An ought-to-do deontic logic for reasoning about fault-tolerance: the diarrheic philosophers

Abstract

In the present paper we use a variation of a well-known example (dining philosophers) to illustrate how deontic logics can be used to specify, and verify, systems with fault- tolerant characteristics. Towards this goal, we first introduce our own version of a prepositional deontic logic, and then some of its most important meta properties are described. Our main goal is to show that our deontic formalism is suitable for use in practical examples, and also to prepare the ground for more inclusive formalisms.