On the logical independence of collective deontic admissibility statements (Joint work with Hein Duijf and Frederik Van De Putte)Allard Tamminga

26 October 2023

Allard Tamminga (Universität Greifswald), 17:15 - 18:45, presents their project in the Interdisciplinary Research Seminar of the GRK "Collective Decision-Making”.

Location: Room 0079, Von-Melle-Park 5

Abstract

The deontic logic of collective agency can be used to study inferential relations between actions, omissions, abilities, and obligations of individuals and groups. I first present the full formal language L of the deontic logic of collective agency. Truth-conditions for the statements from L are specified in terms of deontic game models. After the logic has been presented, I focus on collective deontic admissibility statements: which statements from L imply them and which statements from L are implied by them? To answer these questions, I define the set L of sublanguages of L that all include all operators for individual and group agency but differ with respect to the included deontic admissibility statements. Thirdly, I give a sketch of the proof of the theorem that the statement “Group G of agents performs a deontically admissibility group action” is partially expressible in one of the sublanguages in L if and only if this sublanguage includes, for some supergroup H of G, the statement “Group H of agents performs a deontically admissible group action”. This theorem can be considered as a fairly precise answer to my initial questions. Lastly, I discuss some philosophical repercussions of this result.

Find the abstract as PDF here.