Knowledge of the molecular and physiological mechanisms of the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) is no longer confined to the lab. Rather, DOHaD is part of a scattered landscape of policy initiatives, including political discourses, programmatic statements, and public health measures. This chapter examines what could be called the ‘moral paradox’ of DOHaD in policymaking; that is, the idea that while the scope, foundations, and practical implications of DOHaD research call for structural interventions addressing social determinants of health over the lifecourse, messages can boil down to simplistic claims of individual responsibility addressed to parents and gestating bodies. The chapter draws from a systematic literature review to document claims towards individual responsibilities in DOHaD publications. It shows that scientists rarely make any straightforward argument in favour of individual responsibilities for health. The ‘moral paradox’ of DOHaD arises from an ambiguous stance on the pragmatic possibilities of health promotion strategies inspired by DOHaD knowledge, which mixes up the current practical possibilities of the field with its policy framing, opportunities, and political ambitions. The chapter concludes that a greater awareness of these moral idiosyncrasies in DOHaD research may help the field embrace a social justice framing.

Thus chapter discusses the basics of international responsibility, focusing mostly on states. It details how states can be held responsible, what the consequences thereof may be, and discusses the circumstances precluding wrongfulness. It further analyzes the responsibility of international organizations and of individuals under international law

This chapter captures and closely analyzes the multiplicity of narratives developed by designated Gang of Four followers purged from the regime following the end of the Cultural Revolution. The CCP authorities have labeled these so-called followers as “perpetrators” of the Cultural Revolution. Using oral histories, the chapter shows how those officially labeled as “perpetrators” rarely and only indirectly portray themselves as such; more often they see themselves as victims or even heroes. The chapter further illustrates how the party-state has never been able to silence alternative voices on the Cultural Revolution within society, nor can it addresses the issue of responsibility for past violence by categorizing perpetrators and victims, two categories that are often confronted with a complex reality. The chapter argues that the processes of punishing perpetrators in post-Cultural Revolution China, or the absence thereof, have continued to influence the way the past is remembered and not remembered in present Chinese society.

While not typically considered a postcolonial writer, Ishiguro’s work often engages with the question of British and Japanese imperialism and colonialism, either directly in works such as An Artist of the Floating World, When We Were Orphans, and the Ishiguro-scripted film The White Countess, or through subtle allusion to the American post-war occupation of Japan in A Pale View of Hills or the Suez Crisis in The Remains of the Day. Writing from the ‘inside’, from the perspective of individuals who are unwittingly complicit in the structures of oppression entailed by colonial rule, Ishiguro offers complex and unsettlingly sympathetic depictions of the psychological denials and displacements that allow individuals to operate within these regimes. Focusing on An Artist of the Floating World, When We Were Orphans, and The White Countess, this chapter responds to the ways in which Ishiguro’s fiction attends to the relationship between individual and collective responsibility and historico-political forces.

There are important doctrinal and institutional obstacles in the way of proper treatment of collective legal responsibility of several States for global environmental harm, but no serious theoretical obstacles. Difficult theoretical issues do arise at the level of justification, however. The chapter investigates how legal and moral responsibility of individuals, States, and collectives of both all fit together as a normative matter, using global environmental harm as its case study. It argues that shared moral responsibility – the responsibility an individual has when acting together with others – is a very important moral phenomenon. By contrast we have no need for the idea of a collective (such as a State) itself being morally responsible. Ideally, the shared ex ante moral responsibilities of individuals together to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would be discharged by domestic law under the guidance of international law. Where non-complying States face sanctions, the burden of those sanctions will be imposed on individuals who are not responsible for their State’s failure. Yet citizens have political obligations to improve their States, including in the matter of compliance with international law. If the sanctions can be seen as doing citizens’ work for them, the burdens imposed do not seem objectionable.

This chapter deepens the insight that tort law fulfils a societal role. It locates the classical model of tort liability, namely individual responsibility, within a wider privatist societal constitution. Both contract and tort, however, are understood as second order observations of the knowledge base of society, which has broken free of tradition and centralized authority in modernity. Therefore, private law models its dynamic knowledge base, and provide a constitution of civil society that unleashes experimentation and enables a 'relational rationality' to unfold. The gradual emergence classical tort law is documented, and its constitutional role underscored through examples from of private and public liability in English, French and German law. The society of individuals on which the law of torts is modelled, however, begins to rupture by the end of the 19th century, and it becomes increasingly difficult to frame all legal problems as issues of corrective justice. Nonetheless, the legacy of classical tort law, is a model of individual responsibility, which continues to shape scholarly engagement with tort law, and continues to impact on how legal problems are perceived in law.

Thus chapter discusses the basics of international responsibility, focusing mostly on states. It details how states can be held responsible, what the consequences thereof may be, and discusses the circumstances precluding wrongfulness. It further analyzes the responsibility of international organizations and of individuals under international law

This chapter examines the contribution of the Special Court for Sierra Leone caselaw on the prosecution of child recruitment as a war crime under international law. The Sierra Leone conflict was widely known for its conscriptions of children as child soldiers, who under the influence of fear, drugs, and hallucinogens committed grave atrocities across Sierra Leone. Although the crime of child recruitment and conscription was recognized in 1998 when the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court was adopted, the Special Court was the first court to successfully charge and prosecute this particular war crime. In analyzing this novel prosecution, this chapter first addresses the creation and recognition of the war crime of child recruitment within the Rome Statute. Second, it examines the reasoning of the Appeals Chamber in holding that child recruitment is a crime recognized under customary international law. Third, it assesses the impact of the Special Court’s work on prosecuting child recruitment in developing the actus reus and mens rea of the crime. Finally, this chapter examines the impact of the Special Court on the International Criminal Court’s prosecutions of child recruitment in the recent cases of Lubanga and Ongwen.

The ‘āqila -- a group of men liable for the payment of blood money on behalf of any of them -- is based on collective liability. When the Shari‘a borrowed this institution from pre-Islamic, tribal custom, a contradiction was created with the Islamic important principle of individual responsibility. This chapter focuses on this contradiction, examining the means by which Muslims jurists attempted to settle, reduce, or justify the paradox, and how these efforts contributed to shaping the law. One way was to restrict the liability of the ‘āqila to accidental homicide, leaving the perpetrator alone liable for intentional homicide. Another solution was to develop arguments that either denied the contradiction or enhanced the importance of the ‘āqila to justify the existence of the institution despite the contradiction involved. It is argued that the changes introduced in rules related to the ‘āqila, and the proposed justifications, brought homicide, which in pre-Islamic Arab custom was treated as a tort, closer to a crime.