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23Duties towards Animals versus Rights to Culture: An African Approach to the Conflict in Terms of CommunionIn Luis Rodrigues & Les Mitchell (eds.), Multiculturalism, Race and Animals – Contemporary Moral and Political Debates, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 269-294. 2017.Influential moral theories in the contemporary West face problems making sense of the conflict between the interests of animals and people’s interests in culture. They have trouble explaining either the existence of strong direct duties to animals or the importance of people’s right to culture (and frequently both). In this chapter I aim to advance a relational ethic, grounded on the African philosophical tradition, that offers a promising alternative. I contend that duties toward animals and ri…Read more
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44Philosophy of Higher EducationIn Duncan Pritchard (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies Online: Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2013.A lengthy annotated bibliography of the most central work from the past 25 years on various aspects of the philosophy of higher education.
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341Assessing 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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1321The South African Student/Worker Uprisings in Light of Just War TheoryIn Susan Booysen (ed.), Fees Must Fall: Student Revolt, Decolonisation and Governance in South Africa, Wits University Press. pp. 292-308. 2016.I critically examine the South African university student and worker protests of 2015/2016 in light of moral principles governing the use of force that are largely uncontested in both the contemporary Western and African philosophies of just war, violence and threats. Amongst these principles are: “discrimination”, according to which force should be directed not towards innocent bystanders but instead should target those particularly responsible for injustice; “likely success”, meaning that, ins…Read more
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291Climate 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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41Exploring the Ethical Foundations of Nkrumah’s ConsciencismIn Martin Ajei (ed.), Consciencism, . pp. 213-227. 2017.In this chapter I critically discuss the meta-ethical and normative ethical foundations of Nkrumah’s philosophy as discussed in Consciencism. With respect to meta-ethics, I address Nkrumah’s characteristically African attempt to ground ethics on metaphysics, and, specifically, his claim that a basic egalitarian moral principle follows from a materialist ontology. Granting Nkrumah that reality is ultimately physical and that the physical is unitary, I argue that nothing logically follows about wh…Read more
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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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534New 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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769A 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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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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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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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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159Review of Ethics & AIDS in Africa (review)South African Journal of Philosophy 25 (4): 369-71. 2006.
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304African 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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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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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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292The Nature of Poverty as an Inhuman ConditionRes Publica 22 (3): 327-342. 2016.In this article, part of a symposium devoted to Hennie Lötter’s Poverty, Ethics and Justice, my aims are threefold. First, I present a careful reading of Lötter’s original and compelling central conception of the nature of poverty as the inability to ‘obtain adequate economic resources….to maintain physical health and engage in social activities distinctive of human beings in their respective societies’. After motivating this view, particularly in comparison to other salient accounts of poverty,…Read more
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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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724God’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
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 |