Conditional permissions in contracts

Abstract

Defining and characterising conditional permissions has never been easy. Part of the problem, we believe, comes from the fact that there is not one but a whole family of possible deontic operators, all of them distinct and reasonable, that can be labelled as conditional permissions. In this article, rather than disputing the correct interpretation, we revisit a number of different interpretations the term has received in the literature, and propose appropriate formalisations for these interpretations within the context of contract automata.