Reasoning with rules and rights : term-modal deontic logic

General obligations such as ‘every driver has to give way to a driver coming from the right’ are central in legal reasoning, but have been mostly overlooked in deontic logic. We claim that a simple extension of Standard Deontic Logic to the predicative level is insufficient to capture general obligations. Instead, we argue for an explicit representation of bearers (and counterparties) of obligations as terms in a quantified deontic logic. To achieve this we develop a term-modal counterpart of Standard Deontic Logic and give a sound and strongly complete axiomatization for it. We go on to show that this logic is not only suitable for capturing reasoning with general obligations, but also with (multital and paucital) Hohfeldian rights relations and rules of rights