This chapter formulates guidance for applying the IHL proportionality rule by looking at its objectivity; the standard of the reasonable commander and the interpretation of the term ’excessive’.

This chapter contains an analysis of the practical application of the IHL proportionality rule by looking at a number of examples of factual situations.

This chapter contains an overview of the development of the IHL rule on proportionality in treaty law and a discussion of its existence as a customary IHL rule.

In addition to the IHL proportionality rule, IHL contains a number of other rules that fulfil a similar role as a standard of moderation and with a broader scope, including effects on enemy forces.

This chapter provides insight into the practical and legal context in which the proportionality rule must be applied: the targeting process; indiscriminate attacks and precautionary measures.

The aim of this chapter is to assess the different factors which comprise the IHL proportionality rule.

Introduction to the study of proportionality rule in international humanitarian law.

IHL proportionality as a principle of IHL and the manifestations of proportionality in other legal frameworks relating to the use of force.

This chapter pleads for a refocussed application of the IHL proportionality rule, tilting the balance more towards humanity; and analyses whether it needs to be clarified or changed.

This chapter revisits Herder’s debate with Kant in his Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Mankind, paying particular attention to Herder’s ideas on individual self-determination and his history of modern liberty and enlightenment. In this work, Herder reinterpreted human self-determination as a distinctive capacity and moral duty, whilst also viewing it as the highest form of self-preservation and sociability exhibited across the spectrum of natural beings. Kant, by contrast, invoked human ‘unsocial sociability’, presenting morality as a late development in human history as well as underlining the role of the modern state in facilitating this development. Herder rejected all the constitutive elements of Kant’s idea for a universal history, whilst also seeking to refine his account of the history of ‘state-machines’ and political government in Europe. He accordingly proposed an alternative vision of the prospects for greater peace in Europe and the world, drawing attention to a moral learning process in human history and the role of commercial cities in the rise of modern liberty. He set up the ‘Hanseatic league’ as an example for a future European union as well as predicted the empowerment of the subjugated peoples of Europe thanks to growing international trade and improved government.

Herder was deeply committed to finding ways to achieve moral and political reform in Livland, Russia, Germany and Europe in general. Herder’s reform ideas were embedded in Enlightenment discussions about the moral psychological foundations of ‘modern liberty’ and international peace. In responding to Rousseau’s challenge in The Second Discourse, Herder engaged with the new mid-eighteenth century work on human psychology, sensibility, physiology, whilst also delving into literary and cultural history. In the 1770s, Herder developed a theologically framed understanding of the history of mankind as a gradual ethical formation of humanity, which was still largely compatible with his earlier naturalistic approach. In the 1780s, Herder came to view human history as part of a more encompassing ‘natural process’, whilst continuing to take an interest in distinct national histories. In contrast to Kant, Herder interpreted individual human self-determination as a voluntary ‘life according to nature’, emphasising the cultivation of ‘purified patriotism’ and ‘dispositions of peace’ as essential for modern liberty and international peace. He welcomed the French Revolution and, as a ‘German patriot’, encouraged Germans to ‘self-constitute’ themselves by pursuing cultural, moral and constitutional change.

In the last decades, scholars have carved out Herder’s original and interconnected ideas about epistemology, metaphysics, philosophical anthropology, language, and aesthetics, situating his thinking in various strands of Enlightenment philosophy, natural history and hermeneutics. Several recent studies have also dissected Herder’s moral and political ideas. However, Herder’s views on modern European politics and the evolution of his political thought have remained largely unexplored. In particular, his self-avowed ‘German patriotism has not been studied at any depth. At the same time, a debate on Herder’s relationship to nationalism still lingers on. This study proposes that reconstructing Herder’s serial contributions to eighteenth-century discussions on the moral psychological foundations of, and the possible reforms in, modern societies provides a key to understanding the evolution of his political thought, including his relationship to nationalism. In engaging with thinkers such as Rousseau, Montesquieu, Möser, Ferguson, and Kant, Herder addressed questions on how to close the gap between moral principles and action, as well as law and ethics, in contemporary societies.

This chapter discusses Herder’s engagement with the French Revolution and his continuing debate with Kant, specifying the ways in which Herder sought to balance humanitarian and patriotic concerns in his political vision in the 1790s and early 1800s. Herder celebrated the French Revolution as an attempt to restore a ‘living constitution’ based on natural order in France. He initially also welcomed Kant’s ideas on human dignity, but soon came to reject his more specific conception of self-determination. His worries about the outbreak of the Revolutionary wars were reflected in his concern that Kant’s philosophy of history might unwittingly exacerbate republican moral absolutism and imperialism. In his view, Kant could not adequately resolve the gap between professed principles and action, law and ethics. Herder’s own understanding of a truly humanitarian philosophy of history was grounded in his Stoic-vitalist account of human self-determination. He further elaborated on the ways in which humans could cultivate their ‘sensus humanitatis’ through reflective engagement with history, criticising various instances of European colonial imperialism. His primary concern, however, was to guide European nations—above all, the German—in cultivating a new ethic to enable the simultaneous pursuit of domestic reforms and international cooperation.

George Moore spent a large portion of his career writing joyously and explicitly about sex. Sex meant everything to Moore, and he occasionally mused that it was a ‘fluid’ or ‘rhythm’ that connected and vitalized all things in the world. But at the end of his three-volume autobiography Hail and Farewell (1911–14) he not only declared the onset of age-related sexual impotence, but also claimed that it was this that was finally going to make him a great artist. His newly imposed continence was going to make him intellectually and artistically strong and would give him the authority and charisma of a prophet. He had said similar things elsewhere, and his descriptions of the dangers of excessive sexuality closely follow those of Victorian medical texts. This chapter teases out this line of thinking in Moore’s writing about art and artists, and particularly his connection of this potently continent art with Walter Pater. The chapter shows how different sexual ideas can exist side by side in the work of a single person or even a single text, and how productive continence can often be found in surprising places.

Matthias Koßler argues that Schopenhauer's theory of character is relevant to the recent revival of the concept in the social sciences. He argues that the theory of character Schopenhauer presented in his later essays is inconsistent with the theory developed in The World as Will and Representation. In the prize essays, Schopenhauer develops the Kantian distinction between intelligible and empirical character, treating the former as an innate, unchangeable metaphysical entity, while in WWR Schopenhauer clearly emphasizes the importance of empirical evidence, even for his metaphysics, so that intelligible character must be thought of in relation to experience. Furthermore, reason itself is an essential component of being human, and rationality involves the possibility of partly resisting the effect of a motive on the will, hindering it from achieving expression in action. Thus, human species character cannot just be a set of fixed properties, but rather a general field of possibilities by means of which we use our rationality to individualize ourselves. In conclusion, Koßler recommends avoiding the Kantian terminology of intelligible versus empirical character that achieves prominence in the prize essays. Instead, we should speak of a general concept of personhood that is necessarily specialized into an individual character.

In this concluding chapter, I summarize the argument about the conditions for the achievement of recognition that Hegel sets out from Chapters IV-VI of the Phenomenology. I consider the ways in which the conclusions of this argument are significant for the project of the text as a whole, pointing to the role of the idea of the self both in the Phenomenology’s “Preface” and account of “Absolute Knowing,” and in the Science of Logic. At the same time, I also argue that the account of reciprocal recognition is completed in Hegel’s account of “spirit,” and so does not depend on the subsequent accounts of religion or philosophical science. I conclude by stressing the precarity of relations of reciprocal recognition which are dependent on the achievement of moral agreement.

This chapter analyses the international humanitarian rules on veterinary personnel. It distinguishes between international armed conflicts and non-international armed conflicts and examines the legal consequences of violations. The chapter also reflects on the anthropocentric nature of international humanitarian law and discusses how this body of law might take better account of the interdependency of the fate of the human race with the fate of the other animal and plant species with which it shares the planet. It finally recommends lines of investigations on the legal protection of veterinary personnel.