Cancelling and Overshadowing: Two Types of Defeasibility in Defeasible Deontic Logic

Abstract

In this paper we give a general analysis of dyadic deontic logics that were introduced in the early seventies to formalize deontic reasoning about subideal behavior. Recently it was observed that they are closely related to nonmonotonic logics, theories of diagnosis and decision theories. In particular, we argue that two types of defeasibility must be distinguished in a defeasible deontic logic: overridden defeasibility that formalizes cancelling of an obligation by other conditional obligations and factual defeasibility that formalizes overshadowing of an obligation by a violating fact. We also show that this distinction is essential for an adequate analysis of notorious `paradoxes' of deontic logic such as the Chisholm and Forrester `Paradoxes'. 1 Introduction In recent years defeasible deontic logic has become increasingly popular as a tool to model legal reasoning in expert systems [ McCarty, 1992; Meyer and Wieringa, 1994; Jones and Sergot, 1994 ] , because defeasible reasoning i...