Abstract
This paper studies long-term norms concerning actions. In Meyer’s Propositional Deontic Logic (PD e L), only immediate duties can be expressed, however, often one has duties of longer durations such as: “Never do that”, or “Do this someday”. In this paper, we will investigate how to amend PD e L so that such long-term duties can be expressed. This leads to the interesting and suprising consequence that the long-term prohibition and obligation are not interdefinable in our semantics, while there is a duality between these two notions. As a consequence, we have provided a new analysis of the long-term obligation by introducing a new atomic proposition I (indebtedness) to represent the condition that an agent has some unfulfilled obligation.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Anderson A.R.: ‘Some Nasty Problems in the Formalization of Ethics’. Noûs 1, 345–360 (1967)
Castañeda, H.-N., ‘The Paradoxes of Deontic Logic’, in R. Hilpinen (ed.), New Studies in Deontic Logic, Reidel, 1981, pp. 37–85.
Harel, D., ‘Dynamic Logic’, in D. Gabbay and F. Guenthner (eds.), Handbook of Philosophical Logic, Volume II: Extensions of Classical Logic, Reidel, 1984, pp. 497–604.
Kevin, K., The Logic of Reliable Inquiry, Oxford University Press, 1996.
Meyer J.J-.Ch.: ‘A Different Approach to Deontic Logic: Deontic Logic viewed as a Variant of Dynamic Logic’. Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 29, 106–136 (1988)
Meyer, J. J-.Ch., ‘Using Programming Concepts in Deontic Reasoning’, in R. Bartsch, J.F.A.K. van Benthem, and P. van Emde Boas (eds.), Semantics and Contextual Expression, FORIS publications, 1989, pp. 117–145.
Meyer, J. J-.Ch., ‘Dynamic Logic for Reasoning about Actions and Agents’, in J. Minker (ed.), Logic-Based Artificial Intelligence, Kluwer, 2000, pp. 281–311.
Pratt, V.R., ‘Process logic Preliminary Report’, Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, ACM Press, 1979, pp. 93–100.
van der Meyden R.: ‘The Dynamic Logic of Permission’. Journal of Logic and Computation 3, 465–479 (1996)
von Wright G.H.: ‘Deontic Logic’. Mind 60, 1–15 (1951)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Hughes, J., Royakkers, L.M.M. Don’t Ever Do That! Long-term Duties in PD e L . Stud Logica 89, 59–79 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11225-008-9118-5
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11225-008-9118-5