Automated Reasoning in Normative Detachment Structures with Ideal Conditions
This work addresses the problem of automating legal and ethical reasoning for AI systems, but it is incremental as it builds on existing deontic logic frameworks.
The authors tackled the challenge of automating normative reasoning by developing a logic that balances expressiveness and mechanization, avoiding deontic paradoxes and enabling contrary-to-duty reasoning, with examples applied to a concrete legal text.
Systems of deontic logic suffer either from being too expressive and therefore hard to mechanize, or from being too simple to capture relevant aspects of normative reasoning. In this article we look for a suitable way in between: the automation of a simple logic of normative ideality and sub-ideality that is not affected by many deontic paradoxes and that is expressive enough to capture contrary-to-duty reason- ing. We show that this logic is very useful to reason on normative scenarios from which one can extract a certain kind of argumentative structure, called a Normative Detachment Structure with Ideal Conditions. The theoretical analysis of the logic is accompanied by examples of automated reasoning on a concrete legal text.