Arguing about constitutive and regulative norms

Abstract

Formal arguments are often represented by (support, conclusion) pairs, but in this paper we consider normative arguments represented by sequences of (brute, institutional, deontic) triples, where constitutive norms derive institutional facts from brute facts, and regulative norms derive deontic facts like obligations and permissions from institutional facts. The institutional facts may be seen as the reasons explaining or warranting the deontic obligations and permissions, and therefore they can be attacked by other normative arguments too. We represent different aspects of normative reasoning by different kinds of consistency checks among these triples, and we use formal argumentation theory to resolve conflicts among such normative arguments. In particular, we introduce various requirements for arguing about norms concerning violations, contrary-to-duty obligations, dilemmas, conflict resolution, and different kinds of norms, and we introduce a formal argumentation theory satisfying the requirements. In order to illustrate our framework, we introduce a running example based on university regulations for prospective and actual students.

Reasoning With and About Norms in Logical Argumentation

“…In future work, we aim to incorporate priority and preference reasoning in the more transparent context of DAC. Moreover, the I/O formalism has other applications including reasoning with consistency checks, permissions, and constitutive norms [8,17]. In particular, we aim to exploit the internalization of meta-reasoning in DAC to characterize various types of permission [17], for instance, negative permissions as defined in terms of the absence of applicable norms to the contrary.…”

“…Nonmonotonicity is captured in constrained I/O logics through considering maximal consistent families of norms. In recent years, also argumentative representations of deontic logics have attracted increasing interest [4,5,6,7,8,9]. This paper is the first to provide argumentative characterizations for a significant class of I/O logics, including all original logics from [3].…”

Argumentation Frameworks – A Brief Review

“…Given several standards and a situation displayed as a defeasible hypothesis, this framework allows us to link the acceptances of the due form and the related violations and evaluates the probability in an initial way. To achieve this, this system integrates due arguments and reformulates the due principles as well [49] so it is the probabilistic approach of grandiose such that the value of an argument is related to its name [50]. By embodying the principle of prohibition, the processing is done to fulfill the standard Then you combine the prescriptive combination with the probabilistic that has the character of the probabilistic argument this allows the probability values to be linked to acceptances.…”

From Classical to Non-monotonic Deontic Logic Using ASPIC $$^+$$

“…Besides this point, our work focuses more on how to capture the intuition of reasoning about free-choice permission, by using different monotonic logics (lower bound and upper bound) to define strict rules and defeasible rules, and different types of arguments (rule-based, premise-based and universal) to define the preference relation between arguments. Connecting formal argumentation and deontic logic is an increasingly active research topic in recent years [19]. In the direction of using argumentation to represent various non-monotonic logics, Young et al [25] proposed an approach to represent prioritized default logic by using ASPIC`.…”