•  276
    The Abrahamic faiths of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are typically recognized as the world’s major monotheistic religions. However, African Traditional Religion is, despite often including lesser spirits and gods, a monotheistic religion with numerous adherents in sub-Saharan Africa; it includes the idea of a single most powerful God responsible for the creation and sustenance of everything else. This Element focuses on drawing attention to this major world religion that has been much neglec…Read more
  • Karl Marx's normative views have routinely been contrasted with moral-political theories such as utilitarianism and Rawlsian justice. They have not been systematically contrasted with characteristically African, and specifically communal, values, with post-independence African leaders such as Nyerere and Nkrumah instead having emphasized the similarities. In this article, a work of analytic philosophy, I sketch the essentials of Marx’s approach to the human good, especially his early writings on…Read more
  •  6
    Two Conceptions of African Ethics
    Quest - and African Journal of Philosophy 25 (1-2): 141-162. 2011.
  •  341
    The Meanings of God: Reply to Four Critics
    International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 82 (4-5): 366-374. 2021.
    In this article, I briefly reply to four critics who critically engage with my book God, Soul and the Meaning of Life in a special issue of the International Journal of Philosophy and Theology. I view them mainly as addressing the ‘meaning’ of God in three distinct senses, namely, in terms of how best to understand the word ‘God’ and related terms such as ‘the spiritual’, whether God is central to what gives our lives a particular sort of final value, and how beliefs about God might be central t…Read more
  •  254
    Problems of Living Meaningfully in Psychiatry and Philosophy
    Brazilian Journal of Psychiatry 44 (3): 229-230. 2022.
    A brief critical notice of Dan J Stein's new book _Problems of Living: Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Cognitive-Affective Science_.
  •  562
    A Reconciliation Theory of State Punishment: An Alternative to Protection and Retribution
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 91 119-139. 2022.
    I propose a theory of punishment that is unfamiliar in the West, according to which the state normally ought to have offenders reform their characters and compensate their victims in ways the offenders find burdensome, thereby disavowing the crime and tending to foster improved relationships between offenders, their victims, and the broader society. I begin by indicating how this theory draws on under-appreciated ideas about reconciliation from the Global South, and especially sub-Saharan Africa…Read more
  •  423
    How Much Punishment Is Deserved? Two Alternatives to Proportionality
    with Mika’il Metz
    Philosophies 7 (2): 1-13. 2022.
    When it comes to the question of how much the state ought to punish a given offender, the standard understanding of the desert theory for centuries has been that it should give him a penalty proportionate to his offense, that is, an amount of punishment that fits the severity of his crime. In this article, part of a special issue on the geometry of desert, we maintain that a desert theorist is not conceptually or otherwise required to hold a proportionality requirement. We show that there is log…Read more
  • Human Rights and African Communitarian Values
    In Jesse Tomalty & Kerri Woods (eds.), Routledge Handbook for the Philosophy of Human Rights, Routledge. forthcoming.
    This chapter demonstrates that the African philosophical tradition offers four interesting ways to broaden global thought about human rights, where all four involve an appeal to the value of community in some way. Firstly, some African philosophers are skeptical about the normative category of human, i.e., individual rights, with some appealing to communal considerations to deny they exist at all and others doing so to argue that they should not play a central role in moral-political thought. Se…Read more
  •  320
    Meaning and Medicine: An Underexplored Bioethical Value
    Ethik in der Medizin 33 (4): 439-453. 2021.
    In this article, part of a special issue on meaning in life and medical ethics, I argue that several issues encountered in a bioethical context are not adequately addressed only with values such as morality and welfare. I maintain, more specifically, that the value of what makes a life meaningful is essential to being able to provide conclusive judgements about which decisions to make. After briefly indicating how meaningfulness differs from rightness and happiness, I point out how it is plausib…Read more
  •  343
    I begin by constructing a religio-philosophical argument informed by ideas salient in the African tradition for thinking that we should express gratitude to God for having been giving a dignity-conferring life-force, after which I defend the argument from value-theoretic criticisms (I set aside metaphysical issues altogether). For example, I respond to the objections that having an inherent dignity is not a benefit of a sort warranting gratitude and that those with bad lives have no reason to be…Read more
  •  161
    Defending a Relational Account of Moral Status
    In Mbih Jerome Tosam & Erasmus Masitera (eds.), African Agrarian Philosophy, Springer Verlag. pp. 105-124. 2023.
    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
  • African Values and Capital Punishment (Repr.)
    In Mark Timmons (ed.), Disputed Moral Issues: A Reader, 5th ed, Oxford University Press. 2019.
    Reprint of a chapter initially published in G. Walmsley (ed.) African Philosophy and the Future of Africa (2011).
  •  466
    Shortened and mildly revised version of an essay that initially appeared in Murove (ed.) African Ethics (2009). This chapter is a work of applied ethics that aims to provide a convincing comprehensive account of how a government official in a post-independence sub-Saharan country should make decisions about 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 app…Read more
  •  629
    Harmony as a basic value is neglected in internationally influential philosophical discussions about rights, power, and other facets of public policy; it is not prominent in articles that appear in widely read journals or in books published by presses with a global reach. Of particular interest, political philosophers and policy makers remain ignorant of the similarities and differences between various harmony-oriented approaches to institutional choice from around the world. In this chapter, I …Read more
  •  1
    Medicine and Meaning in Life
    In Alex Broadbent (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Medicine, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    Insofar as value theory is relevant to the philosophy of medicine, two goods have dominated reflection: well-being and morality. This essay casts doubt on whether those values are sufficient to resolve an array of important debates about medical practice, maintaining that the value of what makes a life meaningful should play a much larger role. After first indicating how meaningfulness differs from happiness and rightness, the essay argues that meaningfulness cannot reasonably be ignored when th…Read more
  •  671
    Exactly Why Are Slurs Wrong?
    Daimon: Revista Internacional de Filosofía 84 13-29. 2021.
    This article, part of a special issue on 'Expressing Hatred', seeks to provide a comprehensive and fundamental account of why racial epithets and similar slurs are immoral, whenever they are. It considers three major theories, roughly according to which they are immoral because they are harmful (welfarism), because they undermine autonomy (Kantianism), or because they are unfriendly (an under-considered, relational approach informed by ideas from the Global South). This article presents new obje…Read more
  •  418
    On the rise over the past 20 years has been ‘moderate supernaturalism’, the view that while a meaningful life is possible in a world without God or a soul, a much greater meaning would be possible only in a world with them. William Lane Craig can be read as providing an important argument for a version of this view, according to which only with God and a soul could our lives have an eternal, as opposed to temporally limited, significance, by virtue of our moral choices then making an ultimate di…Read more
  •  206
    A Relational Theory of Justice
    Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    The core idea of A Relational Theory of Justice is that normative political and legal philosophy should be grounded on people’s relational features, in particular their ability to commune with others and be communed with by them. Usually, philosophers of justice in the West have based their views on people’s intrinsic features, ones that make no essential reference to others, such as their autonomy, self-ownership, or well-being. In addition, often critics of basing politics and law on justice, …Read more
  •  418
    Recent Work in African Political and Legal Philosophy
    Philosophy Compass 16 (9): 1-10. 2021.
    In this article I critically survey non-edited books on political and legal philosophy that have been composed by those working in the sub-Saharan African tradition and have appeared in print since 2016. These monographs principally address political, distributive, and criminal justice at the domestic level, with this article recounting the essentials of these texts as well as noting prima facie weaknesses in their positions and gaps in current research agendas. My aims are to enable readers to …Read more
  •  226
    An updated version of this encyclopedia entry on the concept of what, if anything, makes life worthwhile.
  •  24
    Karl Popper is famous for favoring an open society, one in which the individual is treated as an end in himself and social arrangements are subjected to critical evaluation, which he defends largely by appeal to a Kantian ethic of respecting the dignity of rational beings. In this essay, I consider for the first time what the implications of a characteristically African ethic, instead prescribing respect for our capacity to relate communally, are for how the state should operate in an open socie…Read more
  •  9
    Shortened and mildly revised reprint of an article first appearing in Ethical Perspectives (2020).
  •  235
    خدا،روح و معنای زندگی (edited book)
    Negahehandisheh. 2021.
    Persian translation by Ashkan M. Roshan of _God, Soul and the Meaning of Life_.
  •  647
    What does an African ethic of social cohesion entail for social distancing?
    Developing World Bioethics 21 (1): 7-16. 2021.
    The most prominent strand of moral thought in the African philosophical tradition is relational and cohesive, roughly demanding that we enter into community with each other. Familiar is the view that being a real person means sharing a way of life with others, perhaps even in their fate. What does such a communal ethic prescribe for the coronavirus pandemic? Might it forbid one from social distancing, at least away from intimates? Or would it entail that social distancing is wrong to some degree…Read more
  •  688
    The COVID-19 pandemic has brought significant challenges to healthcare systems worldwide, and in Africa, given the lack of resources, they are likely to be even more acute. The usefulness of Traditional African Healers in helping to mitigate the effects of pandemic has been neglected. We argue from an ethical perspective that these healers can and should have an important role in informing and guiding local communities in Africa on how to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Particularly, we argue no…Read more
  •  1661
    The Meaning of Life (Second Revised Edition)
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2021.
    A 10,000+ word critical overview of analytic philosophy devoted to life's meaning, with some focus on books and more recent works.
  •  365
    Supernaturalist analytic existentialism: Critical notice of Clifford Williams’ Religion and the meaning of life
    International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 89 (2): 189-198. 2021.
    In this critical notice of Clifford Williams’ Religion and the meaning of life, I focus on his argumentation in favour of the moderate supernaturalist position that, while a meaningful life would be possible in a purely physical world, a much greater meaning would be possible only in a world with God and an eternal afterlife spent close to God. I begin by expounding and evaluating Williams’ views of the physical sources of meaning, providing reason to doubt both that he has captured all the cent…Read more