Obligations and Permissions

4 Utterances and statements concerning obligations and permissions are 5 known as deontic expressions. They can present something of a challenge 6 when it comes to formulating their meaning and behaviour. The content 7 of these expressions can appear to support entailment relations similar to 8 those of classical propositions, but such behaviour can sometimes lead to 9 counter-intuitive outcomes. Historically, much of the descriptive work in 10 this area has been philosophical in outlook, concentrating on questions of 11 morality and jurisprudence. There have been some additional contributions 12 from computer science, in part due to the need to specify normative behaviour. 13 There are a number of formal proposals that seek to account for obligations and 14 permissions, such as Standard Deontic Logic. There has also been discussion of 15 various conundrums and dilemmas that need to be resolved, such as the Good 16 Samaritan, the Knower, the Gentle Murderer, Contrary to Duty Obligations, 17 Ross’s Paradox, Jørgensen’s Dilemma, Sartre’s Dilemma, and Plato’s Dilemma. 18 Even so, there still appears to be no definite consensus about how these kinds 19 of expressions should be analysed, or how all the deontic dilemmas should 20 be resolved. It is possible that obligations themselves, as opposed to their 21 satisfaction criteria, do not directly support a conventional logical analysis. 22 It is also possible that a linguistically informed analysis of obligations and 23 permissions may help to resolve some of the deontic dilemmas, and clarify 24 intuitions about how best to formulate a logic of deontic expressions. 25 ∗Language & Linguistics Compass invited submission. Copyright c © 2010 The Author. 1