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290Climate Change in Africa and the Middle East in Light of Health, Ubuntu and Islam (repr.)South African Journal of Bioethics and Law 9 (2): 88-92. 2016.Reprint of a chapter initially published in _Bioethical Insights into Values and Policy: Climate Change and Health_ (2016).
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135Life Worth LivingIn Alex Michalos (ed.), Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-being Research, Springer. pp. 3602-05. 2014.In this encyclopedia entry, I seek to distinguish the concept of a worthwhile life from related ones such as a happy or meaningful life, to draw key distinctions that arise in discussion of worthwhileness (e.g., between life worth starting and life worth continuing), and to discuss some of the contemporary debates among ethicists about when a life is indeed worth living and when it's not.
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532New developments in the meaning of lifePhilosophy Compass 2 (2). 2007.In this article I survey philosophical literature on the topic of what, if anything, makes a person’s life meaningful, focusing on systematic texts that are written in English and that have appeared in the last five years (2002-2007). My aims are to present overviews of the most important, fresh, Anglo-American positions on meaning in life and to raise critical questions about them worth answering in future work.
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30The Immortality Requirement for Life's Meaning (repr.)In Joshua Seachris (ed.), Exploring the Meaning of Life: An Anthology and Guide, Wiley. pp. 416-427. 2012.Reprint of an article that initially appeared in Ratio (2003).
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484Animal Rights and the Interpretation of the South African Constitution (repr.)In David Bilchitz & Stu Woolman (eds.), Is This Seat Taken? Conversations at the Bar, the Bench and the Academy, Pretoria University Law Press. pp. 209-219. 2012.In this chapter, a reprinted article from Southern African Public Law (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 st…Read more
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332The 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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22Could God's Purpose Be the Source of Life's Meaning? (repr.)In Joshua Seachris (ed.), Exploring the Meaning of Life: An Anthology and Guide, Wiley. pp. 200-218. 2012.Reprint of an article that initially appeared in Religious Studies (2000).
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262How to Deal with Neglected Tropical Diseases in the Light of an African EthicDeveloping World Bioethics 18 (3): 233-240. 2018.Many countries in Africa, and more generally those in the Global South with tropical areas, are plagued by illnesses that the wealthier parts of the world (mainly ‘the West’) neither suffer from nor put systematic effort into preventing, treating or curing. What does an ethic with a recognizably African pedigree entail for the ways various agents ought to respond to such diseases? As many readers will know, a characteristically African ethic prescribes weighty duties to aid on the part of those …Read more
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239Legal PunishmentIn Christopher Roederer & Darrel Moellendorf (eds.), Jurisprudence, Juta. pp. 555-87. 2004.We seek to outline philosophical answers to the questions of why punish, whom to punish and how much to punish, with illustrations from the South African legal system. We begin by examining the differences between forward- and backward-looking moral theories of legal punishment, their strengths and also their weaknesses. Then, we ascertain to which theory, if any, contemporary South Africa largely conforms. Finally, we discuss several matters of controversy in South Africa in the context of forw…Read more
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44The African Ethic of Ubuntu/Botho (repr.)In Sharlene Swarz & Monica Taylor (eds.), Moral Education in Sub-Saharan Africa, Routledge. pp. 7-24. 2011.In this chapter, a reprint of an article initially appearing in the Journal of Moral Education (2010), we provide a theoretical reconstruction of sub-Saharan ethics that we argue is a strong competitor to typical Western approaches to morality. According to our African moral theory, actions are right roughly insofar as they are a matter of living harmoniously with others or honouring communal relationships. After spelling out this ethic, we apply it to several issues in both normative and empiri…Read more
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55Africanising Institutional Culture: What Is Possible and Plausible (repr.)In Michael Cross & Amasa Ndofirepi (eds.), Knowledge and Change in the African University: Challenges and Opportunities, Sense Publishers. pp. 19-41. 2017.Reprint of a chapter that initially appeared in _Being at Home_ (2015).
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491The 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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302African and western moral theories in a bioethical contextDeveloping World Bioethics 10 (1): 49-58. 2009.The field of bioethics is replete with applications of moral theories such as utilitarianism and Kantianism. For a given dilemma, even if it is not clear how one of these western philosophical principles of right (and wrong) action would resolve it, one can identify many of the considerations that each would conclude is relevant. The field is, in contrast, largely unaware of an African account of what all right (and wrong) actions have in common and of the sorts of factors that for it are german…Read more
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153How the West Was One: The Western as Individualist, the African as Communitarian (repr.)In Peters Michael & Mika Carl (eds.), The Dilemma of Western Philosophy, Routledge. pp. 51-60. 2017.Reprint of an article initially appearing in Educational Philosophy and Theory (2015).
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106Review 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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561Ancillary Care Obligations in Light of an African Bioethic: From Entrustment to CommunionTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 38 (2). 2017.Henry Richardson has recently published the first book ever devoted to ancillary care obligations, which roughly concern what medical researchers are morally required to provide to participants beyond what safety requires. In it Richardson notes that he has presented the ‘only fully elaborated view out there’ on this topic, which he calls the ‘partial-entrustment model’. In this article, I provide a new theory of ancillary care obligations, one that is grounded on ideals of communion salient in …Read more
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68Further 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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604What Can the Capabilities Approach Learn from an Ubuntu Ethic? A Relational Approach to Development TheoryWorld Development 97 (September). 2017.Over the last two decades, the capabilities approach has become an increasingly influential theory of development. It conceptualises human wellbeing in terms of an individual's ability to achieve functionings we have reason to value. In contrast, the African ethic of ubuntu views human flourishing as the propensity to pursue relations of fellowship with others, such that relationships have fundamental value. These two theoretical perspectives seem to be in tension with each other; while the capa…Read more
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723God’s Role in a Meaningful Life: New Reflections from Tim MawsonEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 10 (3): 171-191. 2018.Characteristic of the contemporary field of life's meaning has been the combination of monism in method and naturalism in substance. That is, much of the field has sought to reduce enquiry into life's meaning to one question and to offer a single principle as an answer to it, with this principle typically focusing on ways of living in the physical world as best known by the scientific method. T. J. Mawson's new book, God and the Meanings of Life, provides fresh reason to doubt both this form and…Read more
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187God, Morality and the Meaning of LifeIn Samantha Vice & Nafsika Athanassoulis (eds.), The Moral Life: Essays in Honour of John Cottingham, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 201-227. 2008.In this chapter, I critically explore John Cottingham's most powerful argument for the thesis that the existence of God is necessary for meaning in life. This is the argument that life would be meaningless without an invariant morality, which could come only from God. After demonstrating that Cottingham's God-based ethic can avoid not only many traditional Euthyphro meta-ethical concerns, but also objections at the normative level, I consider whether it can entail the unique respect in which mor…Read more
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474Realism and the Censure Theory of PunishmentIn Patricia Smith & Paolo Comanducci (eds.), Legal Philosophy: General Aspects, Franz Steiner Verlag. pp. 117-29. 2002.I focus on the metaphysical underpinnings of the censure theory of punishment, according to which punishment is justified if and because it expresses disapproval of injustice. Specifically, I seek to answer the question of what makes claims about proportionate censure true or false. In virtue of what is it the case that one form of censure is stronger than another, or that punishment is the censure fitting injustice? Are these propositions true merely because of social conventions, as per the do…Read more
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344آثار جدید درباره معناى زندگى (Persian: 'Recent Work on the Meaning of Life’)Naqd Va Nazar: Quarterly Journal of Philosophy and Theology 8 (29-30): 266-313. 2003.Persian translation by Mohsen Javadi of 'Recent Work on the Meaning of Life' (first published in Ethics 2002).
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829Relational 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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25Ubuntu and the Value of Self-Expression in the Mass MediaCommunicatio 41 (3): 388-403. 2015.In this article I consider what the implications of ubuntu, interpreted as an African moral philosophy, are for self-expression as a value that the media could help to promote. In contrast to the natural hunches that self-expression is merely a kind of narcissism or makes sense for only individualist cultures to prize, I argue that an attractive construal of ubuntu entails that self-expression can play an important communitarian role. The mass media can be obligated to enable people to express t…Read more
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241Developing African Political Philosophy: Moral-Theoretic StrategiesPhilosophia Africana 14 (1): 61-83. 2012.If contemporary African political philosophy is going to develop substantially in fresh directions, it probably will not be enough, say, to rehash the old personhood debate between Kwame Gyekye and Ifeanyi Menkiti, or to nit-pick at Gyekye’s system, as much of the literature in the field has done. Instead, major advances are likely to emerge on the basis of new, principled interpretations of sub-Saharan moral thought. In recent work, I have fleshed out two types of moral theories that have a cle…Read more
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85Censure 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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24PunishmentIn Deen Chatterjee (ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Justice, Springer. pp. 915-17. 2012.A large majority of theoretical debate with regard to criminal justice at the global level has been concerned to identify which kinds of punishment of international agents are morally sound. Three key issues have been: (1) international sentencing, which concerns the rightness of international tribunals to prosecute what might be called ‘large-scale’ or ‘humanitarian’ crimes; (2) extraterritorial punishment, most topically regarding the appropriateness of a state punishing a foreign national for…Read more
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46The Meaning of Life, Revised EditionIn Peter Adamson (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2012.An updated version of the initial, 2007 entry, adding in discussion of key works that have appeared since then.
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520Confucianism and African Conceptions of Value, Reality and Knowledge (儒家思想与非洲的价值观、现实 观与知识观)International Social Science Journal (Chinese Edition 国际社会科学杂志) 33 (4): 159-170. 2016.This article, translated into Chinese by Tian Kaifang, summarizes and critically reflects on the current state of the literature that has recently begun to put Chinese Confucianism into dialogue with characteristically African conceptions of what is good, what fundamentally exists, and how to obtain knowledge. As most of this literature has addressed value theory, this article focuses largely on it, too. It first illustrates how similar the foundational values are between the two cultural tradit…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.
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 |