“An empty play with symbols”? von Wright e le criticità della logica deontica

Norm and Action is an undoubtedly corner stone in the almost fifty years of researches devoted by von Wright to deontic logic. Nevertheless, as usual with any philosophical topic he has ever investigated, von Wright never conceived of its results as an ultimate and definitive achievement. Actually he was never content with his tentative answers concerning the ontological status of (legal) norms nor convinced of the jurists’ expectation to conceive of deontic calculi as a suitable logic of legal norms.