Normative statements, which involve concepts such as obligation and prohibition, are enormously important in a variety of fields, from law and ethics to artificial intelligence. Reasoning with and about them requires deontic logic, which is a quite recent area of research. By contrast, for more than two millennia, one of the most important systems of Indian philosophy focused on analyzing normative statements. Mimamsa, as it is called, looks at these statements found in the Vedas, the sacred texts of (what it is now called) Hinduism, and interprets them by explaining precisely what course of action they require. This talk will describe the findings in [1] on the deontic reasoning of \mimamsa{}, and preliminary ideas on how to apply them to design autonomous agents sensitive to legal, social and ethical norms, see [2].

The results I will present arise from a collaboration between logicians, sanskritists and computer scientists.

Bibliography

1. Reasoning Tools for Deontic Logic and Applications to Indian Sacred Texts. Research project (with Elisa Freschi) funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Funds WWTF – 2017-2022.https://mimamsa.logic.at/
2. TAIGER: Training and Guiding AI Agents with Ethical Rules. Research project (with Ezio Bartocci and Thomas Eiter) funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Funds WWTF – 2023-2026.https://taiger.logic.at/