This chapter analyses legal responses to three situations: someone pretending to intend marriage, someone entering marriage or a civil partnership for ‘ulterior motives’ and someone entering marriage or a civil partnership when an existing relationship disqualifies them from doing so. It argues that, historically, marriage was used to compensate women who experienced the first form of deception and to punish the men who deceived them; that in ‘ulterior motive’ cases, marriage might have been withheld from the deceptive party; and that bigamy provided legal recognition of the harms and wrongs experienced by duped individuals at the same time as it protected the state’s interest in shoring up marriage. The chapter concludes by arguing that the move away from each of these positions over time means that the extent to which the law protects individuals’ interests in avoiding deceptively induced intimate relationships has decreased. It further argues that this development has implications for how we assess the adequacy of contemporary legal responses to inducing intimacy.

This chapter focuses on the transition process, called the Expert Transition Cycle, which an individual goes through each time they make a transition. It reviews the more traditional models including vocational models, career anchors, psychometric models, work adjustment theories, and psychologically based models as well as ecologically and socially embedded models. It then reviews more contemporary transition process models, focusing on two models, working identity and identity status, which inform the study of identities in transition in the research. Finally, it presents the Expert Transition Cycle, which is the basis for determining how identity changes during a transition. This model includes five stages: Intention, Inquiry, Exploration, Commitment, and Integration.

Intentionalism is the least investigated approach to treaty interpretation. It is often discredited by international legal scholars on the basis of various pragmatic arguments. It is also normatively discouraged as a threat to the stability and predictability of treaty rules. At the same time, even a cursory glance at the case law of international courts and tribunals would be sufficient to realize that treaty interpretation discourse in practice is replete with references to the parties’ intention. This chapter situates the reluctance of international legal scholars about intentionalism in the broader intellectual history of international law and shows that most objections to intentionalism rest on a mentalist understanding of intention that has been severely criticized in philosophy. It also argues that given intentionalism’s close connection with consensualism, it is unrealistic to believe that it can be dismissed in practice.

This chapter addresses problems in the philosophy of interpretation with regard to Latin authors. Its central question is what we mean by the ‘author’. The history of ‘persona’, the notion that the speaker in first-person literature and by extension the image of the author presented in any text is a ‘mask’, is explored for its theoretical and interpretive value, but also critiqued for the potential ethical and political issues it raises. The author should be considered not a window onto the life of the flesh-and-blood Roman, but rather as a construct arising in part, but only in part, from an initial human consciousness living in a specific historical place and time, then developed through a dynamic process of reception. The battle for the life and soul of the author is the story of interpretation, in which the question of the extent to which ‘original intention’ can or should be the goal of exegesis was one of the great controversies of the 20th century and remains a creatively unsolvable problem. I argue that there are certain kinds of readings which are rightly and explicitly situated outside the scope of ‘original intention’, of which I take feminist readings as exemplary.

The author examines the place of consent in treaty interpretation at the time of the marginalization of the role of the intention of the parties. Whether the characterization of international law as a legal system grounded in State consent has ever been empirically true is, as he argues, open to discussion. For him, the law of treaties, however, is commonly seen as ‘a bastion of consensualism’. This sense of confidence has, however, never sat easily with treaty interpretation. The author claims that, despite the lip service sometimes paid to the fiction of the common intention of the parties, the official doctrine of treaty interpretation rests on the primacy of the terms of the treaty.

Chapter 2’s purpose is to provide some focused discussion on the meaning of the ‘force’ prohibited in Article 2(4) and customary international law. In seeking to expose the uncertainties regarding this particular term, various factors or common elements of ‘force’ are distilled. After looking at the prohibition of force in the context of the principle of non-intervention, the chapter moves on to look at the type of force that the prohibition is concerned with and, concluding that it is ‘armed force’, then moves on to attempt to distil the key elements of such force, including whether it is the means used or the effects created which is of importance, and whether force can be used indirectly. The chapter then addresses the ‘gravity’ or severity aspects of a use of force, in particular by distinguishing it from an armed attack or act of aggression, but also by examining whether there is a level of force – or de minimis threshold – below which an action falls out of the remit of the prohibition. Finally, and having distilled the key practical components of a prohibited use of force, the chapter focuses upon the mens rea component.

Ethics has tended to concentrate on (1) what we should do, (2) virtues of character, or (3) the importance of motivation in appraising actions. All three are ethically important. But there is a dimension of moral responsibility that should have a place beside obligations to act, virtues of character, and appraisals of actions in relation to their motivation. It is the manner of actions. This can be right or wrong, an object of intention, and behavior for a reason. Interpersonal relations are not a behavioral grid with fixed points representing only act-types. This chapter explores manners of action. The result is a wider conception of acting rightly than the common understanding on which (despite the adverb) it is simply doing the right thing; a partial account of how acting rightly figures in the content of intention; and a sketch of the moral dimensions of the manners in which we act.

Actions are not merely what we do but essentially connected with intentionality, particularly beliefs and intentions, and thereby with the will. Some actions are basic; others we do by doing something basically – “at will.” Act-types are the kind of thing we can exemplify repeatedly or multiple agents can exemplify simultaneously, say speaking. Act-tokens are individual actions tied to a particular agent, time, and mode of performance. Ethics must address both: types as contents of intentions and primary indicators of obligations, and tokens as morally significant in ways that, like their underlying motives, are not fixed by their type. This chapter also clarifies control of action, direct and indirect. It is not just basic acts that are under direct voluntary control; most of the salient manners of our actions are. Moral obligation and moral responsibility for action extend to those as well as to the acts they color – or discolor.

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.

Given the plurality of uses to which the terms ‘ethics’ and ‘ritual’ are put, we focus on only one tradition of thought about their relationship, namely that stemming from Austin – in which ritual is understood as an act or as a particular modality of action with ethical entailments. After elaborating this position in the first half of the essay, we juxtapose it with an ethnographic description of life in northern Uganda. The ethnography serves both to support aspects of the formal argument and to show that conditions ‘on the ground’ readily escape any formal model. If ritual performance sets the criteria for ethical judgement, ethical concerns establish the choice of ritual performed. Ethical life is shaped by ritual enactment yet is also challenged by circumstances beyond what any given ritual, liturgical order, or theoretical apparatus can provide.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the common methodologies, starting assumptions, and key aims that shape philosophical work in this sphere. This part of the chapter aims to lay bare the bones of philosophy of parenthood as this field currently stands, providing a critical tool for investigation of existing theories of parenthood, but also further demonstrating the complex interdependence between moral parenthood and the concepts of parenthood covered in the previous chapters. I then give an overview of the approaches philosophers have taken to defining the grounds of moral parenthood, and the different problem cases motivating these accounts. Whilst all these problem cases deviate from the ‘paradigm’ case – in which biological, social, legal, and moral parenthood neatly coincide – literature on parental obligations tends to focus on situations in which candidate parents are disinclined to take on some form of parenting role. Philosophers focusing on parental rights, on the other hand, have often been concerned with an overabundance of candidate parents and have aimed to provide solutions to potential disputes. These disputes might arise between parties to surrogacy agreements, biological parents and step- or adoptive parents; and, more speculatively, between biological parents and the hypothetical ‘best available parents’.