Defeasible deontic reasoning and its applications to normative systems

Abstract Our interests are in the application of deontic logic for the modelling of regulations in commercial law and other social institutions. We provide a first-order framework of deontic reasoning that can model and compute social regulations and rules. This effort has practical importance due to the ubiquity and complexity of social regulations and norms. Computer-mediated modelling of norms may reduce the overhead of managing complex social norms and avoid inefficiencies and social inequity resulting from complex and ill-maintained social norms. In order to achieve the goal, we apply defeasible reasoning, a clausal form logic programming approach, and capture deontic concepts in first-order representations. The proposed formalism is applied to the modelling of normative systems such as bureaucratic regulations and legal reasoning.

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