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132African Ethics and Journalism Ethics: News and Opinion in Light of UbuntuJournal of Media Ethics 30 (2): 74-90. 2015.In this article, I address some central issues in journalism ethics from a fresh perspective, namely, one that is theoretical and informed by values salient in sub-Saharan Africa. Drawing on a foundational moral theory with an African pedigree, which is intended to rival Western theories such as Kantianism and utilitarianism, I provide a unified account of an array of duties of various agents with respect to the news/opinion media. I maintain that the ability of the African moral theory to plaus…Read more
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1306 Das Sinnvolle und das LebenswerteIn Matthias Hoesch, Sebastian Muders & Markus Rüther (eds.), Glück - Werte - Sinn: Metaethische, ethische und theologische Zugänge zur Frage nach dem guten Leben, Walter De Gruyter. pp. 109-126. 2013.Zur Klärung ihrer Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede
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128The Politics of Doing Philosophy in Africa: A ConversationSouth African Journal of Philosophy 34 (4): 538-550. 2015.The background to the present discussion is the prevalence of political and personal criticisms in philosophical discussions about Africa. As philosophers in South Africa—both white and black—continue to philosophise seriously about Africa, responses to their work sometimes take the form of political and personal criticisms of, if not attacks on, the philosopher exploring and defending considerations about the African continent. One of us (TM) has been the target of such critiques in light of hi…Read more
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128Meaning 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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128Précis of Meaning in Life: An Analytic StudyJournal of Philosophy of Life 5 (3). 2015.Brief summary of _Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study_ and of how contributors to a special issue of the _Journal of Philosophy of Life_ question it.
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121Understanding a Thing's Nature: Comparing Afro-Relational and Western-Individualist Ontologies (Repr.)In Peter Aloysius Ikhane & Isaac E. Ukpokolo (eds.), African Epistemology: Essays on Being and Knowledge, Routledge. pp. 63-78. 2023.Slightly modified reprint of an article first appearing in the journal _Synthesis Philosophica_ (2018)
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118Respect for persons and perfectionist politicsPhilosophy and Public Affairs 30 (4). 2001.Can a state seek to promote a thick conception of the good (such as fostering a kind of meaning or excellence in people's lives) without treating its citizens disrespectfully? The predominant answer among friends of the principle of respect for persons is "no." The most powerful Kantian objection to non-liberalism or perfectionism is the claim that citizens who do not share the state's conception of the good would be wronged in that the state would treat a certain way of life as more important …Read more
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113Review of Liam Murphy, Moral Demands in Nonideal Theory (review)Philosophical Review 110 (4): 614-617. 2001.How much must a given individual benefit others, apart from any obligation to do so because of prior acts, special relationships, or self-regard? In short, to what extent is a person morally required to promote the well-being of strangers?
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112Meaning (Atheism)In Graham Oppy & Joseph W. Koterski (eds.), Theism and Atheism: Opposing Arguments in Philosophy, 1st Edition, Gale. 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.
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110Conversations about the Meaning of LifeObsidian Worlds Publishing. 2021.Interviews with David Benatar and Thaddeus Metz about some core aspects of their views about meaning in life, including debate between them. Accessible to a generally educated audience. Edited by Mark Oppenheimer and Jason Werbeloff.
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109Justice 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
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107How to Do African Ethics: Reply to Six CriticsAfrican Philosophical Inquiry 11 123-150. 2023.This essay is a lengthy response to six contributors to a special issue edited by Adeshina Afolayan and devoted to critical discussions of _A Relational Moral Theory: African Ethics in and Beyond the Continent_. Key topics include: the proper role of metaphysics when doing moral philosophy; the appropriate aims of moral philosophy in the light of relational values and properties; the ir/relevance of imperceptible agents for an African ethic; the un/attractiveness of the principle that one morall…Read more
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104Review of Todd May, A Significant Life (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 8 (19): 0. 2015.Approx. 2000 word review of Todd May's _A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe_ (University of Chicago Press)
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103Defending a Relational Account of Moral StatusIn Mbih Jerome Tosam & Erasmus Masitera (eds.), African Agrarian Philosophy, Springer. pp. 105-124. 2024.For the more than a decade, I have advanced an account of what makes persons, animals, and other beings entitled to moral treatment for their own sake that is informed by characteristically African ideas about dignity, a great chain of being, and community. Roughly according to this account, a being has a greater moral status, the more it is capable of communing (as a subject) or of us communing with it (as an object). I have mainly argued that this characteristically African and relational appr…Read more
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102Does the Lack of Cosmic Meaning Make Our Lives Bad?Journal of Value Inquiry 56 (1): 37-50. 2022.This article is part of a special issue devoted to David Benatar’s anti-natalism. There are places in his oeuvre where he contends that, while our lives might be able to exhibit some terrestrial or human meaning, that is not enough to make them worth creating, which would require a cosmic meaning that is unavailable to us. There are those who maintain, in reply to Benatar, that some of our lives do have a cosmic meaning, but I argue that Benatar is correct that none of our lives does. I instead …Read more
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99Understanding the Question of Life’s MeaningIn Joshua Seachris (ed.), Exploring the Meaning of Life: An Anthology and Guide, Wiley. pp. 23-27. 2012.A critical overview of some central work on the meta-ethical question of what the question of life's meaning means, as appearing in Joshua Seachris, ed., Exploring the Meaning of Life: An Anthology and Guide. It discusses contributions from Paul Edwards, R. W. Hepburn, Robert Nozick, Garrett Thomson, Arjan Markus and Thaddeus Metz.
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94Emergent Issues in African Philosophy: A Dialogue with Kwasi WireduPhilosophia Africana 17 (2): 75-87. 2015.These are major excerpts from an interview that was conducted with Professor Kwasi Wiredu at Rhodes University during the 13th Annual Conference of The International Society for African Philosophy and Studies in 2007. He speaks on a wide range of issues such as political and personal identity, racism and tribalism, moral foundations, the Golden Rule, African communalism, human rights, personhood, consensus, meta-philosophy, amongst other critical themes.
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84The Ethics and Politics of the Brain Drain: A Communal Alternative to Liberal PerspectivesSouth African Journal of Philosophy 36 (1): 101-114. 2017.In Debating Brain Drain, Gillian Brock and Michael Blake both draw on a liberal moral- political foundation to address the issue, but they come to different conclusions about it. Despite the common ground of free and equal persons having a dignity that grounds human rights, Brock concludes that many medical professionals who leave a developing country soon after having received training there are wrong to do so and that the state may place some limits on their ability to exit, whereas Blake infe…Read more
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84Hayatin AnlamiÖncül. 2023.Translation of 'The Meaning of Life' (second revised edition for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) into Turkish by Beyza Nur Dogan.
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83Dignity in the Ubuntu TraditionIn Marcus Düwell (ed.), Cambridge Handbook on Human Dignity, Cambridge University Press. pp. 310-18. 2014.I draw on ideas commonly advocated by adherents to ubuntu, the term often used to capture sub-Saharan morality, in order to spell out, and sometimes construct, understandings of human dignity that are worth taking seriously by professional ethicists, moral philosophers, jurisprudential scholars and Constitutional Courts anywhere in the world. In particular, I seek to articulate a theory of dignity grounded in African values that could serve as a genuine rival to the influential Kantian conceptio…Read more
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81Human Rights, African PerspectivesIn Deen Chatterjee (ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Justice, Springer. pp. 501-05. 2012.At least the three major academic debates one encounters about human rights in an African context are usefully framed in terms how they relate to community in various ways. Specifically, this entry first discusses disputes among moral anthropologists and political scientists about the extent to which human rights were present in pre-colonial, communal sub-Saharan societies; then it takes up ways in which group-based claims have significantly influenced human rights discourse and observance in po…Read more
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80Teaching African Philosophy alongside Western Philosophy: Some Advice about Topics and Texts (repr.)In Etieyibo Edwin (ed.), Decolonisation, Africanisation and the Philosophy Curriculum, Routledge. pp. 173-183. 2018.Reprint of an article that initially appeared in the South African Journal of Philosophy (2016).
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79Censure theory still best accounts for punishment of the guilty: Reply to MontaguePhilosophia 37 (1): 113-23. 2009.In an article previously published in this journal, Phillip Montague critically surveys and rejects a handful of contemporary attempts to explain why state punishment is morally justified. Among those targeted is one of my defences of the censure theory of punishment, according to which state punishment is justified because the political community has a duty to express disapproval of those guilty of injustice. My defence of censure theory supposes, per argumentum, that there is always some defea…Read more
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77Contemporary Anti-Natalism (edited book)Routledge. 2023.Given the pain, discomfort, anxiety, heartbreak, and boredom that most humans experience in their lives, is it morally permissible to create them? Some philosophers lately have answered ‘No’, contending that it is wrong to create a new human life when one could avoid doing so, because it would be bad for the one created. This view is known as ‘anti-natalism’. Some contributors to this volume argue that anti-natalism is true because: agents have a prima facie duty to prevent suffering; it is immo…Read more
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77The Reasonable and the MoralSocial Theory and Practice 28 (2): 277-301. 2002.I develop an account of the property in virtue of which actions are wrong that retains the notion of unreasonableness but rejects Scanlon's contractualist framework. Specifically, I maintain (roughly) that the property of treating another unreasonably better explains what makes an act wrong than does the property of it being prohibited by principles that contractors with an ideal motivation could not reasonably reject. One advantage of my alternative is a more straightforward way to capture duti…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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75Arbitrariness, Justice, and RespectSocial Theory and Practice 26 (1): 25-45. 2000.I examine John Rawls' objection to libertarianism that it permits economic shares to be distributed in a morally arbitrary way. This argument was dropped largely for two reasons. First, talk of "arbitrariness" has been vague and associated with implausible views about moral desert, collective assets, and noumenal selves. Second, several criticisms which Robert Nozick made 25 years ago have gone unanswered. In this essay, I reconstruct the arbitrariness argument, giving it a new, Kantian interpre…Read more
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73Gross National Happiness: A Philosophical AppraisalEthics and Social Welfare 8 (3): 218-232. 2014.For more than 40 years, the Kingdom of Bhutan has eschewed evaluating its socio-economic status in terms of Gross Domestic Product and has instead done so under the heading of ‘Gross National Happiness’. As part of the upswing in international interest in well-being as the proper final end of development, it would be apt to critically explore the approach that has been in use for several decades. In this article I expound the central elements of Gross National Happiness and discuss their strengt…Read more
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72'The Meaning of Life Lies in the Search': Robert Kane's New Justification of Objective ValuesSocial Theory and Practice 39 (2): 313-27. 2013.Part of Robert Kane’s response to the contemporary cultural condition of pluralism is to attempt to ground morality in the _search_ for wisdom about how to live. With regard to the right, Kane argues, roughly, that a new principle capturing what all morally permissible actions have in common warrants belief on the part of all inquirers, even in the face of reasonable uncertainty, because it is justified as an essential means to ascertaining wisdom. Upon embarking for wisdom, one quickly discover…Read more
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72Review of Leonhard Praeg, A Report on Ubuntu, and of Leonhard Praeg and Siphokazi Magadla (eds), Ubuntu: Curating the Archive (review)Philosophical Papers 43 (3): 447-453. 2014.
APA Central Division
Pretoria, Gauteng, South Africa
Areas of Specialization
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The Meaning of Life |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
African Philosophy |
Philosophy of Law |
Applied Ethics |
Value Theory |