Commitment: some formal interpretations

We often use sentences that seem conditional in nature when we reason about normative issues, e.g. ‘If you have promised to do something, you should keep your promise’ and ‘If you have done something bad, you should apologize’. We seem to think that promise-making in some sense commits us to promise-keeping and that acting bad in some sense creates an obligation to apologize. It is, however, not obvious how we should symbolize such sentences in a formal language. The purpose of this essay is to investigate some different possible formalizations of different conditional obligation sentences. I consider seven different interpretations of the concept of commitment or conditional obligation and I say something about the logical properties of these different interpretations.