Is Free Choice Permission Admissible in Classical Deontic Logic?
This addresses a foundational issue in formal logic and ethics for logicians and philosophers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing deontic systems.
The paper tackles the problem of incorporating free choice permission (FCP) into classical deontic logic without leading to an indefinite number of permissions, by presenting six Hilbert-style systems that admit a guarded version of FCP while maintaining inferential strength for permissions and not weakening obligation logic.
In this paper, we explore how, and if, free choice permission (FCP) can be accepted when we consider deontic conflicts between certain types of permissions and obligations. As is well known, FCP can license, under some minimal conditions, the derivation of an indefinite number of permissions. We discuss this and other drawbacks and present six Hilbert-style classical deontic systems admitting a guarded version of FCP. The systems that we present are not too weak from the inferential viewpoint, as far as permission is concerned, and do not commit to weakening any specific logic for obligations.