Towards Deontic Explanations Through Dialoque

Abstract

Deontic explanations answer why-questions concerning agents’ obligations and permissions. Normative systems are notoriously conflict sensitive, making contrastive explanations pressing: “Why am I obliged to do 𝜙, despite my (seemingly) conflicting obligation to do 𝜓?” In this paper, we develop a model of contrastive explanatory dialogues for the well-established defeasible reasoning formalism Input/Output logic. Our model distinguishes between successful, semi-successful, and unsuccessful deontic dialogues. We prove that the credulous and skeptical (under shared reasons) entailment relation of Input/Output logic, can be characterized in formal argumentation using preferred and grounded semantics. This result allows us to leverage known results for dialogue models of the latter two semantics. Since this work is the first of its kind, we discuss 5 key challenges for deontic explanations through dialogue. Keywords Defeasible normative reasoning, Contrastive deontic explanations, Logical argumentation, Dialogues