Imperatives and Deontic Logic

Deontic logic has so far been almost exclusively interpreted by a possible worlds semantics and ideality or preference relations between the worlds. In distinguishing itself from attempts at a logic of norms or logic of imperatives, deontic logic has portrayed its formulas as ‘deontic propositions’, true or false statements about what is obligatory, permitted or forbidden according to some unspecified normative system. Based on this idea, the ‘imperatival tradition’ of deontic logic, an unorthodox sidearm of the mainstream, has interpreted the formulas of deontic logic not with respect to ideal or best worlds, but to given sets of norms or imperatives. In a series of papers standing in this tradition, I have shown that by using an explicitly represented set of imperatives and what they command as the logical semantics by which the truth of deontic formulas is defined, all the standard systems of monadic and dyadic deontic logic can be ‘reconstructed’, i.e. they are sound and complete with respect to such semantics. The basic concepts are motivated here from a position of ‘imperativological scepticism’, and the main results are summarized.