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935How to Ground Animal Rights on African Values: A Reply to HorsthemkeJournal of Animal Ethics 7 (2): 163-174. 2017.I seek to advance plausible replies to the several criticisms Kai Horsthemke makes of ‘African Modal Relationalism’, his label for my theory of animal rights with a sub-Saharan pedigree. Central to this view is the claim that, roughly, a being has a greater moral status, the more it is in principle capable of relating communally with characteristic human beings. Horsthemke maintains that this view is anthropocentric and speciesist, is poorly motivated relative to his egalitarian-individualist ap…Read more
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1096Meaning 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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63The Concept of a Meaningful Life (repr.)In Joshua W. Seachris (ed.), Exploring the Meaning of Life: An Anthology and Guide, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 79-94. 2012.Reprint of an article that initially appeared in the American Philosophical Quarterly (2001).
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46Accountability in Higher Education: A Comprehensive Analytical FrameworkTheory and Research in Education 9 (1): 41-58. 2011.Concomitant with the rise of rationalizing accountability in higher education has been an increase in theoretical reflection about the forms accountability has taken and the ones it should take. The literature is now peppered by a wide array of distinctions (e.g. internal/external, inward/ outward, vertical/horizontal, upward/downward, professional/public, political/economic, soft/ hard, positive/negative), to the point that when people speak of ‘accountability’ they risk speaking past one anoth…Read more
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4932Ubuntu as a Moral Theory: Reply to Four CriticsSouth African Journal of Philosophy 26 (4): 369-87. 2007.In this article, I respond to questions about, and criticisms of, my article “Towardan African Moral Theory” that have been put forth by Allen Wood, Mogobe Ramose, Douglas Farland and Jason van Niekerk. The major topicsI address include: what bearing the objectivity of moral value should have on cross-cultural moral differences between Africans and Westerners; whether a harmonious relationship is a good candidate for having final moral value; whether consequentialism exhausts the proper way to r…Read more
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76’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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1136In Search of Ubuntu: A Political Philosopher’s View of Democratic South AfricaIn Busani Ngcaweni (ed.), Liberation Diaries: Reflections on 20 Years of Democracy, Jacana Media. 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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14Recent 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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953A Dilemma about the Final Ends of Higher Education -- and a ResolutionKagisano (The Higher Education Discussion Series) 9 23-41. 2013.In this article, written for the generally educated reader, I summarize my latest thinking about a dilemma that I believe current theoretical reflection faces about the proper ultimate aims of a public university. Specifically, I make the following three major points: (1) On the one hand, all dominant theories of how properly to spend public resources entail that academics should not pursue knowledge for its own sake and should rather devote their energies toward promoting some concrete public g…Read more
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96The Justice of Crime PreventionTheoria 51 (105): 104-128. 2004.In this essay, I critically evaluate the new South African state's approach to crime prevention in light of the Kantian principle of respect of persons. I show that the five most common explanations of why the state must fight crime are unconvincing; provide a novel, respect-based account of why justice requires the state to prevent crime; and specify which crime fighting techniques the state must adopt in order to meet this requirement. Reviewing the South African state's criminal justice polic…Read more
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255Jurisprudence 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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138Dignity 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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1716Happiness and Meaningfulness: Some Key DifferencesIn Lisa Bortolotti (ed.), Philosophy and Happiness, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 3-20. 2009.In this chapter, I highlight the differences between the two goods of happiness and meaningfulness. Specifically, I contrast happiness and meaning with respect to six value-theoretic factors, among them: what the bearers of these values are, how luck can play a role in their realization, which attitudes are appropriate in response to them, and when they are to be preferred in a life. I aim not only to show that there are several respects in which happiness and meaning differ as categories of val…Read more
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1823The Concept of a Meaningful LifeAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 38 (2): 137-153. 2001.This paper aims to clarify what we are asking when posing the question of what (if anything) makes a life meaningful. People associate many different ideas with talk of "meaning in life," so that one must search for an account of the question that is primary in some way. Therefore, after briefly sketching the major conceptions of life's meaning in 20th century philosophical literature, the remainder of the paper systematically seeks a satisfactory analysis the concept of a meaningful life that t…Read more
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1053نیاز جاودانگی برای معنای زندگی (Persian: 'The Immortality Requirement for Life's Meaning')Falsafeh 6 (72): 81-90. 2013.Persian translation by Seyyed Mostafa Mousavi A’zam of 'The Immortality Requirement for Life's Meaning' (Ratio 2003).
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715Assessing Lives, Giving Supernaturalism Its Due, and Capturing Naturalism: Reply to 13 Critics of Meaning in LifeJournal of Philosophy of Life 5 (3): 228-278. 2015.A lengthy reply to several critical discussions of _Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study_ appearing in 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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2442Ubuntu: The Good LifeIn Alex C. Michalos (ed.), Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research, Springer. pp. 6761-65. 2014.An overview of a characteristically African approach to the human good.
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7329Ethics in Aristotle and in Africa: Some Points of ContrastPhronimon 13 (2): 99-117. 2012.In this article I compare and, especially, contrast Aristotle’s conception of virtue with one typical of sub-Saharan philosophers. I point out that the latter is strictly other-regarding, and specifically communitarian, and contend that the former, while including such elements, also includes some self-regarding or individualist virtues, such as temperance and knowledge. I also argue that Aristotle’s conception of human excellence is more attractive than the sub-Saharan view as a complete accoun…Read more
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674Poverty 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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2707A Relational Moral Theory: African Ethics in and Beyond the ContinentOxford University Press. 2022._A Relational Moral Theory_ draws on neglected resources from the Global South and especially the African philosophical tradition to provide a new answer to a perennial philosophical question: what do all morally right actions have in common as distinct from wrong ones? Metz points out that the principles of utility and of respect for autonomy, the two rivals that have dominated Western moral theory for the last two centuries, share an individualist premise. Once that common assumption is replac…Read more
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39The Politics of Doing Philosophy in Africa: A Conversation (repr.)In Mogobe B. Ramose (ed.), Contrasts and contests about philosophy, Routledge. pp. 148-160. 2016.Reprint of an article first appearing in the South African Journal of Philosophy (2015).
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1662Contemporary African PhilosophyIn Duncan Pritchard (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies in Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2011.A lengthy, annotated bibliography of much of the most important work in post-war African professional philosophy as of 2011.
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1232Could God's purpose be the source of life's meaning?Religious Studies 36 (3): 293-313. 2000.In this paper, I explore the traditional religious account of what can make a life meaningful, namely, the view that one's life acquires significance insofar as one fulfils a purpose God has assigned. Call this view ‘purpose theory’. In the literature, there are objections purporting to show that purpose theory entails the logical absurdities that God is not moral, omnipotent, or eternal. I show that there are versions of purpose theory which are not vulnerable to these reductio arguments. Howev…Read more
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2960Just 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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1173Meaning in Life as the Aim of Psychotherapy: A HypothesisIn Joshua A. Hicks & Clay Routledge (eds.), The Experience of Meaning in Life: Classical Perspectives, Emerging Themes, and Controversies, Springer Verlag. pp. 405-17. 2013.The point of psychotherapy has occasionally been associated with talk of ‘life’s meaning’. However, the literature on meaning in life written by contemporary philosophers has yet to be systematically applied to literature on the point of psychotherapy. My broad aim in this chapter is to indicate some plausible ways to merge these two tracks of material that have run in parallel up to now. More specifically, my hunch is that the connection between meaning as philosophers understand it and therapy…Read more
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1448Replacing Development: An Afro-communal Approach to Global JusticePhilosophical Papers 46 (1): 111-137. 2017.In this article, I consider whether there are values intrinsic to development theory and practice that are dubious in light of a characteristically African ethic. In particular, I focus on what a certain philosophical interpretation of the sub-Saharan value of communion entails for appraising development, drawing two major conclusions. One is that a majority of the criticisms that have been made of development by those sympathetic to African values are weak; I argue that, given the value of comm…Read more
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27African Political PhilosophyIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 1-9. 2013.I critically discuss contemporary work in African, i.e., sub-Saharan, political philosophy that has been written in English. I begin by providing an overview of the profession and discussing the aptness of focusing on African political philosophy as a distinct topic. Next, I highlight discussions that should be of interest to a political philosopher working anywhere in the world, focusing on ideas characteristic of the sub-Saharan region that are under-appreciated not merely for the purpose of c…Read more
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1357An African Theory of Social JusticeIn Camilla Boisen & Matt Murray (eds.), Distributive Justice Debates in Political and Social Thought: Perspectives on Finding a Fair Share, Routledge. pp. 171-190. 2016.A comprehensive account of justice grounded on salient Afro-communitarian values, the article attempts to unify views about the distribution of economic resources, the protection of human rights and the provision of social recognition as ultimately being about proper ways to value loving relationships.
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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, Gale. 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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76Life, Meaning ofIn Henk ten Have (ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics, Springer. pp. 1-6. 2015.This entry begins by indicating respects in which the concept of life’s meaning has only recently become salient in English-speaking bioethical discussions and by clarifying what talk of ‘life’s meaning’ and cognate phrases mean, at least to most of the philosophers and bioethicists who have used them. This essay then addresses six major respects in which thought about what makes a life meaningful has influenced bioethics. The first four issues concern life and death matters for human beings, an…Read more
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| The Meaning of Life |
| African Philosophy |
| Normative Ethics |
| Social and Political Philosophy |
| Philosophy of Law |
| Applied Ethics |
| Value Theory |