Skip to main content
Log in

Agency and obligation

  • Published:
Synthese Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore a new deontic operator for representing what an agent ought to do; the operator is cast against the background of a modal treatment of action developed by Nuel Belnap and Michael Perloff, which itself relies on Arthur Prior's indeterministic tense logic. The analysis developed here of what an agent ought to do is based on a dominance ordering adapted from the decision theoretic study of choice under uncertainty to the present account of action. It is shown that this analysis gives rise to a normal deontic operator, and that the result is superior to an analysis that identifies what an agent ought to do with what it ought to be that the agent does.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Belnap, N.: 1994, ‘An Austere Theory of Strategies’, Manuscript, Philosophy Department, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA.

    Google Scholar 

  • Belnap, N. and M. Green: 1993, ‘Indeterminism and the Thin Red Line’, Manuscript, Philosophy Department, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA.

    Google Scholar 

  • Belnap, N. and M. Perloff: 1988, ‘Seeing to it that: a Canonical Form for Agentives’, Theoria 54, 175–99.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brown, M.: 1988, ‘On the Logic of Ability’, Journal of Philosophical Logic 17, 1–26.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chellas, B.: 1969, The Logical Form of Imperatives, PhD thesis, Philosophy Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chellas, B.: 1980, Modal Logic: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chisholm, R.: 1964, ‘The Ethics of Requirements’, American Philosophical Quarterly 1, 147–53.

    Google Scholar 

  • Garcia, J.: 1986, ‘The Tunsollen, Sansollen, and the Soseinsollen’, American Philosophical Quarterly 23, 267–76.

    Google Scholar 

  • Geach, P.: 1982, ‘Whatever Happened to Deontic Logic?’ Philosophia 11, 1–12.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harman, G.: 1983, ‘Human Flourishing, Ethics, and Liberty’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 12, 307–22.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harman, G.: 1986, Change in View: Principles of Reasoning, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

    Google Scholar 

  • Horty, J.: 1993, ‘Deontic Logic as Founded on Nonmonotonic Logic’, Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence 9, 69–91.

    Google Scholar 

  • Horty, J.: 1996, Agency and Deontic Logic, Manuscript, University of Maryland, College Park, MD.

    Google Scholar 

  • Horty, J. and Belnap, N.: 1995, ‘The Deliberative Stit: A Study of Action, Omission, Ability, and Obligation’, Journal of Philosophical Logic 24, 583–644.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kenny, A.: 1975, Will, Freedom, and Power, Basil Blackwell, Cambridge, MA.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kenny, A.: 1976, ‘Human Abilities and Dynamic Modalities’, in Juha Manninen and Raimo Tuomela (eds.), Essays on Explanation and Understanding: Studies in the Foundations of Humanities and Social Sciences, D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht.

    Google Scholar 

  • Luce, R. D. and Raiffa, H.: 1957, Games and Decisions, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., New York.

    Google Scholar 

  • Montague, R.: 1968, ‘Pragmatics’, in R. Klibansky (ed.), Contemporary Philosophy: A Survey, Florence.

  • Prior, A.: 1967, Past, Present, and Future, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

    Google Scholar 

  • Savage, L. J.: 1972, The Foundations of Statistics, John Wiley and Sons, 1954. Second revised edition published by Dover Publications.

  • Scott, D.: 1967, ‘A Logic of Commands’, Manuscript, Philosophy Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thomason, R.: 1970, ‘Indeterminist Time and Truth-value Gaps’, Theoria 36, 264–81.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thomason, R.: 1981, ‘Deontic Logic as Founded on Tense Logic’, in Risto Hilpinen (ed.), New Studies in Deontic Logic, D. Reidel Publishing Company, pp. 165–176.

  • Thomason, R.: 1984, ‘Combinations of Tense and Modality’, in Dov Gabbay and Franz Guethner (eds), Handbook of Philosophical Logic, Volume II: Extensions of Classical Logic, D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, pp. 135–165.

    Google Scholar 

  • van Fraassen, B.: 1973, ‘Values and the Heart's Command’, The Journal of Philosophy 70, 5–19.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Horty, J.F. Agency and obligation. Synthese 108, 269–307 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00413499

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00413499

Keywords

Navigation