An agent may decide to delegate tasks to others. The act of delegating a task by one autonomous agent to another can be carried out by the performance of one or more imperative communication acts. In this paper, the semantics of imperatives are specified using a language of actions and states. It is further shown how the model can be used to distinguish between whole-hearted and mere extensiona...

Actual-sequence views of responsibility are views according to which moral responsibility is a function of actual sequences, histories, or ancestries. In recent years these views have acquired much popularity as an attractive kind of compatibilist answer to the problem of determinism and the freedom of the will. But what does it mean to say that responsibility is ‘a function of the actual seque...

How do people attribute responsibility in situations where the contributions of multiple agents combine to produce a joint outcome? The prevalence of over-determination in such cases makes this a difficult problem for counterfactual theories of causal responsibility. In this article, we explore a general framework for assigning responsibility in multiple agent contexts. We draw on the structura...

Rises in new HIV infections and the return of the hyper-epidemics of sexually transmissible infections have occurred among gay men in North America, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand. If you look beneath the surface, discourses of failed responsibility and blame are a common reaction among gay men, educators, doctors and governments. When HIV first spread among gay communities in the la...

Received 7 September 2006 Revised 30 November 2006 Accepted 6 December 2006 Unhealthy lifestyle contributes significantly to the burden of disease. Scarce medical resources that could alternatively be spent on interventions to prevent or cure sufferings for which no one is to blame, are spent on prevention or treatment of (the risk of) disease that could be avoided through individual lifestyle ...

The implementation of Lean Production Systems is more than redesigning some production processes. The most seminal change has to be made in people’s knowledge. Otherwise, the changes will not be sustainable. Most implementation processes describe the sequence of necessary tasks but do not regard the integration of knowledge in the organization. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze how knowledg...

Implementation often occupies a problematic position in accounts of strategy. It is often seen as a separate and low level activity. The assumption of separateness contradicts empirical evidence, while the assumption of low level activity portrays implementation as simple and automatic despite evidence that implementation often fails. We propose to resolve this difficulty by regarding implement...

There has been limited coverage of the corporate responsibility (CR) practices of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the mainstream CR literature. Furthermore, there has been no systematic analysis of the responsibilities of the high value jewellery industry and jewellery SMEs in particular. This study explores the potential for harm and value creation by individual stakeholders in fi...