26 January 2023, The Utrecht Logic in Progress Series (TULIPS), Frederik Van De Putte

Abstract: Deontic games are normal form games equipped with a classification of action profiles into those that are acceptable and those that are not. These games have been used in past work to tackle various questions concerning individual and group obligation, group plans and coordination, and method- ological individualism. This paper is the first to develop a combinatorial perspective on such games. In particular, we define three ways to combine any two deontic games, resulting in a new game that represents the simulta- neous play of both original games. We then study the relation between the deontic status of group actions in the new game and the deontic status of the corresponding sub-actions in the original games, establishing a number of fundamental reduction theorems. From these, we derive several corollaries concerning the existence of acceptability voids in interaction scenarios.