Modeling Contrary-to-Duty with CP-nets

Modelling deontic notions through preferences [12] has the advantage of linking deontic notions to the manifold research on preferences, in multiple disciplines, such as philosophy, mathematics, economics and politics. In recent years, preferences have also been addressed within AI [15,8,18] and applications can be found in multi-agent systems [19] and recommender systems [17]. We shall model deontic notions through ceteris-paribus preferences, namely, conditional preferences for a state of affairs over another state of affairs, all the rest being equal. In particular, we shall focus on the ceteris-paribus preference for a proposition over its complement. The idea of ceteris-paribus preferences was originally introduced by the philosopher and logician Georg von Wright [22].