Obligation, Contracts, and Negotiation

Abstract

Many obligations can be seen as arising from contractual arrangements (or from situations resembling contractual arrangements) among agents. My obligation to repay you the $100 I borrowed is associated with a simple (quite possibly tacit and informal) contractual arrangement between us. My obligations as an employee of my university are associated with contractual arrangements with my university, which may be considered a collective agent. My university in turn has certain obligations to me. But some obligations change over time as a result of changing circumstances, and in at least some cases the changes that occur can be thought of as involving a renegotiation of a contract among the parties involved. When I pay back half the money I owe you, I have not fulfilled my original obligation; but neither does that original obligation to pay you $100 still stand. Instead, we may consider, we have renegotiated my contract with you so that my remaining obligation is to pay you $50 (or, depending on details of the negotiation, perhaps $50 plus interest or a late fee). Analogous, though usually more explicit, renegotiations of contracts are commonplace in the corporate world as well.

As we examine this way of looking at normative situations, we find a number of complications which must be considered, many of which we are accustomed to set aside in simpler treatments of deontic logic. We must consider the relationships among distinct agents, not just consider the normative positions of one agent at a time. We need to make room for corporate agents, i.e. agents which are organizations or groups of other agents. We need to consider that a single agent may be involved in multiple contractual arrangements, and thus may have a number of different normative roles simultaneously. As a result, we must make room for conflicting obligations. And we must allow for various kinds of modifications of contractual arrangements over time, including negotiation and renegotiation. Moreover, ultimately we must consider ways in which complex organizations are related to their changing roster of participant agents, whose roles within the organization alter over time.

In this paper, I will discuss a number of the issues which arise in any attempt to formalize a contractual model of our changing normative situations.