Obligations, permissions and transgressions: An alternative approach to deontic reasoning

This paper proposes a logic of transgressions for obligations and permissions. A key objective of this logic is to allow deontic conflicts (Lemmon 1962) but without appealing to defeasible or paraconsistent reasoning, or multiple levels of obligation. This logic of transgressions can be viewed as conceptually related to those approaches that formulate obligations in terms of ?escaping? from a sanction (Prior 1958; Nowell-Smith & Lemmon 1960), and its modal variants (Anderson 1958; Kanger 1971), but where the notion of a transgression is more fine-grained than a single ?sanction?.