John Horty’s book ‘Agency and deontic logic’ appeared at Oxford Press in 2001. It develops deontic logic against the background of a theory of agency in nondeterministic time. Several philosophical reviews of the book appeared since then [1–5]. Our goal is to present the book to a general AI audience that is familiar with action theories developed in AI, classical decision theory [6], or formal...

In his paper ‘What we are morally responsible for’,1 Harry Frankfurt claims, in passing, that while the ‘Frankfurt Counterexamples’2 are counterexamples to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP: An agent is morally blameworthy3 for what she has done only if she could have done otherwise), they are not counterexamples to the famous Kantian maxim that ‘Ought’ implies ‘Can’. In an Analysis...

Physicians, having shared and survived the gauntlets of medical school and residency, tend to be supportive of one another. At the same time, having first hand knowledge of the time commitment that goes with our profession, we are often hesitant to ask for one another's assistance. These factors have been instrumental in the evolution of the curbside or sidewalk consult, a practice that is ingr...

Various formally valid counterexamples have been adduced against the Humean dictum that one cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.” There are formal rebuttals—some very sophisticated now (e.g., Charles R. Pigden’s and Gerhard Schurz’s)— to such counterexamples. But what follows is an intuitive and informal argument against them. I maintain that it is better than these sophisticated formal defens...

Shared memory as a programming abstraction is widely used within parallel applications. It is not widely used between applications, but we argue that it should be. Specifically, we suggest that shared memory is both faster and more intuitive than the principal alternatives in many cases, and that the general disuse of shared memory facilities in systems such as Unix is due in large part to a la...