Tolerating Inconsistencies: A Study of Logic of Moral Conflicts

Abstract

Moral conflicts are the situations which emerge as a response to deal with conflicting obligations or duties. In general, an agent in a state of moral conflict, ought to act on two or more events simultaneously, but fails to do all of them at once. An interesting case arises when an agent thinks that two obligations A and B are equally important, but yet fails to choose one obligation over the other. Despite the fact that the systematic study and the resolution of moral conflicts finds prominence in our linguistic discourse, standard deontic logic when used to represent moral conflicts, implies the impossibility of moral conflicts. This presents a conundrum for appropriate logic to address these moral conflicts. We frequently believe that there is a close connection between tolerating inconsistencies and conflicting moral obligations. In paraconsistent logics, we tolerate inconsistencies by treating them to be both true and false. In this paper, we analyze Graham Priest's paraconsistent logic LP, and extending our examination to the deontic extension of LP known as DLP. We illustrate our work with a classic example from the famous Indian epic Mahabharata, where the protagonist Arjuna faces a moral conflict in the battlefield of Kurukshetra. The paper aims to come up with a significant set of principles to accommodate Arjuna's moral conflict in paraconsistent deontic logics. Our analysis is expected to provide novel tools towards the logical representation of moral conflicts and to shed some light on the relationship between the actual world and the context-sensitive ideal world.