Home – Home – Jornals – Philosophy of Sciences 2025 number 2

The question of the modality of “permitted” plays a key role in deontic logic and the philosophy of law, but it has long taken a second place compared to the more extensively developed categories of “obligatory” and “prohibited”. This lack of attention is partly due to the traditional definition of permission as an absence of prohibition, which allows legal systems to be treated as logically closed: if an action is not prohibited, it is permitted. However, this view gives rise to a number of theoretical problems and limits the possibilities of formal analysis of normative systems. First, real legal systems cannot always be considered as complete and consistent, in which each action is either prohibited or permitted. They may contain gaps, uncertainties and conflicts of legal norms due to their dynamic development, as well as the presence of multiple levels of norm creation. Second, equating permission with the absence of prohibition fails to account for the distinction between weak and strong permissions. Weak permission merely indicates the absence of prohibition, whereas strong permission presupposes the existence of a special norm that explicitly sanctions an action. In open normative systems, these two types of permission do not always coincide, which calls into question the principle of “everything that is not prohibited is permitted.” Thus, the study of the modality of “permitted,” especially in open normative systems, requires a more sophisticated logical framework than traditional deontic logic focused on the interdefinability of “permitted” and “prohibited,” that is, on understanding permission as the absence of prohibition.,