A Deontic Logic for Programming Rightful Machines

A "rightful machine" is an explicitly moral, autonomous machine agent whose behavior conforms to principles of justice and the positive public law of a legitimate state. In this paper, I set out some basic elements of a deontic logic appropriate for capturing conflicting legal obligations for purposes of programming rightful machines. Justice demands that the prescriptive system of enforceable public laws be consistent, yet statutes or case holdings may often describe legal obligations that contradict; moreover, even fundamental constitutional rights may come into conflict. I argue that a deontic logic of the law should not try to work around such conflicts but, instead, identify and expose them so that the rights and duties that generate inconsistencies in public law can be explicitly qualified and the conflicts resolved. I then argue that a credulous, non-monotonic deontic logic can describe inconsistent legal obligations while meeting the normative demand for consistency in the prescriptive system of public law. I propose an implementation of this logic via a modified form of "answer set programming," which I demonstrate with some simple examples.