Oluwaseun D. Sanwoolu

African ethical theories emphasize community as the foundation of moral life, yet their central concepts of ‘individual’ and ‘community’ have been implicitly constructed around men’s experience, extending recognition to women only when their roles align with androcentric norms. Drawing on Ipadeola’s concept of ‘the gender of power’, I argue that this androcentrism operates not merely epistemically but ethically. When cultural structures determine whose experiences count, the criteria of moral judgment become gendered. In response, I propose self-care as resistance, as a practice of self-preservation, self-affirmation, and boundary-setting through which marginalized individuals sustain their dignity and capacity for collective participation, as a feminist corrective to this distortion. Through a reinterpretation of the communitarian concepts of belonging and participation, I show that self-care is not the negation of African communal values but their precondition, and that a genuinely reconstructed African communitarian ethics must recognize it as a central moral practice.

This paper explores the potential application of Kant’s moral philosophy to artificial intelligence (AI) and addresses two major objections. The first objection is that AI cannot fulfill Kant's standards for moral agency. I contend, however, that AI alignment with Kantian principles does not require moral agency in Kant's sense. I propose that the Categorical Imperative (CI) can serve as a useful framework for AI alignment, guiding the creation of maxims governing AI actions and testing their universalizability, particularly using the first principle of the CI which is the formula of the universal law (FUL). The second objection I address is the particularist critique to Kantian universalism, which is that Kantian universalism cannot tell us how to form maxims in a way that it allows sensitivity to context. I maintain that Kant’s framework can indeed accommodate context-sensitivity through practical judgment. But since AI are not the kinds of things to have practical judgment, I show that they have a functionally equivalent mechanism—transformer models—which can allow them form maxims that consider morally salient facts. Thus, supporting the claim that AI alignment is possible within a Kantian framework.

This paper explores the limitations of artificial intelligence (AI) in fulfilling the obligations inherent in close personal relationships, particularly in the context of loneliness. While AI technologies may offer some of the goods that we associate with close personal relationships, they lack the capacity for genuine commitment and individualized care that characterize human interactions. The finitude of human existence—our cognitive, emotional, and temporal limitations— and our capacity to make judgments concerning distinct kinds of value imbues human relationships with significance that AI cannot replicate.