An attempt to adapt a logic for conditional preferences for reasoning with Contrary-To-Duties

Abstract

This paper presents an attempt to adapt, in the context of deontic reasoning, a logic defined by Boutilier for reasoning with conditional preferences. The first motivation for this work is that deontic logic can be given a semantics in terms of ordered worlds like in this kind of logic: the preference relation among worlds aims at ordering worlds from the most ideal ones to the least ideal ones. The second motivation is that Boutilier introduced a model of an agent's ability by distinguishing between controllable, influenceable and uninfluenceable propositions. And we noticed that this partition can be related to the notions introduced by Carmo and Jones for reasoning with Contrary-To-Duties. This present work shows an extension of Boutilier's work in order to use his logic for reasoning with Contrary-To-Duties. An exhaustive study of a benchmark example of CTDs leads us to show that the results obtained with this extension coincide exactly with those obtained by Carmo and Jones.