the motivational view, a desire is basically a disposition to bring about the desire’s content. First, I argue that two rival views on the nature of desire, the evaluative theory and the deontic theory, fall prey to the problem of the death of desire and that, when one tries to develop a plausible version of these theories which is able to overcome this problem, one ends up with a view that is not relevantly different from the evaluative view. Second, I respond to some objections to the claim that motivations are sufficient for desire, namely, the Radioman objection and the objection that some motivational states like intentions and habits are not desires.

More Seriously Wrong, More Importantly Right

AbstractCommonsense morality divides acts into those that are right and those that are wrong, but it thinks some wrong acts are more seriously wrong than others, for example, murder than breaking a promise. This has several implications. If an act is more seriously wrong, you should feel more guilt about it and, other things equal, you are more blameworthy for it and can deserve more punishment; we may also need to consider serious wrongness when choosing in conditions of risk or moral uncertainty. This paper examines how one act can be more seriously wrong than another, and, when it is, what makes this so. More specifically, it considers a number of different views about the ground of serious wrongness and explores the possibility that this may be different when acts violate deontological versus consequentialist duties. It also asks whether there is a parallel concept that admits of degrees on the side of rightness, one of being, as we can say, more importantly right. It aims to expand the scope of deontic theory from binary questions about right versus wrong to ones whose answers admit of degrees.

Love in the Time of Consequentialism

AbstractThere are several powerful motivations for neutral value‐based deontic theories such as Act Consequentialism. Traditionally, such theories have had great difficulty accounting for partiality towards one's personal relationships and projects. This paper presents a neutral value‐based theory that preserves the motivations for Act Consequentialism while vindicating some crucial intuitions about reasons to be partial. There are two central ideas. The first is that when it comes to working out what you ought to do, your friends’ interests, the needs of your family, the significance of your own projects and ideals, etc. have more weight than the interests and needs of strangers. Your friends’ interests are not (thereby) more neutrally valuable than the interests of others. So there is a difference between the value of an outcome and its deontic significance. The second familiar idea is that reasons are modifiable. Reasons of partiality are reasons the weights of which are a function of the value of the relevant outcome modified by facts about the value of caring about the outcome in question. The resulting principle has various further explanatory advantages; in particular, it accounts for project‐ and relationship‐specific permissions and requirements, both at a time and across time.

Others service experiences: emotions, perceived justice, and behavior

Purpose– Often, service failures are witnessed by other customers, but little is known about how consumers react to service recovery aimed at other customers. Using the deontic theory of justice, this paper aims to examine consumers' reactions to justice directed toward other customers.Design/methodology/approach– Two studies were conducted to test the hypotheses. Both were 2 x 2 between subjects quasi experimental designs using written scenarios and surveys. The scenarios depicted an observing customer witnessing a service failure and recovery happening to another customer.Findings– Results show that the valence of the recovery attempt impacted the observing customer's reactions and evaluations, and that the observer's processing frame and loyalty status of the victim impacted the observing customer's judgments of fairness and behavioral intentions.Originality/value– These results provide guidance to service providers by shedding light on the impact of service failures and recovery on surrounding customers.

The Logical Foundation of Fundamental Rights and their Universality

This paper offers a critical analysis of two central issues in Luigi Ferrajoli’s Principia iuris, and more generally of his theory of rights. One is the way in which ‘expectations’ play a crucial role in his deontic theory by establishing the logical basis for his guarantee-based conception of law and rights. The axiomatic way in which Ferrajoli arrives at his conception of fundamental rights is questioned, for it fails to give a full account of the nature of subjective rights. The other issues discussed here is Ferrajoli’s own defence of the universality of fundamental rights, and how this is made to depend on a ‘normative technique’ that one can associate with legal discourse and modern law in Western societies. This, however, poses the problem of how this formal universalism can be reconciled with the intercultural dialogue that Ferrajoli also advocates.

The Elementary Epistemic Arithmetic of the Law II: The Inadequate Resources of Moral Theory for Dealing with the Criminal Law

In this lecture, I identify two key areas of the theory of crime and punishment that are demonstrably not derivable from deontological or retributive moral theory. In the first section, I will show that deontological moral theories are helpless when faced with the challenge of either justifying or deriving a standard of proof for criminal trials. In the second section, I will show that existing moral theories of punishment (especially Retributivism) in fact are nothing of the sort, in that they lack the resources to justify or derive a schedule of punishments or even a nonarbitrary definition of the just deserts for any given crime. Put differently, while Deontic theories stress the importance of convicted defendants receiving their just deserts, they have no machinery for figuring out what the just deserts are for any given crime. This pair of arguments is an ambitious agenda so let me turn to it straightaway

On deontic logic

Some requirements concerning deontic logic are formulated and discussed. Stress is laid on the need to distinguish between theories and deductive systems. It is argued that deontic theories need not be closed under the rule of detachment. Two deontic calculi, called DSC1, DSC2, are presented and talked over.