Obligations directed from bearers to counterparts

This articles provides a logical analysis of the concepts of directed obligation, prohibition and permission. These concepts are used to express normative relations between a bearer and a counterpart. They play a predominant role in Hohfeld’s analysis of rights. On our analysis, a directed obligation is defined as a conj unction of a statement expressing that a bearer ought to do a certain act and a statement expressing that it ought to be the case for the counterpart that the bearer does this act. A similar definition is offered of directed prohibition and permission. The proposed analysis is discussed in view of two competing theories of rights: the benefit theory and the claimant theory. The present proposal is found to be supported by the benefit theory. 1 The problem of how to represent directed obligations This paper contributes to the formal analysis of the concept of rights in the tradition from Hohfeld, Kanger and Lindahl. In a number of papers Allen and Saxon have defended the value of a formal representation of rights when making programs to aid the process of drafting or interpreting law (cf. [AS86], [AS93a], [AS93b]). (Concerning the relevance to automated tools for legal drafting, see also [H G93].) This supports the relevance of our paper to AI and Law. Furthermore, Jones and Sergot argues that certain complex systems are best analysed from a ‘normative perspective’, and suggests Lindahl’s analysis as a useful tool (cf. [JS93] ). In [Kro95] it is argued that a representation of normative relations discussed here may be useful to the design of multi–agent systems, as these systems have reached a level where full regimentation i= impossible and reliance will be based on the ability to make contracts between agents. This suggests the relevance of the present paper to mainstream AI as well. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies we not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing Machinery. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee andlor specific permission.