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This paper analyzes Mally’s system of deontic logic, introduced in his The Basic Laws of Ought: Elements of the Logic of Willing (1926). We discuss Mally’s text against the background of some contributions in the literature which show that Mally’s axiomatic system for deontic logic is flawed, in so far as it derives, for an arbitrary A, the theorem “A ought to be the case if and only if A is the case”, which represents a collapse of obligation. We then try to sort out and understand which axioms are responsible for the collapse and consider two ways of amending Mally’s system: (i) by changing its original underlying logical basis, that is classical logic, and (ii) by modifying Mally’s axioms.

DOI: 10.1007/s11229-013-0251-y

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