The Life and Times of Identified, Situated, and Conflicting Norms
Alan S. Abrahams, Jean Bacon · 2002
In this paper we argue for a treatment of obligations, permissions, and prohibitions that differs from the standard treatment of these notions in deontic logic. Firstly, we propose that instantiated norms be treated as individual, identified entities- that is, variables that can be quantified over- rather than simply as logical operators as in Standard Deontic Logic. This allows us to refer to specific instances of obligations, permissions, and prohibitions. We explain why we believe that norms take, as their arguments, sets of occurrences, rather than simply propositions as in the standard treatment. Further, we argue that specific, identified norms themselves are brought about by occurrences. We provide an account of the life-cycle of norms: we explain how individual identified norm-instances are generated from general norms through functions of occurrences, and how each such instance’s life may end with its fulfillment, violation, or nullification. In addition, we suggest that norms are situated: that they must be tagged with the context in which they were written or spoken. This is necessary for conflict specification, detection, and resolution purposes. Finally, we tag our conclusions with a time, so that, without contradiction, we may nonmonotonically conclude different results as cases and norms vary over time. The Life and Times of Identified, Situated, and Conflicting Norms 1