Abstract

Deontic logic is concerned with the logical foundations of normative reasoning. Traditionally, deontic logic has been considered a branch of modal logic, with standard possible worlds semantics.

In this talk, I aim to give an overview of my PhD project, which is concerned with non-standard semantics for deontic logic. In my thesis, I argue that the traditional picture of deontic logic is too coarse-grained to account for several important and interesting aspects of normative reasoning, and I propose new, more fine-grained, semantic frameworks to deal with these shortcomings.

In the talk, I will focus on two particular problems. The first problem concerns the interaction between deontic modalities and disjunction, where the traditional account fails to explain various intuitions. The second problem concerns the role of norms in deontic logic. On the traditional account, norms are only considered implicitly. However, we typically do reason explicitly about norms, for example in legal contexts.