This paper warns of two threats to moral responsibility that arise when accounting for omissions, given some plausible assumptions about how abilities are related to responsibility. The first problem threatens the legitimacy of our being responsible by expanding the preexisting tension that luck famously raises for moral responsibility. The second threat to moral responsibility challenges the legitimacy of our practices of holding responsible. Holding others responsible for their omissions requires us to bridge an epistemic gap that does not arise when holding others responsible for their actions—one that we might often fail to cross.

Spinoza's Ethics promises a path for sweeping personal transformations, but his accounts face two sets of overarching problems. The first concerns his peculiar metaphysics of action and agents; the second his apparent neglect of the very category of persons. Although these are somewhat distinct concerns, they have a common, unified solution in Spinoza's system that is philosophically rich and interesting, both in its own right and in relation to contemporary work in moral philosophy. After presenting the core of the problem facing Spinoza's action theory, I turn to his overlooked account of selves, one that can be illuminated by contemporary work on so-called deep-self theories. I then show how Spinoza's distinctive account of selves prevents his action theory from collapsing into metaphysical incoherence, and conclude with an implication for Spinoza's broader account of transformation.

Is Anscombean practical knowledge independent of what the agent actually does on an occasion? Failure to understand Anscombe’s answer to this question is a major obstacle to appreciating the subtlety and plausibility of her view. I argue that Anscombe’s answer is negative, and turns on the nature of mistakes in performance, and reveals a distinctive implicit metaphysics of mind and knowledge, structured by related capacities and exercises of capacities. If my interpretation is correct, then practical knowledge shares features with knowledge-how and knowledge-that, but deserves its own epistemic category.

Although individual values have been scarcely studied in the entrepreneurship literature, existing research provides evidence that they are relevant for understanding entrepreneurial behavior. Values, however, do not necessarily influence action in a direct way. Instead, they may indirectly predict behavior via more proximal psychological processes. We build upon previous research in entrepreneurship values using Schwartz (1992) individual-values theory and Frese’s (2007) entrepreneurial action theory, and propose a theoretical model in which individual values have an indirect effect on entrepreneurial behavior through a series of four ulterior cognitive processes: Goal setting and intentions, mapping of information about the environment, planning and monitoring of the execution, and feedback processing. In doing so we integrate the theory of individual values with entrepreneurial cognition research. Despite their complementarity, these two theoretical approaches have not been studied together before. In this way, we offer new insights on the way individual values can explain entrepreneurial action. Based on these two lines of research we additionally propose a research agenda.

Just as the existence of practical akrasia has been treated as important evidence for the existence of our practical agency, the alleged absence of epistemic akrasia—cases in which a believer believes some proposition contrary to her considered judgments about what she has most reason to believe—has recently been marshaled as grounds for skepticism about the existence of similar forms of epistemic agency. In this paper, I defend the existence of epistemic agency against such objections. Rather than argue against the impossibility of epistemic akrasia, I argue that the impossibility of epistemic akrasia is actually compatible with the existence of epistemic agency. The crucial mistake, I argue, is that skeptics about epistemic agency are failing to distinguish carefully between differences in the structure of believing and acting and differences in the structure of normative reasons to believe and normative reasons to act. I show that once these ‘environmental’ differences are properly distinguished, we can see that absence of epistemic akrasia provides no reason to doubt that practical and epistemic agency are on a par with one another.

There is an increasing interest in using logic programming to specify and implement distributed algorithms, including a variety of network applications. These are applications where data and computation are distributed among several devices and where, in principle, all the devices can exchange data and share the computational results of the group. In this paper we propose a declarative approach to distributed computing whereby distributed algorithms and communication models can be (i) specified as action theories of fluents and actions; (ii) executed as collections of distributed state machines, where devices are abstracted as (input/output) automata that can exchange messages; and (iii) analysed using existing results on connecting causal theories and Answer Set Programming. Results on the application of our approach to different classes of network protocols are also presented.