Deontic logic is the field of logic that is concerned with obligation, permission, and related concepts. Alternatively, a deontic logic is a formal system that attempts to capture the essential logical features of these concepts. Typically, a deontic logic uses OA to mean it is obligatory that A, (or it ought to be (the case) that A), and PA to mean it is permitted (or permissible) that A. The term deontic is derived from the ancient Greek déon - δέον (gen.: δέοντος), meaning, roughly, that which is binding or proper.

Philosophers from the Indian Mimamsa school to those of Ancient Greece have remarked on the formal logical relations of deontic concepts and philosophers from the late Middle Ages compared deontic concepts with alethic ones. In his Elementa juris naturalis, Leibniz notes the logical relations between the licitum, illicitum, debitum, and indifferens are equivalent to those between the possible, impossible, necessarium, and contingens respectively.

Ernst Mally, a pupil of Alexius Meinong, was the first to propose a formal system of deontic logic in his Grundgesetze des Sollens and he founded it on the syntax of Whitehead's and Russell's propositional calculus. Mally's deontic vocabulary consisted of the logical constants U and ∩, unary connective !, and binary connectives f and ∞.