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of normativity that will fade only insofar as it is not being used or in dialectical re-
lation with its use or lack of use in ethical practice. This is especially contemplated
in the case of legal norms, in which the jurist's interpretation in favor of a norm and
against incompatible one does not eliminate conflict, since it does not necessarily
cause its revision or derogation.
This way of normative reasoning would provide reasonable justified 'inclina-
tions' in favor of one of the pans of the scale or one of the points of view at stake.
This amounts to an inclination that is consistently non-definitive, non-conclusive,
and revisable (
incliner sans necessiter
, in Leibniz' words).
All the previous invite us to a gradualist and fuzzy analysis of normative quali-
fications, values, and principles. The sense is a sort of 'modest' reason, typical in
Bioethics, where moral reasoning should be related to circumstances and situations,
against the oversimplification of the moral realm and against the 'tyranny of prin-
ciples' [17]. The goal is 'practical wisdom', rejecting 'moral geometry' in the line
of a new casuistry, which does not offer 'prescriptions' or 'recipes' but upholds the
necessity of the analysis, weighing and evaluation of circumstances; it is, basically,
'prudent'.
As a result is that deontic qualifications are a matter of degree: Licitness, pro-
hibition, and duty should be treated as gradual notions. From this perspective, a
particular action can have a more or less degree of licitness and to the extent that it
is not completely licit, it will have some degree of illicitness. In words of Sadegh-
Zadeh [15], [16] it is usual and possible to compare the deontic strenght of different
norms (on the basis of fuzzy deontic sets). This comparative notion of obligation
would be based upon a fuzzy concept of obligation (permission, forbiddance). By
fuzzifying deontic qualifications, norms may be ranked according to the degree of
normativeness (obligatoriness, permission, prohibition) of what they prescribe. This
approach, Sadegh-Zadeh says:
[It] also enables a method by which (i) to interpret and reconstruct sit-
uations concerning the superiority of one legally protected interest over
another by introducing a rank order of norms that are relevant in a given
circumstance, and (ii) to introduce a comparative relation of performance
order for diagnostic-therapeutic actions in clinical medicine. ([15], p. 153).
The core of our type of analysis is the principle of graduation, according to which,
when two facts are similar, their deontic treatment must also be similar. The prin-
ciple of graduation concerning norms leads to the rejection of the idea that rights,
duties, and prohibitions, that is, moral or juridical matters (bioethical issues), are
“all-or-nothing” issues. This entails an anti-absolutist approach to human rights and
duties, which are unconditional but not absolute. Graduation leaves room for flex-
ibility and adaptability when dealing with particular and contingent circumstances
in the bioethical debate, and it gives an important role to prudence -understood as
reasonableness- in the bioethical domain. From a normative point of view, this grad-
ualist approach brings in an ingredient of malleability and flexibility, which rehabil-
itates, in some ways, a certain spirit closer to Anglo-Saxon common law. This leads
us to develop a soft deontic logic based on transitive logic, a fuzzy-paraconsistent
