Resolving conflicting obligations in Mimamsa: a sequent-based approach

The Philosophical School of Mimamsa provides a treasure trove of more than 2000 years worth of deontic investigations. In this paper we formalize the Mimamsa approach of resolving conflicting obligations by giving preference to the more specific ones. From a technical point of view we provide a method to close a set of prima-facie obligations under a restricted form of monotonicity, using specificity to avoid conflicting obligations in a dyadic non-normal deontic logic. A sequent-based decision procedure for the resulting logic is also provided.