Abstract
This paper looks at deontic logic as resulting from both a betterness ordering on states (i.e., a ‘deontic preference’) and a priority ordering on properties (i.e., a ‘law’ explicitly representing a standard of behavior). The correspondence between these two orderings offers a rich perspective from which to look at deontic scenarios and puzzles, and in particular at contrary-to-duties. The framework naturally lends itself to describing dynamics involving both orderings, thereby providing a new analysis of norm change as ‘betterness change’.
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van Benthem, J., Grossi, D., Liu, F. (2010). Deontics = Betterness + Priority. In: Governatori, G., Sartor, G. (eds) Deontic Logic in Computer Science. DEON 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6181. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14183-6_6
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