Permissions and obligations

Abstract

This article describes a formal semantics for the deontic concepts -- the concepts of permission and obligation -- which arises naturally from the representations used in artificial intelligence systems Instead of treating deontic logic as a branch of modal logic, with the standard possible worlds semantics, we first develop a language for describing actions, and we define the concepts of permission and obligation in terms of these action descriptions. Using our semantic definitions, we then derive a number of intuitively plausible inferences, and we show generally that the paradoxes which are so frequently associated with deontic logic do not arise in our system.