This chapter describes the development of prosocial motives and the social contexts within which these motives emerge and differentiate. Initially, prosocial behavior is based on a blend of motives, namely, participating in social interaction and early forms of feeling for others. During early childhood, concern-based guilt emerges and mere participation transforms into contributing to collaborative activities. During childhood, the normative turn complements these motives by a sense of obligation (living up to), and, during adolescence, aspiring to one’s ideal self can become an important prosocial motive. In this sense, doing good often is an expression of central human motives, namely, belonging to others, feeling for others, contributing to joint endeavors, affirming a sense of responsibility and normative obligation, and striving for our ideal selves.

Anthropologists and cognitive scientists interested in ethics and morality have much to gain from a two-way dialogue that does not shy away from constructive criticism. This chapter seeks to initiate such a conversation through an overview of three lines of recent research in cognitive science: the evolution of human morality from the standpoint of evolutionary psychology; theories that look to social institutions rather than only evolved psychological dispositions for insight into the variability of human moral dispositions; and studies of how responsibility and intentionality are ascribed in cases of wrongdoing. The final section offers some personal reflections on the methodological challenges of inter-disciplinary engagement, drawing on some of the authors’ recent research on morality and change in western Amazonia. It concludes that anthropologists can use experimental methods creatively, as a way of generating new ethnographic insights; although if genuine conversation on an equal footing is to take place, then ethnography must not only inform experimental design but also be employed to redefine concepts and generate theory.

Calls to ‘be responsible’ render relations, dependencies, and interdependencies visible, and they make demands and claims on others and on oneself. To speak about responsibility is to speak of our diverse attempts to build a good life within relational worlds, and our commonplace failure to do so. By exploring the modes and meanings of responsibility in an array of cultural settings, this chapter reveals how calls for responsibility hinge upon specific enactments of agency, freedom, intentionality, reflexivity, mutuality, responsiveness, and recognition. Yet there remains no stable or universal expression and arrangement of these enactments of responsibility; as an anthropology of ethics makes clear, responsibility’s seemingly self-evident or essential nature dissolves upon closer ethnographic attention. In explicating a multiplicity of responsibilities, this chapter explores how calls for responsibilities shift with scale, from the individual to the collective, within diverse temporal frames, and in response to technologies, techniques, and ideologies that bring new accountabilities and agencies to life.

On March 21, 1918, the German Army launched “Operation Michael” against British positions around Arras as the first stage of an offensive along the Western Front. Bolstered by reinforcements from the Eastern Front after the October 1917 Revolution and cessation of hostilities with Russia, the Kaiserschlacht, as it was called, represented a final gambit to win the war. A few days after the start of this titanic onslaught, Georg Simmel confided in a letter of March 25 to his friend Hermann Graf von Keyserling: “Now I am in the midst of very difficult ethical and metaphysical investigations […]” (G. Simmel, Briefe 1912–1918. Jugendbriefe. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008). It was not only premature aging that conspired against reaping his philosophical harvest: Simmel had been diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. As he writes to his friend, he finds himself in “very bad health” and severely reduced in “intellectual energy.”

Spaceflights may cause pollution of the Earth’s environment, including its maritime dimension, by emissions of harmful substances and jettisoned parts of space launch vehicles and de-orbited spacecraft. Although potentially significant, this source of pollution has received little international attention. In the absence of specific environmental provisions in the international law of outer space, the applicable environmental law provisions are derived from general environmental laws and multilateral environmental agreements such as the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. This Chapter argues that an effective environmental legal regime in the space sector needs to be developed further through more active cooperation between States. Such cooperation should first of all be aimed at gathering scientific knowledge about the marine environmental impact of spaceflights and strengthening the international institutional framework, before any substantive provisions on prevention of pollution can feasibly be developed.

This chapter has two purposes. First, to offer a vision of environmental humanities as an interdisciplinary endeavour that involves the core disciplines of the humanities, as well as their connections with other disciplines and ways of working within the academy and beyond. Second, to draw some conclusions from that vision for the kinds of issues of politics, dialogue and ethics that arise from the real-world problems on which environmental humanities bear. In other words, the chapter attempts to operationalise some of the key messages that the environmental humanities might have to propose in the real-world situation of today. This is a matter first of characterising that situation. Environmental humanities can help us make sense of the challenges that arise, albeit not in isolation. The point of the exercise is to seek appropriate forms of integration between a realm of humanities or humanistic thinking about environmental challenges with a scientific mode of thinking. Second, the chapter considers how humanities thinking can bear on action issues that arise from the situation as thus characterised. What kind of action? How can it be justified? Through which practical mechanisms can it be pursued?

The end of a war is not just about a societys making peace with its former enemy. It is also about the societys making peace with itself. This begins with welcoming back those who have gone to war, those who must be at peace with themselves and at peace with others over what they have done. My title, The Lament of the Demobilized, is from Vera Brittain, a leading pacifist voice of the twentieth century whose pacifism – I call it soldier pacifism – was grounded in her first-hand experience of war. Such soldier pacifism holds that the grief of knowing war means the soldier can never fully return home, and that this constitutes an indictment of all war. I explore this theme through memoirs, literature, poetry, as well as recent topics in just war theory.

The end of a war is not just about a societys making peace with its former enemy. It is also about the societys making peace with itself. This begins with welcoming back those who have gone to war, those who must be at peace with themselves and at peace with others over what they have done. My title, The Lament of the Demobilized, is from Vera Brittain, a leading pacifist voice of the twentieth century whose pacifism – I call it soldier pacifism – was grounded in her first-hand experience of war. Such soldier pacifism holds that the grief of knowing war means the soldier can never fully return home, and that this constitutes an indictment of all war. I explore this theme through memoirs, literature, poetry, as well as recent topics in just war theory.

Chapter 5 considers the theology and moral philosophy of the respected theologian and moral casuist, Robert Sanderson. The divine Sanderson despaired of the unfortunate consequences for practical morality of denying the responsibility and freedom of individuals. In its historical context his doubt amounted to finally rejecting the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Scholars consider Sanderson’s Several Cases of Conscience Discussed in Ten Lectures in the Divinity School at Oxford a main reference for Locke in the writing of the unpublished Two Tracts of Government and his foundational Essays on the Law of Nature. Sanderson’s work sets out a moral philosophy of free will reinforced by mechanical overtones of necessary causality in reasoning. The chapter briefly analyses this type of ‘mechanical conscience’ and shows how Sanderson was committed to a de facto theory of government.

This chapter is concerned with Germany’s stand on State responsibility and liability. It is found that Germany mistakenly attributed acts by the Houthi rebels to the State of Yemen and mistakenly assumed that the Houthi rebels are bound by Yemen’s international human rights obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Further, Germany’s position that Russia is responsible for the use of a chemical weapon in the poisoning of Alexei Nawalny will be addressed. It will be argued that Germany should have cooperated directly with Russia rather than only calling the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Concerning the Federal Parliament’s Scientific Research Services’ assessment on claims against China for damages incurred due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, it will be argued that the only conclusion to be drawn from the report is that legal actions against China must be doomed to failure. Finally, the question will be raised whether Malta apologising for a Maltese ambassador who compared the German Chancellor to Hitler forms a rare example of a formal State apology.

The epilogue concludes the book by summarizing the book’s key findings. In particular, it draws out five categories of implications following the book’s examination of coherence. These implications relate to fundamental aspects of international legal practice, including, crucially, to conceptual understandings of law, doctrine, epistemology, professional ethics in investor-state dispute settlement, and future institutional design in investor-state dispute settlement.

Chapter 7 addresses the following question: How can reflexivity be promoted in the collective context of investor-state dispute settlement, so as to help bridge individually held views by arbitrators that often come into competition or conflict with one another? The response that this chapter offers is that collective reflexivity can be promoted by acknowledging the presence of moral responsibility in arbitrators and by arbitrators committing to five distinct judicial virtues, namely: faith, humility, acquiescence, integrity, and candour. Judicial virtues are habits and mental dispositions, not an equation for the courtroom. They are thus meant as a framework offering guidelines and a roadmap to develop better deliberative practices. The chapter analyses the content of each virtue and assesses observable behaviour in investor-state dispute settlement under each of them.

Responsibility is a key moral concept but it is often used ambiguously, such as a firm being considered a responsible part of the community, having corporate social responsibility, or being responsible for harms. This chapter provides a clear framework that distinguishes between the different ways the term is used and shows how it can be applied in practical terms. It starts with an exposition of the Volkswagen diesel scandal to illustrate the various meanings of the term, contrasting notions of legal liability from moral wrongs. The relationship of cause, blame, and fault to moral responsibility is evaluated. It is noted that people may adopt institutional values when working in a role, and whether that approach remains valid even when someone else takes responsibility. The nature of company and institutional codes and compliance issues are discussed, and positive acts are contrasted to deliberate avoidance. The doctrine of double effect is evaluated, where an outcome is foreseeable but unintended. The concluding case deals with the tragic loss of Boeing 737 MAX airplanes and the attempt to shift blame from the company to individuals, especially foreign pilots.