• This volume contains the proceedings of DEON2020/2021, the 15th International Conference on Deontic Logic and Normative Systems that was organized by the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy at LMU Munich (Germany) on 21st-24th July, 2021. The biennial DEON conferences are designed to promote interdisciplinary cooperation amongst scholars interested in linking the formal-logical study of normative concepts, normative language and normative systems with computer science, artificial intellige…Read more
  •  86
    Deontic Modality in Rationality and Reasoning
    Dissertation, Tilburg University. 2019.
    The present dissertation investigates certain facets of the logical structure of oughts – where “ought” is used as a noun, roughly meaning obligation. I do so by following two lines of inquiry. The first part of the thesis places oughts in the context of practical rationality. The second part of the thesis concerns the inference rules governing arguments about oughts, and specifically the inference rule of Reasoning by Cases. These two lines of inquiry, together, aim to expound upon oughts in ra…Read more
  •  158
    From Oughts to Goals: A Logic for Enkrasia
    Studia Logica 108 (1): 85-128. 2020.
    This paper focuses on the Enkratic principle of rationality, according to which rationality requires that if an agent sincerely and with conviction believes she ought to X, then X-ing is a goal in her plan. We analyze the logical structure of Enkrasia and its implications for deontic logic. To do so, we elaborate on the distinction between basic and derived oughts, and provide a multi-modal neighborhood logic with three characteristic operators: a non-normal operator for basic oughts, a non-norm…Read more
  •  11
    Objective Oughts and a Puzzle about Futurity
    In Olivier Roy, Allard Tamminga & Malte Willer (eds.), Deontic Logic and Normative Systems, College Publications. pp. 171-186. 2016.
    The paper argues that the standard definition of objective oughts (as oughts in light of the relevant facts) leaves room for a puzzle about futurity: Can objective oughts depend on what will happen in the future? If yes, how to account for those objective oughts that are future-dependent? Two main options are investigated: (i) treating the future as a fact and, hence, committing to the inevitability of the future, or (ii) adopting a branching-time account of the future, and weighting future poss…Read more
  • For a Dynamic Semantics of Necessity Deontic Modals
    In Olivier Roy, Allard Tamminga & Malte Willer (eds.), Deontic Logic and Normative Systems, College Publications. pp. 124-138. 2016.
    Traditional approaches in deontic logic have focused on the so-called reportative reading of obligation sentences, by providing truth-functional semantics based on a primitive ideality order between possible worlds. Those approaches, however, do not take into account that, in natural language, obligation sentences primarily carry a prescriptive effect. The paper focuses precisely on that prescriptive character, and shows that the reportative reading can be derived from the prescriptive one. A dy…Read more
  • Logic and Ethics: An Integrated Model for Norms, Intentions and Actions
    In Wiebe van der Hoek, Wesley H. Holliday & Wen-Fang Wang (eds.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) 9394, Springer. pp. 268-281. 2015.
    The paper investigates the way norms relate to and affect agents' intentions and actions. Current work in deontic logic dealing with agency mainly falls within two different groups: a variety of frameworks which adopt a purely external approach and represent agency in terms of possible outcomes of actions, and frameworks which instead endorse an internal approach and focus exclusively on the agents' intentions. The paper argues that neither of these models alone can produce a satisfactory analys…Read more