rio: Reasoner for Input/Output Logic

Input/Output (I/O) logics have been devised by D. Makinson and L. van der Torre as a class of formal systems for norm-based deontic reasoning. Intuitively, they formalize the detachment process of obligations (referred to as the output) from a given set of conditional norms and a specific situation (called the input). It differs from other deontic logics (e.g., based on modal logics or extensions of it) in the sense that the norms themselves are not part of the object logic and hence do not carry truth values. Constrained I/O logic extend plain I/O logics by restricting the output set to be consistent with respect to a given set of formulas, addressing deontic paradoxes such as contrary-to-duty situations and other dilemmas.

In the standard formulation, there are four different (unconstrained) output operators called out₁, out₂, out₃ and out₄. out₁ allows for basic detachment, out₂ adds reasoning-by-cases principles, and out₃ and out₄ augment out₁ and out₂, respectively, with (cumulative) transitivity.

The Tool

rio provides a TPTP-aligned automated reasoning system for unconstrained and constrained I/O logics basid on the out_i operators, 1 ≤ i ≤ 4. It is implemented as a Scala application and based on the scala-tptp-parser.

In short, the system allows you to specify a set of conditional norms and a number of inputs (each of which describing aspects of the current situational context), and provides automated means for inferring whether given obligations (also encoded as formulas) can be derived. rio can also be used to infer the set of detached obligations instead of checking detachment of given ones.

See the README for details and the release page for release information and change logs.

rio is distributed under the BSD 3-Clause license (see LICENSE file), and uses third party libraries that are distributed under their own terms (see LICENSE-3RD-PARTIES file).