Some Logics of Commitment and Obligation

The topic of this paper is the logical relationship between the notions of commitment and obligation. When this question was first raised it was thought that the former notion could be analysed in terms of the latter and the Boolean connectives of classical logic. However, in the end almost every effort to carry out such an analysis has led to intuitively unacceptable consequences, and there would seem to be substantial agreement among today’s logicians that the notion of commitment cannot be reduced to that of obligation.1 In this paper we define a family of propositional logics in which both commitment and obligation are formalized as independent operators.