Deontic and Action Logics for Organized Collective Agency,Modeled through Institutionalized Agents and Roles

Abstract

In this paper we address the problem of organized collective agency, and propose a deontic/action modal logic for that purpose. We argue that once we want to attribute obligations (permissions or other deontic notions) to a set of agents, we need to consider a new agent - that we called institutionalized agent, and specify how he interacts with the external world: how the obligations flow from the institutionalized agent to the real agents that support him, and how the actions of the latter count as actions of the former. But an agent may act in many qualities (roles), and it is essential to know in which quality an agent has acted, or intends to act, for three main reasons: to know the effects of the act, its deontic qualification, and authentication issues. Thus, we extend the ``sees to it'' action operator with an explicit index that states the quality (role) in which the agent has acted. We also show how to associate obligations to roles, and illustrate how this can be used to express the desired flow of obligations.