Dynamic deontic logic and its paradoxes (Q1005939)

\textit{J.-J. Ch. Meyer} [Notre Dame J. Formal Logic 29, No.~1, 109--136 (1988; Zbl 0695.03009)] showed that the best parts of standard deontic logic could be recovered from propositional dynamic logic supplemented with a constant \(V\) to represent a `violation' state and \(O\alpha\) defined as \([\alpha]V\). With initial optimism it was thought the resulting logic would be free of familiar deontic paradoxes. This brief, but elegant, paper shows that not to be so; serious paradox remains for Meyer's logic. For one thing, the logic, with its underlying algebra of actions, contains the thesis \(F\alpha\to[\alpha]F\beta\), that if an action is forbidden, then every execution of that action results in a state in which every action is forbidden. This leads in turn to \(F\alpha\to [\alpha]O(\beta\,\&\,\overline\beta)\). That, coupled with the standard deontic postulate \(O\alpha\to P\alpha\), or \({\sim} O(\alpha\, \&\,\overline\alpha)\), which could be added to the logic, yields \(F\alpha\to [\alpha]^\perp\), that only impossible actions are forbidden, or that no possible action is ever forbidden! These results are particularly hard to explain away given the requisite interpretation of the underlying dynamic logic.