Deontic Logic

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Overview

Deontic logic studies how rules create obligations, permissions, and prohibitions, including how these norms apply when conditions, exceptions, or conflicts arise. Approaches include modal and input/output logics, defeasible and preference-based semantics, and computational encodings in tools such as Prolog, ASP, and SAT solvers. Applications range from legal and institutional compliance to governing AI agents and constraining robot plans, with benchmarks testing rule interpretation, exception handling, and formalization from policy text. A central challenge is connecting precise, auditable formal rules to incomplete or ambiguous real-world evidence and language, where both automated translations and model-based reasoning can miss important details.

Latest papers

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12 papers1 paper in the last four weeks, against 1 the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. A Simple Doxastic Deontic Logic for Norm-Guided Decision Making

    Sep 30, 2026Thorsten Engesser, Agata CiabattoniLogical ReasoningConstrained Optimization

    TU Wien

  2. Legislating World-Model-Based Planning with Legal Reasoning

    Sep 14, 2026Dylan Waldner, Yiannis Kantaros, Guido Governatori +2Logical ReasoningRobot Task Planning

    Cognizant AI Lab, USA · Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering, Washington University, USA · School of Engineering and Technology, Central Queensland University, Australia +1

  3. Implementing Computational Law in Wolfram Language for the Governance of Artificial Intelligence

    Aug 14, 2026James K. WilesAI GovernanceRuntime Enforcement for AI Agents

    Wolfram Institute for Computational Foundations of Science

  4. PolicyKG: An Agentic LLM Pipeline for Translating Institutional Policies into SHACL Knowledge Graphs

    Aug 10, 2026Ponkrit Kaewsawee, Chaklam Silpasuwanchai, Chutiporn AnutariyaKG ConstructionDocument Information Extraction

    Asian Institute of Technology, Pathum Thani, Thailand

  5. What Does ODRL Mean? A Cross-Level Ontological Grounding of Permissions, Prohibitions, and Duties in UFO-L

    Jun 23, 2026Daham M. Mustafa, Christoph Lange, Giancarlo Guizzardi +3Deontic LogicLegal Reasoning

    Fraunhofer FIT, Sankt Augustin, Germany · RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany · University of Twente, The Netherlands +1

  6. Deontic Policies for Runtime Governance of Agentic AI Systems

    Jun 17, 2026Anupam Joshi, Tim Finin, Karuna Pande Joshi +1Ontology-Based ReasoningAI Agent Security

    CSEE Department UMBC Baltimore, MD, USA · Center for AI UMBC Baltimore, MD, USA · Information Systems Department UMBC Baltimore, MD, USA +1

  7. Obligation-Producing Actions

    Jun 12, 2026Kalonji Kalala, Iluju Kiringa, Tet YeapLogical ReasoningDeontic Logic

    University of Ottawa · Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

  8. From Statute to Control Flow: Span-Grounded Deontic Trees for Defeasible Scope Parsing

    Jun 8, 2026Jian Chen, Siyuan Li, Chucheng Wan +1Logical ReasoningLegal NLP

    The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) Guangzhou, China · Sun Yat-Sen University Guangzhou, China

  9. A Four-Valued Normative Intermediate Representation for ASP-Oriented Compliance Reasoning

    Jun 3, 2026Huanyu Yang, Yangfan Wu, Jianmin JiLogical ReasoningAnswer Set Programming

    School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), Hefei, Anhui, China · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong SAR, China

  10. Defeasible Conditional Obligation in a Two-tiered Preference-based Semantics (Extended Version)

    Apr 28, 2026Xavier ParentLogical ReasoningNonmonotonic Reasoning

    Institute of Logic and Computation, TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

  11. Formalizing Kantian Ethics: Formula of the Universal Law Logic (FULL)

    Apr 15, 2026Taylor OlsonAI EthicsMoral Reasoning

    Department of Computer Science, University of Iowa

  12. DeonticBench: A Benchmark for Reasoning over Rules

    Apr 6, 2026Guangyao Dou, Luis Brena, Akhil Deo +4Logical ReasoningLegal Reasoning

    Johns Hopkins University · Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris