Dyadic Deontic Logic
An important problem of deontic logic is that of how to properly represent conditional obligations, e.g. If you smoke (s), then you ought to use an ashtray (a). It is not clear that either of the following representations is adequate:
Under the first representation it is vacuously true that if you commit a forbidden act, then you ought to commit any other act, regardless of whether that second act was obligatory, permitted or forbidden (Von Wright 1956, cited in Aqvist 1994). Under the second representation, we are vulnerable to the gentle murder paradox, where the plausible statements (1) if you murder, you ought to murder gently, (2) you do commit murder, and (3) to murder gently you must murder imply the less plausible statement: you ought to murder.
Some deontic logicians have responded to this problem by developing dyadic deontic logics, which contain binary deontic operators:
- means it is obligatory that A, given B
- means it is permissible that A, given B.
(The notation is modeled on that used to represent conditional probability.) Dyadic deontic logic escapes some of the problems of standard (unary) deontic logic, but it is subject to some problems of its own.
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