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421Managerialism as Anti-Social: Some Implications of Ubuntu for Knowledge ProductionIn Michael Cross & Amasa Ndofirepi (eds.), Knowledge and Change in the African University: Challenges and Opportunities, Sense Publishers. pp. 139-154. 2017.Given the myriad ways in which managerialism in higher education, and especially research undertaken there, is undesirable, is there a moral theory that plausibly explains why they all are and prescribes some realistic alternatives? In this contribution, I answer ‘yes’ to this overarching question. Specifically, I argue that the various respects in which managerialism is unjustified, particularly with regard to knowledge production, are well captured by an ethical philosophy grounded on salient …Read more
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42Poderá o propósito de Deus ser a fonte do sentido da vida?In Desidério Murcho (ed.), Viver para Que? Ensaios Sobre o Sentido da Vida, Dinalivro. 2009.Portuguese translation by Desiderio Murcho of "Could God's Purpose Be the Source of Life's Meaning?" (Religious Studies 2000).
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1843Ubuntu as a Moral Theory and Human Rights in South AfricaAfrican Human Rights Law Journal 11 (2): 532-559. 2011.There are three major reasons that ideas associated with ubuntu are often deemed to be an inappropriate basis for a public morality. One is that they are too vague, a second is that they fail to acknowledge the value of individual freedom, and a third is that they a fit traditional, small-scale culture more than a modern, industrial society. In this article, I provide a philosophical interpretation of ubuntu that is not vulnerable to these three objections. Specifically, I construct a moral theo…Read more
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63Reasons of Meaning to Abhor the End of the Human RaceFaith and Philosophy 33 (3): 358-369. 2016.In this critical notice of Samuel Scheffler’s Death and the Afterlife, I focus on his intriguing suggestion that we reasonably care more about the fate of an unidentifiable, future humanity than of ourselves and our loved ones. Scheffler’s main rationale for this claim is that meaning in our lives crucially depends on contributing to the well-being of the human race down the road, with many commentators instead arguing that advancing the good of ourselves or existing loved ones would be sufficie…Read more
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76Fundamental Conditions of Human Existence as the Ground of Life’s Meaning: Reply to LandauReligious Studies 51 (1): 111-25. 2015.Taking the good (generosity), the true (enquiry), and the beautiful (creativity) as exemplars of what can make a life noticeably meaningful, elsewhere I have advanced a principle that entails and plausibly explains all three. Specifically, I have proffered the view that great meaning in life, at least insofar as it comes from this triad, is a matter of positively orienting one’s rational nature towards fundamental conditions of human existence, conditions of human life responsible for much else …Read more
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2374The Proper Aim of Therapy: Subjective Well-Being, Objective Goodness, or a Meaningful Life?In Pninit Russo-Netzer, Stefan Schulenberg & Alexander Batthyany (eds.), Clinical Perspectives on Meaning: Positive and Existential Psychotherapy, Springer. pp. 17-35. 2016.Therapists and related theorists and practitioners of mental health tend to hold one of two broad views about how to help patients. On the one hand, some maintain that, or at least act as though, the basic point of therapy is to help patients become clear about what they want deep down and to enable them to achieve it by overcoming mental blockages. On the other hand, there are those who contend that the aim of therapy should instead be to psychologically enable patients to live objectively desi…Read more
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260The Meaningful and the Worthwhile: Clarifying the RelationshipsPhilosophical Forum 43 (4): 435-448. 2012.The question I seek to answer is what the relationship is between judgments of people’s lives as meaningful, on the one hand, and as worth living, on the other. Several in the analytic and Continental literature, including the likes of Albert Camus and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and more recently, Robert Solomon and Julian Baggini, have maintained that the two words mean the same thing, in that they have the same referents or even the same sense. My primary aim is to refute such a position, and instea…Read more
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28An Ubuntu-Based Evaluation of the South African State's Responses to Marikana: Where's the Reconciliation?Politikon 44 (2): 287-303. 2017.In this work of normative political philosophy, I consider the ethical status of the South African government's responses to the Marikana massacre, where police shot and killed more than 30 striking miners, in light of a moral principle grounded on values associated with ubuntu. I argue that there are several respects in which the government's reactions have been unethical from an ubuntu-oriented perspective, and also make positive suggestions about what it instead should have been doing. Much o…Read more
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245Is Life’s Meaning Ultimately Unthinkable?: Guy Bennett-Hunter on the IneffablePhilosophia 44 (4): 1247-1256. 2016.In this critical notice of Guy Bennett-Hunter’s book _Ineffability and Religious Experience_, I focus on claims he makes about what makes a life meaningful. According to Bennett-Hunter, for human life to be meaningful it must obtain its meaning from what is beyond the human and is ineffable, which constitutes an ultimate kind of meaning. I spell out Bennett-Hunter’s rationale for making this claim, raise some objections to it, and in their wake articulate an alternative conception of ultimate me…Read more
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132Meaning in LifeIn Benjamin Matheson & Yujin Nagasawa (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook on the Afterlife, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 353-370. 2017.This chapter critically explores contemporary philosophical understandings of whether meaning in life might depend on the presence or absence of an afterlife. After distinguishing various kinds of afterlife, it focuses most on the potential relevance of an eternal one, and considers at length the extreme but common views amongst philosophers that an eternal afterlife would be either necessary for a meaningful life or, conversely, sufficient for a meaningless one. It concludes by considering the …Read more
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222Making Sense of Survivor’s Guilt: How to Justify It with an African EthicIn George Hull (ed.), Debating African Philosophy: Perspectives on Identity, Decolonial Ethics and Comparative Philosophy, Routledge. pp. 149-163. 2018.The default position in Western ethics is that survivor’s guilt is either irrational or not rational, i.e., that while survivor’s guilt might be understandable, it is not justified in the sense of there being good reason for a person to exhibit it. From a widely held perspective, for example, one ought to feel guilty only for having done wrong, and in a culpable way, which, by hypothesis, a mere survivor has not done. Typical is the following: ‘Strictly speaking, survivor guilt is not rational g…Read more
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542Meaning as a Distinct and Fundamental Value: Reply to KershnarScience, Religion and Culture 1 (2): 101-106. 2014.In this article, I reply to a critical notice of my book, Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study, that Stephen Kershnar has published elsewhere in this issue of Science, Religion & Culture. Beyond expounding the central conclusions of the book, Kershnar advances two major criticisms of it, namely, first, that I did not provide enough evidence that meaning in life is a genuine value-theoretic category as something distinct from and competing with, say, objective well-being, and, second, that, even if…Read more
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13The Concept of a Meaningful Life (repr.)In Joshua Seachris (ed.), Exploring the Meaning of Life: An Anthology and Guide, Wiley. pp. 79-94. 2012.Reprint of an article that initially appeared in the American Philosophical Quarterly (2001).
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515Assessing Lives, Giving Supernaturalism Its Due, and Capturing Naturalism: Reply to 13 Critics of Meaning in Life (repr.)In Masahiro Morioka (ed.), Reconsidering Meaning in Life: A Philosophical Dialogue with Thaddeus Metz, Waseda University. pp. 228-278. 2015.A lengthy reply to 13 critical discussions of _Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study_ collected in an e-book and reprinted from the _Journal of Philosophy of Life_. The contributors are from a variety of philosophical traditions, including the Anglo-American, Continental and East Asian (especially Buddhist and Japanese) ones.
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17African Ethics, Revised EditionIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Blackwell. 2013.An updated version of this 4000 word overview of the meta-, normative and applied ethical dimensions of contemporary sub-Saharan moral philosophy.
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45Samuel Fleischacker, A Third Concept of Liberty: Judgment and Freedom in Kant and Adam Smith Reviewed by (review)Philosophy in Review 20 (4): 249-252. 2000.
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271How the West Was One: The Western as Individualist, the African as CommunitarianEducational Philosophy and Theory 47 (11): 1175-1184. 2015.There is a kernel of truth in the claim that Western, and especially Anglo-American-Australasian, normative philosophy, including that relating to the philosophy of education, is individualistic; it tends to prize properties that are internal to a human being such as her autonomy, rationality, pleasure, desires, self-esteem, self-realization and virtues relating to, say, her intellect. One notable exception is the idea that students ought to be educated in order to be citizens, participants in a…Read more
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6Recent Work in African Ethics (repr.)In Sharlene Swarz & Monica Taylor (eds.), Moral Education in Sub-Saharan Africa, Routledge. pp. 115-126. 2011.Reprint of an article that initially appeared in the Journal of Moral Education (2010).
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797Auf dem Weg zu einer afrikanischen MoraltheorieIn Franziska Dübgen & Stefan Skupien (eds.), Afrikanische politische Philosophie - Postkoloniale Positionen, Suhrkamp. pp. 295-329. 2015.German translation by Andreas Rauhut of a mildly revised version of 'Toward an African Moral Theory' (Journal of Political Philosophy 2007).
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184Jurisprudence in an African ContextOxford University Press. 2017.A textbook written mainly for final year law students taking Jurisprudence at an African university, but that would also be of use to those in a political philosophy course. It includes primary sources from both the Western and African philosophical traditions, and addresses these central questions: what is the nature of law?; how should judges interpret the law?; is it possible for judges to be objective when they adjudicate?; how could the law justly allocate liberty and property?; who is owed…Read more
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53Respect for persons permits prioritizing treatment for HIV/AIDSDeveloping World Bioethics 8 (2): 89-103. 2007.I defend a certain claim about rationing in the context of HIV/AIDS, namely, the 'priority thesis' that the state of a developing country with a high rate of HIV should provide highly active anti-retroviral treatment (HAART) to those who would die without it, even if doing so would require not treating most other life-threatening diseases. More specifically, I defend the priority thesis in a negative way, by refuting two influential and important arguments against it inspired by the Kantian prin…Read more
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285De zachte plek (The Sweet Spot)In Leo Bormans (ed.), The World Book of Happiness 2.0, Marshall Cavendish International (asia) Pte. pp. 335-338. 2011.An 850 word statement, translated into Dutch and composed for a lay audience, of respects in which happiness and meaningfulness can come apart, but highlighting the aim of engaging in projects in which they are co-present.
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769In Search of Ubuntu: A Political Philosopher’s View of Democratic South AfricaIn Busani Ngcaweni (ed.), Liberation Diaries: Reflections on 20 Years of Democracy, Jacana. pp. 205-214. 2014.In this essay I recount how I have been hoping to see more ubuntu in South Africa’s institutions than had been present in the two dominant socio-politico-economic models across the world in the 20th century. I haven’t been expecting utopia from the past 20 years of democracy; I’ve just wanted something new to come out of Africa. I here relate my experience of learning that it is not always forthcoming, at least not as quickly as I would have liked. However, I conclude by indicating that the prom…Read more
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The Meaning of Life |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
African Philosophy |
Philosophy of Law |
Applied Ethics |
Value Theory |