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A Deontic Logic Reasoning Infrastructure

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Sailing Routes in the World of Computation (CiE 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 10936))

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Abstract

A flexible infrastructure for the automation of deontic and normative reasoning is presented. Our motivation is the development, study and provision of legal and moral reasoning competencies in future intelligent machines. Since there is no consensus on the “best” deontic logic formalisms and since the answer may be application specific, a flexible infrastructure is proposed in which candidate logic formalisms can be varied, assessed and compared in experimental ethics application studies. Our work thus links the historically rich research areas of classical higher-order logic, deontic logics, normative reasoning and formal ethics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    HOL as addressed here refers to a (simply) typed logic of functions, which has been proposed by Church [2]. It provides lambda-notation, as an elegant and useful means to denote unnamed functions, predicates and sets. Types in HOL eliminate paradoxes and inconsistencies. For more information on HOL see the literature [7].

  2. 2.

    The semantical embedding of \(out_1\) as presented here is technically still an approximative solution. For a complete embedding, x needs to be defined as a consequence of an arbitrary number of facts (instead of just i, j and k) in lines 13 and 14.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science and Communications, University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg

    Christoph Benzmüller, Xavier Parent & Leendert van der Torre

Authors
  1. Christoph Benzmüller
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  2. Xavier Parent
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  3. Leendert van der Torre
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Correspondence to Christoph Benzmüller .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Kiel University, Kiel, Germany

    Florin Manea

  2. Queens College, CUNY, Queens, New York, USA

    Russell G. Miller

  3. Kiel University, Kiel, Germany

    Dirk Nowotka

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Benzmüller, C., Parent, X., van der Torre, L. (2018). A Deontic Logic Reasoning Infrastructure. In: Manea, F., Miller, R., Nowotka, D. (eds) Sailing Routes in the World of Computation. CiE 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10936. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94418-0_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94418-0_6

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