Special Workshop Abstract

A central feature of the weighing and balancing of normative arguments in a strict sense is that there is no pre-established rule which decides the case in question, but the rule to be applied is determined as the result of a weighing and balancing procedure by an autonomous judgement bound by normative arguments. The justificatory relation between the arguments and the resulting statement is not a logical inference but a normative relation. It includes a pragmatic element, of establishing a norm on the basis of arguments, which is neither adequately represented in deductive models nor in non-monotonic models of normative argumentation.

This conception of weighing and balancing is based on a conception of normative arguments as being reiterated requirements of validity, demanding that a particular norm shall be accepted as definitively valid and including, at a pragmatic level, the claim that the respective requirement can be supported by further arguments of ever higher order. If this support exists, there is a valid normative argument. The result of a weighing and balancing of normative arguments is a normative judgement or statement of a norm as definitively valid. Such normative arguments, judgements and statements must be distinguished from statements of prima facie-, pro tanto-validity or of validity as membership in a normative system.

Accordingly, various logical relations occur in an argumentation consisting of a weighing and balancing of normative arguments, for example inferences within normative arguments, normative relations between normative arguments and the resulting normative judgements or statements, and prima facie- or defeasible relations between normative statements. The logical relations depend on the type of validity as well as on the content of the norms to which validity of a particular type is attributed, and hence result in different systems of a logic of norms, that is, a fragmentation of deontic logic.