In addition to facilitating reproduction and gene propagation, partner attractiveness facilitates pair-bond maintenance. For this reason, partner attractiveness is a core issue for women’s long-term relationships. In this chapter, in addition to explicating the qualities that comprise partner attractiveness for women and their functions, we discuss the extent to which the functional importance of these qualities may shift situationally within the context of women’s committed, long-term relationships. Traits signaling (a) social status, access to resources, and willingness to share resources and (b) physical health and genetic benefits can confer direct benefits to offspring and thus women’s attraction to such traits can facilitate reproduction. Although research to date suggests women’s attraction to traits signaling social status, access to resources, and willingness to share resources does not shift over contexts or the life-course of women’s long-term relationships, women’s attraction to traits signaling physical health and genetic benefits seem to fluctuate across fertility status (though some mixed evidence has emerged). Moreover, the function of such traits may shift as women’s long-term relationships develop over time. We highlight each of these shifts in turn. Traits signaling commitment and trustworthiness (e.g., commitment, supportiveness, warmth, kindness) facilitate long-term relationship maintenance. Given relationship maintenance is consistently important to women, such partner qualities are a stable component of partner attractiveness; nevertheless, we raise the possibility that women’s attraction to such traits may heighten at key milestones in women’s relationship (e.g., during the transition to parenthood, when reaching older age). We end this chapter by proffering an evolutionary developmental relationship life-course model that (a) synthesizes the literature on shifts in partner attractiveness for women and their implications for women’s relationships, (b) suggests new ways of thinking about partner attractiveness, and (c) reveals gaps in empirical knowledge that can pave the way for future research.

Discussants Professor Peter-Tobias Stoll, Professor Duncan French, and Dr Oisin Suttle were asked at the workshop held on 22–23 June 2018 at the World Trade Institute, Bern, Switzerland, to offer an overall assessment of the notion and potentially emerging legal principle of Common Concern of Humankind in international law. Their authorised interventions are transcribed below. They raise pertinent questions as to the novelty of the concept, the thresholds discussed, the relationship to public goods, the feasibility, and methodological implications a prospective principle of Common Concern of Humankind poses. They are encouraging and cautioning at the same time, pointing to conceptual innovation and weaknesses in the chapters of this volume, and offer guidance for further research on the topic.

According to Linden Lab's reports, more than nine million people are residents of Second Life. Many residents spend (on average according to Linden Lab) up to four hours a day in Second Life, some considerably more. What are they doing in that three-dimensional virtual environment, or rather, what are their avatars doing there? They are visiting art galleries, going to concerts, having sex, gambling, consuming and manufacturing products, attending webinars, taking college courses, worshipping, buying and selling, trying to make a profit in Lindens (Linden dollars), which are convertible to real-world currency. In short, living, or, at least, living it up!

Although some commentators and critics have interpreted Second Life as a game on a par with World of Warcraft, it is not a game in the usual sense of the term, although Wittgenstein might disagree. In any event, there are no rule-constitutive actions peculiar to Second Life, no winning or losing, no definable success or failure other than what is understood by those terms in real life (or perhaps I should say in “First Life”). Whatever Second Life now is and whatever it will become is, in very large measure, a product of its residents, who are provided or purchase the programming tools in Second Life to manufacture the objects that give their experiences of Second Life whatever character and content they may have. Residents create or manufacture everything in Second Life, from cars to mansions, and they sell on E-Bay to other residents the programs to do likewise. The Official Guide to Second Life says the following: “Second Life is often held up as the perfect place to get your fantasy on – and yes, there's no other place like it for becoming something you aren't, or even for working out just what it is you want to be. In a sense, it's the epitome of the ‘walled garden’, a place where reality dare not intrude.”

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken a physical and psychological toll on a group in the United States military that has received very little attention in the media: chaplains. Navy chaplains serving with Marine, Coast Guard, and Naval units have responsibilities for ethical education in those units and are tasked as moral advisers to command, as well as provide religious services and counseling. I begin this book with a memoir of my experiences for more than two years (2004–2006) as an instructor in intensive weeklong sessions held at bases and camps around the world teaching Navy chaplains about ethics and the virtues so that they can better fulfill their assignments in theater and during other deployments. Although I have been a university philosophy professor for more than forty years, I had never taken on such an assignment, though I did teach at Homestead Air Force Base for the Air Force during the Vietnam War. I have tried to describe what it was like for those of us on the teaching team to design and teach a suitable ethics curriculum for chaplains who are suffering through identity-challenging personal conflicts while trying to perform their multiple roles in the combat zones. The religious beliefs the chaplains espouse often clash with the realities they confront in a war that many worry cannot be morally justified, and for some chaplains, the curriculum we designed added intellectual ammunition to their concerns about the moral legitimacy of the enterprise in which they had staked their professional careers.

My experiences with the chaplains, most having just recently returned from Iraq or Afghanistan, sometimes bordered on the surrealistic and often jumped that border. Many of the chaplains were tormented by psychological demons that had inhabited them during their combat-zone deployments. Some chaplains had vivid flashback experiences during the teaching sessions. Too many of them seemed to be untreated post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) sufferers. All wrestled with the moral schizophrenia that they wear on their uniforms: they are officers in the war machine and they are ordained representatives of religious faiths that typically preach beliefs antithetical to the “virtues” of the military. Many of the chaplains confided some of their horrific stories to me of personally witnessed human destruction and, in their clerical roles, of listening to confessions and confused cries for psychological and theological help from Marines who had committed or had witnessed patently immoral acts during their tours of duty.