Work · Analytic Philosophy
Deontic Logic
Article in Mind that treats obligation, permission and prohibition as logical operators analogous to necessity and possibility and sets out laws connecting them – the starting point of deontic logic as a discipline.
Introduction
Von Wright published “Deontic Logic” in the journal Mind in 1951. The paper treats the concepts of obligation, permission and prohibition as operators analogous to the modal concepts of necessity and possibility and sets out a formal system with laws connecting them, for example that what is obligatory is permitted. It names the field – “deontic” from the Greek for “what is binding” – and founded modern deontic logic as a branch of philosophical logic; an earlier attempt, Ernst Mally’s “Grundgesetze des Sollens” (1926), had come from Meinong’s school in Graz. Almost all later work in deontic logic, in philosophy, law and computer science, starts from this paper and from the problems it raised.
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