•  894
    Pursuing Knowledge for Its Own Sake amidst a World of Poverty: Reconsidering Balogun on Philosophy’s Relevance
    Filosofia Theoretica: Journal of African Philosophy, Culture and Religions 8 (2): 1-18. 2019.
    In this article I critically discuss Professor Oladele Abiodun Balogun’s reflections on the proper final ends of doing philosophy and related sorts of abstract, speculative, or theoretical inquiry. Professor Balogun appears to argue that one should undertake philosophical studies only insofar as they are likely to make a practical difference to people’s lives, particularly by contributing to politico-economic development, or, in other words, that one should eschew seeking knowledge for its own s…Read more
  •  79
    The Concept of Life's Meaning
    In Iddo Landau (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Meaning in Life, Oxford University Press. pp. 27-42. 2022.
    I critically discuss views about what at least analytic philosophers have in mind when reflecting on what makes life meaningful. I first demonstrate that there has been a standard view of that, according to which meaningfulness centrally involves the actions of human persons, ones that exhibit a high desirability characteristically present in ‘the good, the true, and the beautiful’ and absent from the cases of Sisyphus or the Experience Machine. Then, I address five challenges to the standard vi…Read more
  •  387
    In this article I address the question of what makes addiction morally problematic, and seek to answer it by drawing on values salient in the sub-Saharan African philosophical tradition. Specifically, I appeal to life-force and communal relationship, each of which African philosophers have at times advanced as a foundational value, and spell out how addiction, or at least salient instances of it, could be viewed as unethical for flouting them. I do not seek to defend either vitality or community…Read more
  •  347
    An African Theory of Just Causes for War
    In Heleana Theixos (ed.), Comparative Just War Theory, Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 131-155. 2020.
    In this chapter, I add to the new body of philosophical literature that addresses African approaches to just war by reflecting on some topics that have yet to be considered and by advancing different perspectives. My approach is two-fold. First, I spell out a foundational African ethic, according to which one must treat people’s capacity to relate communally with respect. Second, I derive principles from it to govern the use of force and violence, and compare and contrast their implications for …Read more
  •  21
    An African Theory of Good Leadership (repr.)
    In Josef Wieland & Julika Baumann Montecinos (eds.), Transcultural Leadership: Learning about Sub-Saharan Africa, Metropolis. pp. 41-63. 2018.
    Reprint of an article from the African Journal of Business Ethics (2018).
  •  22
    A Theory of National Reconciliation: Some Insights from Africa (repr.)
    In Aleksandar Fatić, Klaus Bachmann & Igor Lyubashenko (eds.), Transitional Justice in Troubled Societies, Rowman & Littlefield International. pp. 213-235. 2018.
    Reprint of mildly revised version of a chapter that initially appeared in _Theorizing Transitional Justice_ (2015).
  •  741
    An African Theory of Good Leadership
    African Journal of Business Ethics 12 (2): 36-53. 2018.
    This article draws on the indigenous African intellectual tradition to ground a moral-philosophical theory of leadership that is intended to rival accounts prominent in the East Asian and Western traditions. After providing an interpretation of the characteristically sub-Saharan value of communion, the article advances a philosophical account of a good leader as one who creates, sustains and enriches communal relationships and enables others to do so. The article then applies this account to a v…Read more
  •  1048
    Meaning in Life in Spite of Death
    In Michael Cholbi & Travis Timmerman (eds.), Exploring the Philosophy of Death and Dying: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives, Routledge. pp. 253-261. 2021.
    In this chapter the author critically explores answers to the question of how immortality would affect the meaningfulness of a person’s life, understood roughly as a life that merits esteem, achieves purposes much more valuable than pleasure, or makes for a good life-story. The author expounds three arguments for thinking that life would be meaningless if it were mortal, and provides objections to them. He then offers a reason for thinking that a mortal life could be meaningful, and responds to …Read more
  •  1555
    Suppose a person lives in a sub-Saharan country that has won its independence from colonial powers in the last 50 years or so. Suppose also that that person has become a high-ranking government official who makes decisions on how to allocate goods, such as civil service jobs and contracts with private firms. Should such a person refrain from considering any particulars about potential recipients or might it be appropriate to consider, for example, family membership, party affiliation, race or re…Read more
  •  265
    Community, Individuality, and Reciprocity in Menkiti
    In Polycarp A. Ikuenobe & Edwin Etieyibo (eds.), Menkiti on Community and Becoming a Person, Lexington Books. pp. 131-145. 2020.
    For four decades Ifeanyi Menkiti has addressed the question of which sort of community constitutes personhood from a characteristically African perspective. In this chapter, I critically discuss the conceptions of how one acquires personhood through community that Menkiti has advanced, in search of the one that would most enable him to avoid prominent moral objections made to his views over the years. In particular, his account of personhood has been criticized for insufficiently accommodating i…Read more
  •  690
    Adherents to reconciliation, restorative justice, and related approaches to dealing with social conflict are well known for seeking to minimize punishment, in favor of offenders hearing out victims, making an apology, and effecting compensation for wrongful harm as well as victims forgiving offenders and accepting their reintegration into society. In contrast, I maintain that social reconciliation and similar concepts in fact characteristically require punishment but do not require forgiveness. …Read more
  •  298
    I seek to advance enquiry into the point of a public higher education institution by drawing on ideals salient in the sub-Saharan African philosophical tradition. There are relational, and specifically communal, values prominently held by African thinkers that I use to ground a promising rival to the dominant contemporary Western, and especially Anglo-American, accounts of what a university ultimately ought to strive to achieve, which focus mainly on autonomy, truth, and citizenship. My aims are…Read more
  •  147
    The African Ethic of Ubuntu
    1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology. 2019.
    Online reprint of part of an encyclopedia entry (from the Encyclopaedia of Quality of Life and Well-being Research 2014).
  •  648
    While there is a budding literature on media ethics in the light of characteristic sub-Saharan moral values, there is virtually nothing on wartime reporting more specifically. Furthermore, the literature insofar as it has a bearing on wartime reporting suggests that embedded journalism and patriotic journalism are ethically justified during war. In this essay, I sketch a prima facie attractive African moral theory, grounded on a certain interpretation of the value of communal relationship, and b…Read more
  •  15
    Reprint of a mildly revised article that initially appeared in the Journal of Animal Ethics (2017).
  •  23
    Relational African Values between Nations
    In Onditi Francis & Ben-Nun Gilad (eds.), Contemporary Africa in the New World Order, Indiana University Press. pp. 133-150. 2019.
    This chapter considers how some international ethical matters might be approached differently in the English-speaking literature if values salient in sub-Saharan Africa were taken seriously. Specifically, after pointing out how indigenous values in this part of the world tend to prescribe relating communally, this chapter articulates a moral-philosophical interpretation of communal relationship and brings out what such an ethic entails for certain aspects of globalization, political power, forei…Read more
  •  55
    Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (review)
    Philosophical Review 111 (4): 618-620. 2002.
    John Rawls’s professed aim in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement is to clarify in a concise way the changes his political philosophy has undergone since A Theory of Justice. In about 200 pages Rawls summarizes his current view that justice as fairness is a reasonable political conception, or, in other words, that liberal-egalitarianism is justified for modern democratic cultures since it follows from a certain notion of fairness implicit in them. The key question that most readers probably want …Read more
  •  757
    African Values and Capital Punishment
    In Gerard Walmsley (ed.), African Philosophy and the Future of Africa, Council For Research in Values and Philosophy. pp. 83-90. 2011.
    What is the strongest argument grounded in African values, i.e., those salient among indigenous peoples below the Sahara desert, for abolishing capital punishment? I defend a particular answer to this question, one that invokes an under-theorized conception of human dignity. Roughly, I maintain that the death penalty is nearly always morally unjustified, and should therefore be abolished, because it degrades people’s special capacity for communal relationships. To defend this claim, I proceed by…Read more
  •  668
    Neutrality, Partiality, and Meaning in Life
    De Ethica 4 (3): 7-25. 2017.
    Discussion of whether values and norms are neutral or not has mainly appeared in works on the nature of prudential rationality and morality. Little systematic has yet appeared in the up and coming field of the meaning of life. What are the respects in which the value of meaningfulness is neutral or, in contrast, partial, relational, or ‘biased’? In this article, I focus strictly on answering this question. First, I aim to identify the salient, and perhaps exhaustive, respects in which issues of …Read more
  • A collection of several articles on African ethics by Thaddeus Metz translated into Igbo by M. B. Mbah, and edited by Prof Lawrence Ogbo Ugwuanyi of the University of Abuja, Nigeria.
  • The Foundations of Social Contract Theory
    Dissertation, Cornell University. 1997.
    Hypothetical social contract theory is the predominant framework that political philosophers use to argue for conceptions of social justice. A hypothetical social contract theory consists of an initial situation, in which parties are imagined to make a rational agreement about the way to design their politico-economic institutions, and a conception of justice to which these parties would agree. My goals in the dissertation are to determine the most warranted initial situation and the conception …Read more
  •  112
    Meaning (Atheism)
    In Graham Oppy (ed.), A Companion to Atheism and Philosophy, Blackwell. pp. 507-521. 2019.
    A critical exploration of the position that God is necessary for meaning in life for mainly undergraduate and postgraduate readers, with some defence of the view that He is not.
  •  209
    Much of the debate about post-secularism has presumed a background of Western countries and the sort of statutory law that legislatures should make, and how they should make it, in the light of residents’ religious attitudes and practices. In this chapter I address a fresh context, namely, that of South Africa and the way that courts have interpreted, and should interpret, law in the face of African traditional religions. Specifically, I explicate the fact that, by South Africa's famously progre…Read more
  •  68
    In my view, postmodernism, as a cluster of bold epistemological claims, foundered on the rocks of contemporary science. Many postmodern positions about knowledge have conflicted with views of science that are extraordinarily difficult to doubt, which in this short article (composed to honour Educational Philosophy and Theory's 50th anniversary), I point out and argue holds a lesson about how to undertake the philosophy of education.
  •  1409
    African Communitarianism and Difference
    In Elvis Imafidon (ed.), Handbook on African Philosophy of Difference, Springer. pp. 31-51. 2020.
    There has been the recurrent suspicion that community, harmony, cohesion, and similar relational goods as understood in the African ethical tradition threaten to occlude difference. Often, it has been Western defenders of liberty who have raised the concern that these characteristically sub-Saharan values fail to account adequately for individuality, although some contemporary African thinkers have expressed the same concern. In this chapter, I provide a certain understanding of the sub-Saharan …Read more
  •  400
    Many values originating in Africa and in China, and ones that continue to influence much of everyday communication in those societies, are aptly placed under the common heading of 'harmony'. After first spelling out what harmony involves in substantially Confucian China, and then in Africa, this article notes respects in which the Confucian and African conceptions of harmony are similar, an awareness of which could facilitate smooth communication. The article then indicates respects in which the…Read more
  •  466
    The dominant view amongst contemporary Western philosophers about the essence of a natu­ ral object is that it is constituted by its intrinsic properties. The ontological approach salient in the African philosophical tradition, in contrast, accounts for a thing’s essence by appeal to its relational properties. The Afro­relational ontology is under­developed, with the primary aim of this article being to help rectify that weakness. Specifically, this article’s aims are: to articulate an African a…Read more