It is often supposed, as in Professor Kluge's article (1), that one can only acquire an obligation by free consent. This paper argues that although this is true of some types of obligation, including the ones discussed by Professor Kluge, it is by no means true of all. In particular, it is argued, society may legitimately impose obligations on us without our consent, if the obligations are reci...

This paper presents a nonmonotonic deontic logic based on commonsense entailment. It establishes criteria a successful account of obligation should satisfy, and develops a theory that satisfies them. The theory includes two conditional notions of prima facie obligation. One is constitutive; the other is epistemic, and follows nonmonotonically from the constitutive notion. The paper defines unco...

The purpose of this paper is to explore a new deontic operator for representing what an agent ought to do; the operator is cast against the background of a modal treatment of action developed by Nuel Belnap and Michael Perloff, which itself relies on Arthur Prior's indeterministic tense logic. The analysis developed here of what an agent ought to do is based on a dominance ordering adapted from...

Did I tell you about the back pain patient who paused in our waiting room after being discharged just long enough to steal the coin change machine? He didn’t get away with it though, because he stopped in the parking lot for a smoke, where security found him. He ran, but got caught and roughed up by the police, and ended up back in the ED for worsening back pain. What a world we live in! I have...

We explore the view that coordinated behavior is driven by the social constraints (e.g. obligations and interdictions) that agents in organizations are subject to. In this framework, agents adopt those goals that are requested by their obligations, knowing that not ful lling obligations induces a price to pay or a loss of utility. Based on this idea we build an integrated agent coordination sys...

The main policy instruments currently used in the EU Member States to achieve the targets set for electricity produced from renewable energy sources are: 1) the quota obligation system; 2) the feed-in tariff system; and 3) the tendering system. The current study aims to review the experience gained with the quota obligation system. The report provides an overview of the regions where obligation...

arbitration is a private justice for the settlement of disputes in the international trade. by reason of number of benefits, international traders prefer the arbitration in relation to the justice tosettle their disputes. confidentiality is one of those benefits. here, there are some questions: is there any source in international commercial judgment that indicates the confidentiality of judgme...

Abstract There are plenty of classic paradoxes about conditional obligations, like the duty to be gentle if one is murder, and “supererogatory” deeds beyond call duty. But little has been said intersection these topics. We develop first general account supererogation, with power solve familiar puzzles as well several that we introduce. Our account, moreover, flows from two ideas: conditionals r...