Call for Papers

Special Issue of Studia Logica
From Permissions to Obligations

Guest editors: Piotr Kulicki (KUL, Lublin, Poland; kulicki at kul.pl) and Olivier Roy (UNI Bayreuth, Germany; Olivier.Roy at uni-bayreuth.de)

FORMAT OF THE ISSUE AND REFEREEING PROCEDURE:

THEME, MOTIVATION AND AIMS:

Exercising one's rights, or acting on one's permission can generate obligations for others. Contract law and international law provide examples. Debtors are obligated to comply when their creditors exercise their right to request payment. Free trade agreements place their signatories under the obligation not to pass protectionist regulations. A similar phenomenon holds for permissions stemming from morality or rationality. Others ought not infringe my individual right to dignity. In negotiation, one party making a permissible offer might put the other under the (rational) obligation to accept it.

When exactly, then, do permissions and rights generate obligations? Is there a general structure common to these examples? How are such obligations distributed between the parties involved, be they individual or institutional actors? Are the generated obligations strict or could they be overridden, even when they stem from inalienable rights?

These are fundamental questions regarding the dynamic and social or multi-agent aspects of obligations, permissions and rights. Even though deontic logic has long been concerned with the relation between obligation and permission, this relation is usually understood the other way around. Obligations imply permissions, or permissions constrain the promulgation of further obligations. The dynamic generation of obligations by rights and permissions has received comparatively little attention. This special issue aims at filling this gap by focusing on the essential aspects of obligations generated from permissions.

Certainly the questions concerning relations between permission and obligation cannot be answered without the deep understanding of permissions and obligations themselves. Thus papers attempting to formalize different aspects of permission and obligation are also welcome.

The impetus for this special issue stem from a joint Polish-German research project on the topic (www.piotr-project.org). At the first meeting of the project in February 2016 many participants have already expressed their interest in submitting to this special issue. In addition to these we plan on solicit further contributions through a widely distributed call for paper.

ASSOCIATED EVENT:

The editors plan to organize a Symposium on the special issue at the next Trends in Logic Conference to be held in Lublin (Poland) in September 2017 (see trends.philosophy.kul.pl). Financial support will be provided for the selected contributors to attend the event.

last modfied 3.06.2017; designer and webmaster: Krzysztof Pszczola

Studia Logica

An International Journal for Symbolic Logic
Published by the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences