Agential obligation as non-agential personal obligation plus agency

I explore various ways of integrating the framework for predeterminism, agency, and ability in [P. McNamara, Nordic J. Philos. Logic 5 (2) (2000) 135] with a framework for obligations. However, the agential obligation operator explored here is defined in terms of a non-agential yet personal obligation operator and a non-deontic (and non-normal) agency operator. This is contrary to the main current trend, which assumes statements of personal obligation always take agential complements. Instead, I take the basic form to be an agent’s being obligated to be such that p. I sketch some logics for agential obligation based on personal obligation and agency, first in a fairly familiar context that rules out conflicting personal obligations (and derivatively, conflicting agential obligations), and then in contexts that do allow for conflicts (of both sorts).  2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. In [21] (and at DEON’00), I explored a simple framework for agency, predetermination and ability (in the process of developing a framework for agent-evaluative notions like praise and blame).1 Call this simple framework the “APA framework”. In the current paper, I explore various ways of integrating the APA framework with a framework for personal obligations. To do the latter, I explore a familiar tradition, one that combines a non-agential deontic operator with a non-deontic agential operator to yield a derivative analysis of an agential deontic operator. However, I have in mind an exploration of the strategy suggested at the end of [19], which is critical of the traditional employments of this sort of analysis. E-mail address: [email protected] (P. McNamara). 1 As noted in [21] in greater detail, the core of the agency framework employed here is an expansion of that employed in [18,24,25]. This framework is inspired, in part, by Elgesem [9] (see also [10]). The approach to pre-determination and ability is inspired by Brown [4]. My debt to Chellas [7] is apparent. The debt to Krogh and Herrestad is discussed explicitly in the current text. I also benefited by discussions from of an earlier version of this paper with Mark Brown, Jorg Hansen, Andrew Jones, Leon van der Toore, and Peter Vranas. 1570-8683/$ – see front matter  2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jal.2004.01.006 ARTICLE IN PRESS S1570-8683(04)00008-4/FLA AID:22 Vol.•••(•••) P.2 (1-36) ELSGMLTM(JAL):m1a v 1.189 Prn:24/02/2004; 10:37 jal22 by:PS p. 2 2 P. McNamara / Journal of Applied Logic ••• (••••) •••–••• In particular, the deontic operator employed is interpreted as one lying in between an impersonal deontic operator (e.g., “it is obligatory that”, “it ought to be the case that”) and an agential deontic operator (e.g., “it is obligatory for Doe to bring it about that”, “Doe ought to bring it about that”).2 In Section 1, I first sketch the predetermination portion of the APA framework from [21], and then integrate this with an Andersonian–Kangerian deontic “reduction” to get an SDL-generating modal framework for non-agential personal obligation. Next, I sketch the agency portion of the APA framework and integrate it with the deontic framework. Because the Andersonian–Kangerian deontic framework is so familiar, it is interesting to first see how in even such a strong framework for obligation, the weak monotonic classical logic for agency constrains the derivative logic for agential obligation. In Section 2, I drop the Andersonian–Kangerian reduction, and turn to weaker and more plausible systems for non-agential personal obligation, especially with an eye to allowing for conflicts of such obligations. I then explore various conflict-allowing systems for non-agential personal obligation with special attention to their impact on the derivative logics for agential obligation. I then briefly reintroduce a deontic constant in our conflict-allowing setting. In this context, the constant will have a restorative rather than reductive role, and the direction of the old reduction is, so to speak, reversed. Finally, I discuss a problem for my approach and sketch a solution. 1. A simple deontic-modal-agential framework 1.1. The APA framework—predetermination The main operator in our framework for predetermination is: PRp: It is (as of now) predetermined (for John Doe) that p.3 We use standard Kripke structures for modeling “PR”: