van Berkel, K., & Straßer, C. (2025). Reasoning With and About Normative Conflicts. In K. van Berkel, A. Ciabattoni, & J. Horty (Eds.), Deontic Logic and Normative Systems : 17th International Conference, DEON 2025 (pp. 21–40). College Publications.
Normative reasoning is inherently conflict sensitive. Over the past decades, many
conflict-resolution mechanisms have been developed. However, most of the proposed
formal systems do not model interactions between the different conflict types we
encounter in normative reasoning. In this work, we define a Deontic Conflict Calculus
(DCC) to explicitly reason with and about contrary-to-duty, specificity, dilemmas,
and their interaction. DCC generates arguments that represent normative conflicts
in terms of argumentative attacks, naturally giving rise to various kinds of obligations;
e.g., ideal and sub-ideal obligations. We study properties of conflict types and their
interactions. Last, we argue how DCC-instantiated argumentation frameworks relate
to preference models of subideality, a semantic approach prevalent in deontic logic.
