Conditional Obligations in Strategic Situations

We investigate Horty’s action constants and their function ing in action obligations of the form “In the interest of group F of agents, group G of agents ought to perform actionK” and in conditional action obligations of the form “If group H of agents performs action L, then in the interest of group F of agents, group G of agents ought to perform action K”. We show that a straightforward Horty-style analysis of action obligatio ns leads to counterintuitive results. To make amends, we introduce weak action obligations. This new type of action obligations is exactly what we need to show that an action is obligatory for a group of agents if and only if this action i s obligatory for this group of agents regardless of what the others do.