Normative reasoning by sequent-based argumentation
Christian Straßer, Ofer Arieli · Journal of Logic and Computation · 2015
In this article, we present an argumentative approach to normative reasoning. Special attention is paid to deontic conflicts, contrary-to-duty and specificity cases, which are modelled by means of argumentative attacks. For this, we adopt a recently proposed framework for logical argumentation in which arguments are generated by a sequent calculus of a given base logic (see the papers of the second author in CLIMA'2013 and of the two authors in Volume 6 (No. 1) of Argument & Computation ), and use standard deontic logic as our base logic. Argumentative attacks are realized by elimination rules that allow to discharge specific sequents. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach by means of various well-known benchmark examples, and show that this approach is rich enough to capture a variety of paradigms for handling conflicting norms such as reasoning with maximally consistent sets, prioritized norms and deontic formalisms based on I/O logic.