Giving permission implies giving choice

When we want to examine different kinds of forms of acts within the framework of the description of the Dutch criminal law, whether an act is permitted or not permitted, we can encounter a difference. On the one hand, it could be the case that a certain act is permitted by a competent normative authority. On the other hand, it could be the case that in the Dutch criminal law a certain act is weak permitted without a competent normative authority having enacted that permission. The article presents the formalisation of the weak and strong permission in deontic logic based on the logic of enactment. A permission that follows from the absence of a prohibition, we call a weak permission; this permission is not enacted. A strong permission is always enacted (implicitly or explicitly), and implies a giving choice. The distinction between these two types of permission is a consequence of the universality of a normative system by the closure rule: ´whatever is not forbidden, is permitted´.