Permissions, Information and Institutional Dynamics, Obligations, and Rights
Practical Philosophy
Theoretical Computer Science
Final Report Abstract
The project aimed at understanding how can permissions generate obligations. Such situations frequently occur in civil law, morality, and even strategic interaction: Debtors are obligated to comply when their creditors exercise their rights, i.e., permission to request payment. Free-trade agreements, essentially permissive norms, place their signatories under the obligation not to pass protectionist regulations. In bargaining, one party making a permissible offer might put the other under the (rational) obligation to accept it. The goal of the project was to go beyond these intuitive examples. It aimed at pinpointing the general laws and patterns that underlie all such cases. This was to be done using models in so-called deontic logic, viz. the logical study of obligations and permissions, in combination with concrete examples from German and Polish law. Deontic logic is an area of research at the intersection of philosophy, computer science, and law. It has long been concerned with the relation between permissions and obligations. There, however, the relation has been typically understood the from obligations to permissions, and not the other way around. The main scientific aim of this project was thus to fill this gap. The project allowed, first, to develop a general logical model of how obligations are generated by legal rights, especially in the so-called “Hohfeldian” tradition. This model improves on existing ones in that it focuses on how exercising some permissive rights, for instance having the legal ability to sell one’s car, change what others ought or ought not to do. This model was used to analyze cases in German, Polish, and even Chinese law, and also to model the working of EU directives on the legislation of its member states. In parallel, the project also allowed to pinpoint precisely the conditions under which permissions generate so-called “defeasible” obligations, i.e., obligations that only hold prima facie or by default. Finally, the project has shown that the general laws underlying the generation of obligations from permissions in law also apply readily to situations of strategic interaction. As part of the Beethoven joint program between the DFG and the NCN (Polish National Science Foundation), the project also aimed at strengthening the scientific ties between Polish and German deontic logicians. Despite a long tradition of excellence and collaboration in mathematical logic and foundations of mathematics, such collaborations have been much more scarce and haphazard between deontic logicians, despite substantial overlaps in research interests. The project aimed at overcoming this situation and build a sustainable Polish-German research network of deontic logicians, spanning across philosophy, law and computer science The project thus featured six bilateral workshops between German and Polish deontic logicians, two of those were embedded in important international conferences that have been organized by project members. This has resulted in, first, concrete collaborations (joint publications) between project members from both the German and the Polish teams; second, to the successful training of one PhD student, with project members of both the German and the Polish team on the reading committee; third, to one follow-research project (financed by the NCN), where several members of the PIOTR project take part, as well as joint participation to external research networks (for instance, with Tsinghua University, China).
Publications
- Conditional normative reasoning with substructural logics: New paradoxes and De Morgan’s dualities, in Roy, Tamminga and Willer (eds), Deontic Logic and Normative Systems 13th International Conference, DEON 2016, Bayreuth, Germany. College Publications. (2016) pp. 220-236
Peterson, Clayton. and Piotr Kulicki
- Multivalued Logics for Conflicting Norms, in Roy, Tamminga and Willer (eds), Deontic Logic and Normative Systems 13th International Conference, DEON 2016, Bayreuth, Germany. College Publications. (2016)
Piotr Kulicki, Robert Trypuz
- Three Deontic Logics for Rational Agency in Games. Studies in Logic Vol. 8 No. 4 (2016): 7–31
Huimin Dong & Olivier Roy
- Dynamic Logic of Power and Immunity. In: Baltag, Alexandru ; Seligman, Jeremy ; Yamada, Tomoyuki (ed.): Logic, Rationality, and Interaction LORI 2017, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 10455, Berlin, Heidelberg : Springer (2017) pp. 123-136
Dong, Huimin ; Roy, Olivier
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-55665-8_9) - "Monoidal logics: completeness and classical systems" Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics. 29.2 (2019): 121-151
Peterson, Clayton
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1080/11663081.2018.1547513) - (2019) Open Reading and Free Choice Permission: A Perspective in Substructural Logics. In: Liao B., Ågotnes T., Wang Y. (eds) Dynamics, Uncertainty and Reasoning. Logic in Asia: Studia Logica Library. Springer
Dong H., Gratzl N., Roy O.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7791-4_5) - “From Classical to Non-Monotonic Deontic Logic using ASPIC+” In: Blackburn P., Lorini E., Guo M. (eds) Logic, Rationality, and Interaction. LORI 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11813. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg (2019). pp. 71-85
Huimin Dong, Beishui Liao, Réka Markovich, and Leendert van der Torre
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-60292-8_6) - "Deontology of Compound Actions" Studia Logica
Czelakowski, Janusz
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11225-018-9834-4) - "Truthmakers and Normative Conflicts." Studia Logica
Anglberger, Albert, and Johannes Korbmacher
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11225-019-09862-5)
