Arguing about constitutive and regulative norms

Gabriella Pigozzi (1) , Leendert van Der Torre (2)

1 LAMSADE - Laboratoire d'analyse et modélisation de systèmes pour l'aide à la décision
2 University of Luxembourg [Luxembourg]

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.

Mots clés: Normative reasoning; deontic logic; argumentation; input/output logic

Domaines: Informatique [cs]

Gabriella Pigozzi, Leendert van Der Torre. Arguing about constitutive and regulative norms. Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics, 2018, 28 (2-3), ⟨10.1080/11663081.2018.1487242⟩. ⟨hal-01895936⟩