Free Choice Permissions and Ross's Paradox: Internal versus External Nondeterminism

摘要

In the short note the authors show how the well-known paradox of free choice permissions in deontic logic can be understood in terms of nondeterministic actions. Free and 'imposed' permissions can be treated adequately by distinguishing between two kinds of nondeterministic choice operators: one that expresses an external choice, which cannot be influenced by the actor, and one that expresses an internal choice, on which the actor has an influence. Similar notions of nondeterminism are well-known in computer science where they are used in the context of parallel execution of programs with the possibility of synchronization. The authors also apply the insights gained by this approach in a discussion on the well-known paradox of Ross.