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30Open Perfectionism and Global JusticeTheoria 51 (104): 96-127. 2004.In his book Cosmopolitan Justice, Darrel Moellendorf argues that respect for persons has the following rough implications (among others): requires states to enact liberal legislation; permits them to interfere with religious or otherwise perfectionist regimes; forbids them from restricting immigration for perfectionist ends; and requires them to permit secession. In this article, I do not question Moellendorf's Kantian foundation; what I do here is question the inferences from this principle to …Read more
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59’Giving the World a More Human Face’: Human Suffering in African Thought and PhilosophyIn Jeff Malpas & Norelle Lickiss (eds.), Perspectives on Human Suffering, Springer. pp. 49-62. 2012.I present ideas about human suffering that are salient among the black peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, reconstruct them in order to make them relevant to an international audience with philosophical interests, and urge that audience to give them consideration as alternatives or correctives to some dominant Western approaches. I first recount views commonly held by sub-Saharans about the nature, causes and cures of suffering, and then draw on them to articulate an account of it qua enervation, whi…Read more
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140God's purpose as irrelevant to life's meaning: Reply to affolterReligious Studies 43 (4): 457-464. 2007.Elsewhere I have contended that if a God-centred account of meaning in life were true, it would not be because meaning comes from fulfilling God’s purpose for us. Specifically, I have argued that this ‘purpose theory’ of life’s meaning cannot be the correct God-based view since God would have to be atemporal, immutable, and simple for meaning to logically depend on His existence, and since such a being lacking extension could not be purposive. Jacob Affolter has developed a fresh account of the …Read more
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408The Western Ethic of Care or an Afro-Communitarian Ethic?: Finding the Right Relational MoralityJournal of Global Ethics 9 (1): 77-92. 2013.In her essay ‘The Curious Coincidence of Feminine and African Moralities’ (1987), Sandra Harding was perhaps the first to note parallels between a typical Western feminist ethic and a characteristically African, i.e., indigenous sub-Saharan, approach to morality. Beyond Harding’s analysis, one now frequently encounters the suggestion, in a variety of discourses in both the Anglo-American and sub-Saharan traditions, that an ethic of care and an African ethic are more or less the same or share man…Read more
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270Koheleth and the Meaning of LifeIn Stephen D. Leach & James Tartaglia (eds.), The Meaning of Life and the Great Philosophers, Routledge. pp. 73-78. 2018.This chapter critically discusses the most salient positions about life’s meaning advanced by Koheleth, the presumed author of Ecclesiastes, a book from the Hebrew Bible. Koheleth famously argues that ‘life is futility’ (or ‘vanity’) for a variety of reasons, with this chapter focusing on the three that are most recurrent in the text and have been particularly influential in the Western tradition of philosophy. These are considerations about: the mortality of humankind, the undeserved allocation…Read more
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192آيا هدف خداوند مى تواند سرچشمه معناى زندگى باشد؟* (Persian: Could God's Purpose Be the Source of Life's Meaning?)Naqd Va Nazar: Quarterly Journal of Philosophy and Theology 8 (29-30): 149-183. 2003.Persian translation by Mohammad Saeedi of 'Could God's Purpose Be the Source of Life's Meaning?' (first published in Religious Studies 2000).
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447Ubuntu Como uma Teoria Moral e os Direitos Humanos na África do SulRevista Culturas Jurídicas 3 (5): 1-33. 2016.Portuguese translation by Jean-Bosco Kakozi and Karina Macedo Fernandes of 'Ubuntu as a Moral Theory and Human Rights in South Africa', which first appeared in the African Human Rights Law Journal (2011).
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86Dignity in the Ubuntu TraditionIn Marcus Düwell (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Human Dignity: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 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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9Christopher W. Morris, An Essay on the Modern State (review)Philosophy in Review 19 (2): 132-134. 1999.
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561The immortality requirement for life's meaningRatio 16 (2). 2003.Many religious thinkers hold the immortality requirement, the view that immortality of some kind is necessary for life to have meaning. After clarifying the nature of the immortality requirement, this essay examines three central arguments for it. The article establishes that existing versions of these arguments fail to entail the immortality requirement. The essay then reconstructs the arguments, and it shows that once they do plausibly support the immortality requirement, they equally support …Read more
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187Poverty as Inhuman: Plausible but Illiberal?International Journal of Applied Philosophy 30 (1): 1-14. 2016.In this article, part of a special issue devoted to Hennie Lötter’s Poverty, Ethics and Justice, I draw out an interesting implication of Hennie Lötter’s original and compelling conception of the nature of poverty as essentially inhuman. After motivating this view, I argue that it, like the capabilities approach and other views that invoke a conception of good and bad lives, is inconsistent with a standard understanding of a liberal account of the state’s role, one that is independently supporte…Read more
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58Tim Mulgan, Purpose in the Universe: The Moral and Metaphysical Case for Ananthropocentric Purposivism (review)Ethics 127 (4): 944-949. 2017.
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451Contemporary African PhilosophyIn Duncan Pritchard (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies Online: Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2010.A lengthy, annotated bibliography of much of the most important work in post-war African professional philosophy as of 2011.
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1908Just the Beginning for Ubuntu: Reply to Matolino and KwindingwiSouth African Journal of Philosophy 33 (1): 65-72. 2014.In an article titled ‘The end of ubuntu’ recently published in this journal, Bernard Matolino and Wenceslaus Kwindingwi argue that contemporary conditions in (South) Africa are such that there is no justification for appealing to an ethic associated with talk of ‘ubuntu’. They argue that political elites who invoke ubuntu do so in ways that serve nefarious functions, such as unreasonably narrowing discourse about how best to live, while the moral ideals of ubuntu are appropriate only for a bygon…Read more
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116Review 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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416The Good, the True and the Beautiful: Toward a Unified Account of Great Meaning in LifeReligious Studies 47 (4): 389-409. 2011.Three of the great sources of meaning in life are the good, the true, and the beautiful, and I aim to make headway on the grand Enlightenment project of ascertaining what, if anything, they have in common. Concretely, if we take a (stereotypical) Mother Teresa, Mandela, Darwin, Einstein, Dostoyevsky, and Picasso, what might they share that makes it apt to deem their lives to have truly mattered? I provide reason to doubt two influential answers, noting a common flaw that supernaturalism and cons…Read more
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57Animal Rights and the Interpretation of the South African ConstitutionSouthern African Public Law 25 (2): 301-311. 2010.I argue that, even supposing substantive principles of distributive justice entail that animals warrant constitutional protection, there are other, potentially weightier forms of injustice that would probably be done by interpreting a Bill of Rights as implicitly applying to animals, namely, formal injustice and compensatory injustice. Formal injustice would result from such a reading of the Constitution in that the state would fail to speak with one voice upon newly according legal rights to an…Read more
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313African Values and Human Rights as Two Sides of the Same Coin: Reply to OyoweAfrican Human Rights Law Journal 14 (2): 306-21. 2014.In an article previously published in this Journal, Anthony Oyowe critically engages with my attempt to demonstrate how the human rights characteristic of South Africa’s Constitution can be grounded on a certain interpretation of Afro-communitarian values that are often associated with talk of ‘ubuntu’. Drawing on recurrent themes of human dignity and communal relationships in the sub-Saharan tradition, I have advanced a moral-philosophical principle that I argue entails and plausibly explains a…Read more
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69Further Explorations of Supernaturalism about Meaning in Life: Reply to Cottingham, Goetz, Goldschmidt, Jech and WielenbergEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 8 (2): 59-83. 2016.A reply to five critical discussions of _Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study_ (2013).
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44Accounting for Similarities and Differences in Moral Belief (Atheism)In Graham Oppy & Joseph W. Koterski (eds.), Theism and Atheism: Opposing Viewpoints in Philosophy, Macmillan Reference. pp. 472-477. 2019.A chapter composed largely for undergraduate and postgraduate students that considers whether general facts about morality and our ability to make moral judgements count in favor of either theism or atheism.
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44Love and emotional reactions to necessary evilsIn Pedro Alexis Tabensky (ed.), The positive function of evil, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 28-44. 2009.This chapter supposes that certain bads are necessary for substantial goods, and poses the question of how one ought to react emotionally to such bads. In recent work, Robert Adams is naturally read as contending that one ought to exhibit positive emotions such as gladness towards certain ‘necessary evils’. A rationale he suggests for this view is that love for a person, which involves viewing the beloved as good, requires being glad about what is necessary for her to exist, even if it is someth…Read more
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1385Survivor's GuiltIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Blackwell. pp. 1-8. 2013.This essay first analyzes the concept of survivor’s guilt, distinguishing various manifestations of it and considering whether any truly counts as a form of guilt. Then, it addresses arguments for thinking that survivor’s guilt is unreasonable to exhibit, after which it takes up arguments for thinking that it is reasonable. The aim is not to come to some firm conclusion about these conceptual and evaluative matters, but instead to acquaint the reader with the debates about them among contemporar…Read more
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7141Contemporary Anti-Natalism, Featuring Benatar's Better Never to Have BeenSouth African Journal of Philosophy 31 (1): 1-9. 2012.A critical overview of the latest discussion of anti-natalism, with particular reference to David Benatar's work and three additional rationales for anti-natalism that differ from Benatar's.
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64An african theory of bioethics: Reply to Macpherson and MacklinDeveloping World Bioethics 10 (3): 158-163. 2010.In a prior issue of Developing World Bioethics, Cheryl Macpherson and Ruth Macklin critically engaged with an article of mine, where I articulated a moral theory grounded on indigenous values salient in the sub-Saharan region, and then applied it to four major issues in bioethics, comparing and contrasting its implications with those of the dominant Western moral theories, utilitarianism and Kantianism. In response to my essay, Macpherson and Macklin have posed questions about: whether philosoph…Read more
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1128Relational EthicsIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Blackwell. pp. 1-10. 2013.An overview of relational approaches to ethics, which contrast with individualist and holist ones, particularly as they feature in the Confucian, African, and feminist/care traditions.
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443Managerialism 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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51IntroductionPhilosophical Papers 34 (3): 311-329. 2005.This article introduces a special issue of Philosophical Papers devoted to the topic of meaning in life. In the paper, I engage with articles by Robert Audi, David Velleman, John Martin Fischer, Laurence Thomas, Berit Brogaard, Barry Smith and Larry James, laying out their central views, criticizing them, and suggesting ways they could be developed.
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73'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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319A Bioethic of Communion: Beyond Care and the Four Principles with Regard to ReproductionIn Marta Soniewicka (ed.), The Ethics of Reproductive Genetics - Between Utility, Principles, and Virtues, Springer Verlag. pp. 49-66. 2018.English-speaking research on morally right decisions in a healthcare context over the past three decades has been dominated by two major perspectives, namely, the Four Principles, of which the principle of respect for autonomy has been most salient, and the ethic of care, often presented as a rival to not only a focus on autonomy but also a reliance on principles more generally. In my contribution, I present a novel ethic applicable to bioethics, particularly as it concerns human procreation, th…Read more
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32Values in China as Compared to AfricaIn Hester du Plessis (ed.), The Philosophy of Chinese Civilization, Real African Publishers. pp. 75-116. 2015.Expanded version of article appearing in Philosophy East and West (2017).
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The Meaning of Life |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
African Philosophy |
Philosophy of Law |
Applied Ethics |
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