Prioritized conditional imperatives: problems and a new proposal

The sentences of deontic logic may be understood as describing what an agent ought to do when faced with a given set of norms. If these norms come into conflict, the best the agent can be expected to do is to follow a maximal subset of the norms. Intuitively, a priority ordering of the norms can be helpful in determining the relevant sets and resolve conflicts, but a formal resolution mechanism has been difficult to provide. In particular, reasoning about prioritized conditional imperatives is overshadowed by problems such as the ‘order puzzle’ that are not satisfactorily resolved by existing approaches. The paper provides a new proposal as to how these problems may be overcome.