No label defined (Q4535121)

The authors seek to clarify a distinction between prima facie and other kinds of defeasible obligation. An obligation is defeasible if it is understood that it may cease to be binding in special circumstances. On the one hand, these special circumstances may be exceptions to the obligation, and in this case the authors speak of `obligation under uncertainty'. On the other hand, the special circumstances may bring into force an overriding obligation, and in this case the obligation is properly regarded as prima facie. After discussing in intuitive terms the implications of this distinction, the authors express it formally. To do this, they make use of the resources of their system of `deontic update semantics' [\textit{L. van der Torre} and \textit{Y.-H. Tan}, ``An update semantics for deontic reasoning'', in: P. McNamara and H. Prakken (eds.), Norms, logic and information systems: New studies in deontic logic and computer science, Amsterdam: IOS Press. Front. Artif. Intell. Appl. 49, 73-90 (1999; Zbl 0940.03012)]. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0984.00013].