Permissions and obligations in hierarchical normative systems

  • Authors:
  • Guido Boella;Leendert van der Torre

  • Affiliations:
  • Università di Torino, Italy;CWI Amsterdam, The Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • ICAIL '03 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Artificial intelligence and law
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

In this paper we discuss different types of permissions and their roles in deontic logic. We study the distinction between weak and strong permissions in the context of input/output logic, combining the logic with constraints, priorities and hierarchies of normative authorities. In this setting we observe that the notion of prohibition immunity no longer applies, and we introduce a new notion of permission as exception and a new distinction between static and dynamic norms. We show that strong permissions can dynamically change a normative system by adding exceptions to obligations, provide an explicit representation of what is permitted to the subjects of the normative system and allow higher level authorities to limit the changes that lower level authorities can do to the normative system.