Permissions, Information and Institutional Dynamics, Obligations, and Rights

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Exercising my rights, or doing what I am permitted to, can generate obligations for others. Contract law and international law provide examples. Debtors are obligated to comply when their creditors exercise their right to request payment. Free-trade agreements place their signatories under the obligation not to pass protectionist regulations. A similar phenomenon holds for permissions stemming from morality or rationality. Others ought not infringe my individual right to dignity. In negotiation, one party making a permissible offer might put the other under the (rational) obligation to accept it. When exactly, then, do permissions and rights generate obligations? Is there a general structure common to these examples? How are such obligations distributed between the parties involved, be they individual or institutional actors? Are the generated obligations strict or could they be overridden, even when they stem from inalienable rights? These are fundamental questions regarding the dynamic and social or multi-agent aspects of obligations, permissions and rights. Deontic logic, viz. the logical study of obligations and permissions, has long been concerned with the relation between permissions and obligations. Usually, however, the relation is understood the other way around. Obligations imply permissions, or permissions constrain the promulgation of further obligations. However, the dynamic generation of obligations by rights and permissions has received comparatively little attention. The project will fill this gap by focusing on three essential aspects of obligations generated from permissions and rights. First, we will study how explicit permissions generate a dynamics of obligations, and compare it to case where permissions are weak, i.e. the mere absence of prohibitions. Second, we will consider how permissions and rights issued by high-level legal authority generate obligations on its constituents, especially in complex organizations. Finally, we will study the defeasible character of obligations stemming from permissions. Obligations generated from rights and permissions are central to German and Polish law, and these will provide the main sources of data for the analysis in this project.