Meha Mishra

Deontic logic aims to formulate moral concepts consisting of obligation, permission, and prohibition. Although the standard system of deontic logic (SDL) has long provided a fundamental framework for this kind of formalization, its application to non-ideal normative contexts continues to provide challenges. This paper provides a conceptual examination of SDL by analyzing its fundamental principles, semantic assumptions, and well-known paradoxes. The analysis emphasizes how moral conflicts and contrary-to-duty imperatives reveal structural tensions within conventional deontic frameworks, with a focus on classic paradoxes like the Chisholm and Ross paradoxes. The paper seeks to explain these challenges and demonstrate how they represent deeper conceptual constraints in modeling normative reasoning using idealized modal logics, rather than suggesting a new logical system. The main contribution of the paper is therefore clarificatory: it situates the limits of SDL in the context of larger philosophical discussions on moral conflict and normative consistency.

This paper focuses on Chisholm’s paradox and offers to resolve some ambiguities concerning a philosophical comparative analysis using two logical frameworks in which the paradox can be formalized. In the standard system of deontic logic, the Chisholm paradox is one of the most interesting and challenging paradoxes among all. The paradox, ever since its discovery, has been shown to affect many if not most deontic systems. Various approaches like Van Fraassen’s dyadic deontic approach, Peter L. Mott’s counterfactual conditional approach etc. were formulated to avoid inconsistency in the formal representation of Chisholm set of sentences. The aim of this paper is to focus on the ambiguities in the above approaches and to highlight a serious problem in the attempt of Judith Wagner while resolving the paradox. Judith Wagner argued that Peter L. Mott’s solution is unsatisfactory as it allows for general factual detachment. Here, we argue that Wagner’s solution faces serious challenges when it comes to fulfilling minimal adequacy conditions, and shifting the operator can only temporarily fix the problem. In this paper, first, we discuss the approaches and then attempt to highlight the respective ambiguities in them.

Moral conflicts are the situations which emerge as a response to deal with conflicting obligations or duties. An interesting case arises when an agent thinks that two obligations A and B are equally important, but yet fails to choose one obligation over the other. Despite the fact that the systematic study and the resolution of moral conflicts finds prominence in our linguistic discourse, standard deontic logic when used to represent moral conflicts, implies the impossibility of moral conflicts. This presents a conundrum for appropriate logic to address these moral conflicts. We frequently believe that there is a close connection between tolerating inconsistencies and conflicting moral obligations. In paraconsistent logics, we tolerate inconsistencies by treating them to be both true and false. In this paper, we analyze Graham Priest’s paraconsistent logic LP, and extend our examination to the deontic extension of LP known as DLP. We illustrate our work, with a classic example from the famous Indian epic Mahabharata, where the protagonist Arjuna faces a moral conflict in the battlefield of Kurukshetra. The paper aims to avoid deontic explosion and allows to accommodate Arjuna’s moral conflict in paraconsistent deontic logics. Our analysis is expected to provide novel tools towards the logical representation of moral conflicts and to shed some light on the context-sensitive paraconsistent deontic logic.