A logic for deontic dilemmas (Q2568341)

By a deontic dilemma the author means a situation in which both `\(A\) is obligatory' and `not-\(A\) is obligatory' are accepted without reservation nor any form of prioritization or other convention to resolve the conflict in favour of one or the other. He seeks to construct a deontic propositional logic in which such dilemmas do not imply that everything is obligatory. He reviews a range of proposals in this direction that already exist in the literature, discussing their strengths and limitations, and then puts forward his own proposal. The central idea is to replace the derivation rule of monotony (when \(A\to B\) is a theorem then so is \(OA\to OB\)) by a weakened version (when \(A\to B\) is a theorem then so is \(PA \to (OA \to OB)\)).