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247Africanising Institutional Culture: What Is Possible and Plausible (Repr.)In Dennis Masaka (ed.), Knowledge Production and the Search for Epistemic Liberation in Africa, Springer. pp. 111-134. 2022.Reprint of a chapter first published in Being at Home (2015).
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492A Reconciliation Theory of State Punishment: An Alternative to Protection and RetributionRoyal 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
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153Der junge Marx im Licht einer afrikanischen Ethik: Zwei Ansichten der SelbstverwirklichungPolylog: Zeitschrift Für Interkulturelles Philosophieren 47 69-93. 2022.German translation by Namita Herzl and Juri Wald of ‘The Young Marx and an African Ethic: Two Views of Self-realization’.
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32African and East Asian Perspectives on AgeingIn Christopher Wareham (ed.), Cambridge Handbook of the Ethics of Ageing, Cambridge University Press. pp. 118-132. 2022.After expounding the conceptions of harmony that are central to Confucianism and the sub-Saharan ethic of ubuntu, I apply them to three major topics pertaining to age, namely, virtue, the value of life, and care. Roughly speaking, indigenous East Asian and African values of harmony both entail that only the elderly can be truly virtuous, that the elderly have a strong claim to life-saving resources, and that they are entitled to care from their children, views that I show are not characteristic …Read more
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579The Virtues of African Ethics (Repr.)In Luís Rodrigues (ed.), African Ethics: A Guide to Key Ideas, Bloomsbury. pp. 185-196. 2022.Mildly modified reprint of a chapter originally appearing in The Handbook of Virtue Ethics (2012).
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592How to Report on War in the Light of an African EthicIn Jonathan Chimakonam (ed.), Contemporary Issues in African Philosophy, . pp. 145-162. 2022.While there is a budding literature on media ethics in the light of characteristic sub-Saharan moral values, there is virtually nothing on wartime reporting more specifically. Furthermore, the literature insofar as it has a bearing on wartime reporting suggests that embedded journalism and patriotic journalism are ethically justified during war. In this essay, I sketch a prima facie attractive African moral theory, grounded on a certain interpretation of the value of communal relationship, and b…Read more
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18African EthicsIn Tom Angier (ed.), Ethics: The Key Thinkers, 2nd Edition, Bloomsbury. pp. 261-281. 2022.Unlike the Chinese, Indian, and Western ethical traditions, the African one had not been text-based until as recently as the 1960s. Since a very large majority of indigenous sub-Saharan societies had oral cultures, there are no classic texts in the field of African ethics and hence also no Big Names; there's nothing comparable to, say, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics or Confucius’ Analects. However, some names and texts have been more influential than others in shaping ethical reflection, particu…Read more
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222Problems of Living Meaningfully in Psychiatry and PhilosophyBrazilian 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_.
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104Does the Lack of Cosmic Meaning Make Our Lives Bad?Journal of Value Inquiry 56 (1): 37-50. 2022.This article is part of a special issue devoted to David Benatar’s anti-natalism. There are places in his oeuvre where he contends that, while our lives might be able to exhibit some terrestrial or human meaning, that is not enough to make them worth creating, which would require a cosmic meaning that is unavailable to us. There are those who maintain, in reply to Benatar, that some of our lives do have a cosmic meaning, but I argue that Benatar is correct that none of our lives does. I instead …Read more
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370How Much Punishment Is Deserved? Two Alternatives to ProportionalityPhilosophies 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
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62The Concept of Life's MeaningIn Iddo Landau (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Meaning in Life, Oxford University Press. pp. 27-42. 2022.I critically discuss views about what at least analytic philosophers have in mind when reflecting on what makes life meaningful. I first demonstrate that there has been a standard view of that, according to which meaningfulness centrally involves the actions of human persons, ones that exhibit a high desirability characteristically present in ‘the good, the true, and the beautiful’ and absent from the cases of Sisyphus or the Experience Machine. Then, I address five challenges to the standard vi…Read more
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737A 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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568What 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
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157Vitality, Community, and Human Dignity in Africa (rev. edn)In Filomena Maggino (ed.), Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research, 2nd edn, Springer. 2021.Mildly revised reprint of material extracted from an article appearing in Human Rights Review (2012).
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1516The 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.
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860Traditional African Religion as a Neglected Form of MonotheismThe Monist 104 (3). 2021.Our aims are to articulate some core philosophical positions characteristic of Traditional African Religion and to argue that they merit consideration as monotheist rivals to standard interpretations of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. In particular, we address the topics of how God’s nature is conceived, how God’s will is meant to bear on human decision making, where one continues to exist upon the death of one’s body, and how long one is able to exist without a body. For each of these to…Read more
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662Humility and the African Ethic of UbuntuIn Mark Alfano, Michael Patrick Lynch & Alessandra Tanesini (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Humility, Routledge. pp. 257-267. 2021.This chapter explores prominent respects in which humility figures into ubuntu, the southern African (and specifically Nguni) term for humanness often used to capture moral philosophies and cultures indigenous to the sub-Saharan region. The chapter considers respects in which humility is prescribed by ubuntu, understood not just as a relational normative ethic, but also as a moral epistemology. Focusing specifically on philosophical ideas published in academic fora over the past 50 years or so, …Read more
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298The Meanings of God: Reply to Four CriticsInternational 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
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358A Relational Theory of Mental Illness: Lacking Identity and SolidaritySynthesis Philosophica 71 (1): 65-81. 2021.In this article I aim to make progress towards the philosophical goal of ascertaining what, if anything, all mental illnesses have in common, attempting to unify a large sub-set of them that have a relational or interpersonal dimension. One major claim is that, if we want a promising theory of mental illness, we must go beyond the dominant western accounts of mental illness/health, which focus on traits intrinsic to a person such as pain/pleasure, lethargy/liveliness, fragmentation/integration, …Read more
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1040African Reasons Why Artificial Intelligence Should Not Maximize UtilityIn Beatrice Dedaa Okyere-Manu (ed.), African Values, Ethics, and Technology: Questions, Issues, and Approaches, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 55-72. 2021.Insofar as artificial intelligence is to be used to guide automated systems in their interactions with humans, the dominant view is probably that it would be appropriate to programme them to maximize (expected) utility. According to utilitarianism, which is a characteristically western conception of moral reason, machines should be programmed to do whatever they could in a given circumstance to produce in the long run the highest net balance of what is good for human beings minus what is bad for…Read more
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380Comparing the Meaningfulness of Finite and Infinite Lives: Can We Reap What We Sow if We Are Immortal?Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 90 105-123. 2021.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
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282Recent Work in African Philosophy: Its Relevance beyond the ContinentMind 130 (518): 639-660. 2021.In this article I critically discuss some recent English language books in African philosophy. Specifically, I expound and evaluate key claims from books published by sub-Saharan thinkers since 2017 that address epistemology, metaphysics, and value theory and that do so in ways of interest to an audience of at least Anglo-American-Australasian analytic philosophers. My aim is not to establish a definitive conclusion about these claims, but rather to facilitate cross-cultural engagement by highli…Read more
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367Ubuntu: The Good Life (rev. edn)In Filomena Maggino (ed.), Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research, 2nd edn, Springer. 2021.Moderately updated version of this encyclopaedia entry.
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365Recent Work in African Political and Legal PhilosophyPhilosophy 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
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21Popper’s Politics in the Light of African Values (Repr.)In Oseni Taiwo Afisi (ed.), Karl Popper and Africa: Knowledge, Politics and Development, Springer. pp. 9-29. 2021.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
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196خدا،روح و معنای زندگی (edited book)Negahehandisheh. 2021.Persian translation by Ashkan M. Roshan of _God, Soul and the Meaning of Life_.
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933Meaning in Life in Spite of DeathIn Michael Cholbi & Travis Timmerman (eds.), Exploring the Philosophy of Death and Dying: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives, Routledge. pp. 253-261. 2021.In this chapter the author critically explores answers to the question of how immortality would affect the meaningfulness of a person’s life, understood roughly as a life that merits esteem, achieves purposes much more valuable than pleasure, or makes for a good life-story. The author expounds three arguments for thinking that life would be meaningless if it were mortal, and provides objections to them. He then offers a reason for thinking that a mortal life could be meaningful, and responds to …Read more
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569Exactly 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
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642Afro-Communitarianism and the Role of Traditional African Healers in the COVID-19 PandemicPublic Health Ethics 14 (1): 59-71. 2021.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
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317Supernaturalist analytic existentialism: Critical notice of Clifford Williams’ Religion and the meaning of lifeInternational 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
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The Meaning of Life |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
African Philosophy |
Philosophy of Law |
Applied Ethics |
Value Theory |