Automated Reasoning in Normative Detachment Structures with Ideal Conditions

ARTICLE HISTORY Compiled October 24, 2018 ABSTRACT Systems of deontic logic suffer either from being too expressive and therefore hard to mechanize, or from being too simple to capture relevant aspects of normative reasoning. In this article we look for a suitable way in between: the automation of a simple logic of normative ideality and sub-ideality that is not affected by many deontic paradoxes and that is expressive enough to capture contrary-to-duty reasoning. We show that this logic is very useful to reason on normative scenarios from which one can extract a certain kind of argumentative structure, called a Normative Detachment Structure with Ideal Conditions. The theoretical analysis of the logic is accompanied by examples of automated reasoning on a concrete legal text. Keywords: Deontic Logic - Legal Reasoning - Normative Ideality 1. Introduction In the last decades, computer systems have played an important role in assisting people in a wide range of tasks, from searching over data to decision-making, and their use is required in an increasing number of fields. One of these fields is legal reasoning. New court cases and legislations are accumulated every day. In addition, international organizations like the European Union are constantly aiming at combining and integrating separate legal systems (Burley and Walter 1993).