Obligations directed from bearers to counterparts

This articles provides a logical analysis of the concepts of directed obligation, prohibition and permission. These concepts are used to express normative relations between a bearer and a counterpart. They play a predominant role in Hohfeld's analysis of rights. On our analysis, a directed obligation is defined as a conj unction of a statement expressing that a bearer ought to do a certain act and a statement expressing that it ought to be the case for the counterpart that the bearer does this act. A similar definition is offered of directed prohibition and permission. The proposed analysis is discussed in view of two competing theories of rights: the benefit theory and the claimant theory. The present proposal is found to be supported by the benefit theory. 1 The problem of how to represent directed obligations This paper contributes to the formal analysis of the concept of rights in the tradition from Hohfeld, Kanger and Lindahl. In a number of papers Allen and Saxon have defended the value of a formal representation of rights when making programs to aid the process of drafting or interpreting law (cf. [AS86], [AS93a], [AS93b]). (Concerning the relevance to automated tools for legal drafting, see also [H G93].) This supports the relevance of our paper to AI and Law. Furthermore, Jones and Sergot argues that certain complex systems are best analysed from a 'normative perspective', and suggests Lindahl's