Thaddeus Metz
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 710092 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Thaddeus Metz |
| PRENOMES | Thaddeus |
| SOBRENOME | Metz |
| ASSINATURA | METZ T |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Johannesburg |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9861-2408 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 89 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 293 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 89 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2000 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 10 |
Principles for compensating the epistemic injustices of colonialism
I aim to make headway towards understanding how to compensate properly for epistemic injustices committed during large-scale forms of intergroup domination, with my focus being European colonialism in much of Africa and apartheid in South Africa. I point out that there is a wide array of suggestions about how concretely to effect reparations for these injustices in the literature, and seek to discover which (if any) are justified by a plausible t…
Philosophy of education as pluriversal
Cross-cultural and Applied Ethics in the Light of a Relational Moral Theory
This article is a reply to six contributions to a special issue of Ethical Theory and Moral Practice that is devoted to critically discussing A Relational Moral Theory: African Ethics in and Beyond the Continent . In this book I articulate a comprehensive principle of rightness that is substantially informed by relational values salient in the African philosophical tradition (and some others in the Global South) and defend it as preferable to som…
Jecker and Atuire’s African reflections on being a person
A brief critical notice of _What Is a Person?_ by Nancy Jecker and Caesar Atuire focusing on their relational account of what gives human beings a dignity
Cross-cultural Ethics, Moral Status, Right Action, and a Relational Moral Theory
In this article I respond to six contributors to a special issue of Social Theory and Practice that is devoted to critical discussions of my book A Relational Moral Theory: African Ethics in and Beyond the Continent. In this book I articulate a general principle of rightness that is substantially informed by values salient in the African philosophical tradition (and some others in the Global South) and defend it as preferable to some major rivals…
The defence and limits of consensual democracy
In this article, I draw on the neglected tradition of African political and legal philosophy to address the sort of representative democracy suitable for twenty-first century urban societies. In particular, I present and evaluate for a global audience consensualism about democracy, the view that some kind of unanimous agreement amongst elected legislators should normally be a necessary condition for a statute to count as valid law. After expoundi…
Advancing global economic justice in the face of race
Unexplored Issues in the Ethics of Nudges
Since the publication of Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Thaler and Sunstein, nudges have become widely used tools in policymakers' toolkits.1 In parallel, beginning with Bovens's early reflections, scholars have debated the conditions, if any, under which the use of such unconventional policy instruments can be considered ethically legitimate.2 This special issue seeks to advance this ongoing ethical debate with…
Gaza
Nuraan DavidsStellenbosch UniversityI don’t think we need to wait for history to tell us what we already know about Gaza. No amount of legal debates on the plausibility of its genocide status, can
Why Personhood Is Not So Social
In Menkiti’s Moral Man, Oritsegbubemi Oyowe aims to provide a sympathetic interpretation of the works of Ifeanyi Menkiti as they address personhood, community, and other facets of morality. This article maintains that while Oyowe’s Menkiti is more plausible than the way Menkiti has often been read, there are still respects in which the account of personhood advanced invites criticism. One criticism is that it is implausible to think that personho…
The Point of Change as Interpretation
Karl Marx did write, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it,” which in this essay I interpret in the context of his normative thought about overcoming alienation. Reading “thesis eleven” in the light of that critical perspective, I maintain that two under-appreciated claims emerge: a central reason to pursue revolutionary change is so that more people have the freedom to engage in interpretati…
How African conceptions of God bear on life's meaning
Up to now, a very large majority of work in the religious philosophy of life's meaning has presumed a conception of God that is Abrahamic. In contrast, in this article I critically discuss some of the desirable and undesirable facets of Traditional African Religion's salient conceptions of God as they bear on meaning in life. Given an interest in a maximally meaningful life, and supposing meaning would come from fulfilling God's purpose for us, w…
How Much Punishment Is Deserved? Two Alternatives to Proportionality
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, we maintain that a desert theorist is not conceptually or otherwise required to hold a proportionality requirement. We show that there is logi…
A Reconciliation Theory of State Punishment
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 t…
Does the Lack of Cosmic Meaning Make Our Lives Bad
A Relational Moral Theory
A Relational Moral Theory provides a new answer to the long-standing question of what all morally right actions might have in common as distinct from wrong ones, by drawing on neglected resources from the Global South and especially the African philosophical tradition. The book points out that the principles of utility and of respect for autonomy, the two rivals that have dominated Western moral theory for about two centuries, share an individual…
Comparing the Meaningfulness of Finite and Infinite Lives
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 since we…
Supernaturalist analytic existentialism
Relational Moral Theory
What does an African ethic of social cohesion entail for social distancing
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 ent…
Recent work in African political and legal philosophy
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 r…
Communication Strategies in the Light of Indigenous African and Chinese Values
Many values originating in Africa and in China, and ones that continue to influence much of everyday communication in those societies, are aptly placed under the common heading of “harmony.” After first spelling out what harmony involves in substantially Confucian China, and then in Africa, this article notes respects in which the Confucian and African conceptions of harmony are similar, an awareness of which could facilitate smooth communication…
Must Land Reform Benefit the Victims of Colonialism
Elsewhere I have argued that African values such as communion and reconciliation require compensating those who have been wronged in ways likely to improve their lives. I have also contended that, when applied to land reform, this principle entails not transferring unjustly acquired land en masse and immediately to dispossessed populations since doing so would foreseeably lead to such things as capital flight and food shortages, which would harm …
African theories of meaning in life
In this article, I expound and assess two theories of meaning in life informed by the indigenous sub-Saharan African philosophical tradition. According to one view, a life is more meaningful, the more it promotes community with other human persons. According to the other view, a life is more meaningful, the more it promotes vitality in oneself and others. I argue that, at least upon some refinement, both of these African conceptions of meaning me…
The Concept of a Meaningful Life
This paper aims to clarify what we are asking when posing the question of what (if anything) makes a life meaningful. People associate many different ideas with talk of "meaning in life," so that one must search for an account of the question that is primary in some way. Therefore, after briefly sketching the major conceptions of life's meaning in 20th century philosophical literature, the remainder of the paper systematically seeks a satisfactor…
Toward an African Moral Theory
IN the literature on African ethics, one finds relatively little that consists of normative theorization with regard to right action, that is, the articulation and justification of a comprehensive, basic norm that is intended to account for what all permissible acts have in common as distinct from impermissible ones.1 By “African ethics” I mean values associated with the largely black and Bantu-speaking peoples residing in the sub-Saharan part of…
What Can the Capabilities Approach Learn from an Ubuntu Ethic? A Relational Approach to Development Theory
Just the beginning for ubuntu
In an article titled ‘The end of ubuntu’ recently published in this journal, Bernard Matolino and Wenceslaus Kwindingwi argue that contemporary conditions in (South) Africa are such that there is no justification for appealing to an ethic associated with talk of ‘ubuntu’. They argue that political elites who invoke ubuntu do so in ways that serve nefarious functions, such as unreasonably narrowing discourse about how best to live, while the moral…
The western ethic of care or an Afro-communitarian ethic? Specifying the right relational morality
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 Af…
Harmonizing global ethics in the future
This article considers how global ethical matters might be approached differently in the English-speaking literature if values salient in sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia were taken seriously. Specifically, after pointing out how indigenous values in both of these major parts of the world tend to prescribe honouring harmonious relationships, the article brings out what such an approach to morality entails for political power, foreign relations an…
Ubuntu
Human Dignity, Capital Punishment, and an African Moral Theory
In this article I spell out a conception of dignity grounded in African moral thinking that provides a plausible philosophical foundation for human rights, focusing on the particular human right not to be executed by the state. I first demonstrate that the South African Constitutional Court’s sub-Saharan explanations of why the death penalty is degrading all counterintuitively entail that using deadly force against aggressors is degrading as well…
How the West Was One
There is a kernel of truth in the claim that Western philosophy and practice of education is individualistic; theory in Euro-America tends to prize properties that are internal to a human being, such as her autonomy, rationality, knowledge, pleasure, desires, self-esteem and self-realisation, and education there tends to adopt techniques focused on the individual placed at some distance from others. What is striking about other philosophical–educ…
Ubuntu as a Moral Theory
In this article, I respond to questions about, and criticisms of, my article “Towardan African Moral Theory” that have been put forth by Allen Wood, Mogobe Ramose, Douglas Farland and Jason van Niekerk. The major topicsI address include: what bearing the objectivity of moral value should have on cross-cultural moral differences between Africans and Westerners; whether a harmonious relationship is a good candidate for having final moral value; whe…
Recent philosophical approaches to social protection
In the past decade or two, philosophies of social protection have shifted away from a nearly exclusive focus on the subjective and the individual (e.g. autonomous choices, utility) and towards values that are more objective and relational. The latter approaches, typified by the well-established Capabilities Approach and the up and coming ethic of ubuntu, have been substantially inspired by engagements with the Global South, particularly India and…
African Conceptions of Human Dignity
An Ubuntu -based Evaluation of the South African State's Responses to Marikana
In this work of normative political philosophy, I consider the ethical status of the South African government's responses to the Marikana massacre, where police shot and killed more than 30 striking miners, in light of a moral principle grounded on values associated with ubuntu. I argue that there are several respects in which the government's reactions have been unethical from an ubuntu-oriented perspective, and also make positive suggestions ab…
The Final Ends of Higher Education in Light of an African Moral Theory
From the perspective of an African ethic, analytically interpreted as a philosophical principle of right action, what are the proper final ends of a publicly funded university and how should they be ranked? To answer this question, I first provide a brief but inclusive review of the literature on Africanising higher education from the past 50 years, and contend that the prominent final ends suggested in it can be reduced to five major categories.…
The Motivation for “Toward an African Moral Theory”
Here I introduce the symposium issue of the South African Journal of Philosophy that is devoted to critically analysing my article “Toward an African Moral Theory.” In that article, I use the techniques of analytic moral philosophy to articulate and defend a moral theory that both is grounded on the values of peoples living in sub-Saharan Africa and differs from what is influential in contemporary Western ethics. Here, I not only present a précis…
The Meaningful and the Worthwhile
New Developments in the Meaning of Life
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. 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
Respect for Persons and Perfectionist Politics
The good, the true, and the beautiful
Three of the great sources of meaning in life are the good, the true, and the beautiful, and I aim to make headway on the grand Enlightenment project of ascertaining what, if anything, they have in common. Concretely, if we take a (stereotypical) Mother Teresa, Mandela, Darwin, Einstein, Dostoyevsky, and Picasso, what might they share that makes it apt to deem their lives to have truly mattered? I provide reason to doubt two influential answers, …
Utilitarianism and the Meaning of Life
This article addresses the utilitarian theory of life's meaning according to which a person's existence is significant just in so far as she makes those in the world better off. One aim is to explore the extent to which the utilitarian theory has counter-intuitive implications about which lives count as meaningful. A second aim is to develop a new, broadly Kantian theory of what makes a life meaningful, a theory that retains much of what makes th…
Moral Demands in Nonideal Theory
Book Review| October 01 2001 MORAL DEMANDS IN NONIDEAL THEORY MORAL DEMANDS IN NONIDEAL THEORY. By Liam B. Murphy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xiii, 168. Thaddeus Metz Thaddeus Metz Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2001) 110 (4): 614–617. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-110-4-614 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Thaddeus Metz; MORAL DEMAN…
Confucian Harmony from an African Perspective
Chenyang Li’s new book, The Philosophy of Confucian Harmony , has been heralded as the first book-length exposition of the concept of harmony in the approximately 3,000 year old Confucian tradition. It provides a systematic analysis of Confucian harmony and defence of its relevance for contemporary moral and political thought. In this philosophical discussion of Li’s book, I expound its central claims, contextualize them relative to other work in…
Teaching African philosophy alongside Western philosophy
In this article, I offer concrete suggestions about which topics, texts, positions, arguments and authors from the African philosophical tradition one could usefully put into conversation with ones from the Western, especially the Anglo-American. In particular, I focus on materials that would make for revealing and productive contrasts between the two traditions. My aim is not to argue that one should teach by creating critical dialogue between A…
Recent work on the meaning of “life’s meaning
In this article I critically discuss English-speaking philosophical literature addressing the question of what it essentially means to speak of “life’s meaning”. Instead of considering what might in fact confer meaning on life, I make two claims about the more abstract, meta-ethical question of how to understand what by definition is involved in making that sort of enquiry. One of my claims is that over the past five years there has been a notice…
Jus interruptus bellum
With his new book, A Theory of Truces, Nir Eisikovits has succeed in producing the most comprehensive and insightful book to exist on the nature and morality of truces during international military conflict. In it he plausibly argues that thought about such conflict should avoid binary terms such as long-lasting peace and all-out war, and instead must readily acknowledge conditions ‘in between’ them, such as cease-fires and agreements to limit be…
The ethics and politics of the brain drain
In Debating Brain Drain, Gillian Brock and Michael Blake both draw on a liberal moral-political foundation to address the issue, but they come to different conclusions about it. Despite the commonly held value of free and equal persons having a dignity that grounds human rights, Brock concludes that many medical professionals who leave a developing country soon after having received training there are wrong to do so (if they do not provide compen…
Arbitrariness, Justice, and Respect
Etude de l'argument anti-contractualiste developpe par J. Rawls contre la these du libertarisme. Examinant la notion d'arbitraire moral et le principe de la difference sur lesquels s'appuie le theoricien, l'A. defend une interpretation kantienne de la distribution des richesses qui permet de repondre aux critiques adressees par R. Nozick, d'une part, et qui permet d'etablir une nouvelle theorie de la justice economique fondee sur le principe du r…
Could God's purpose be the source of life's meaning
In this paper, I explore the traditional religious account of what can make a life meaningful, namely, the view that one's life acquires significance insofar as one fulfils a purpose God has assigned. Call this view ‘purpose theory’. In the literature, there are objections purporting to show that purpose theory entails the logical absurdities that God is not moral, omnipotent, or eternal. I show that there are versions of purpose theory which are…
Moral Combat
Book Review| July 01 2001 Moral Combat MORAL COMBAT. By Heidi M. Hurd. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xviii, 348. Thaddeus Metz Thaddeus Metz Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2001) 110 (3): 434–436. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-110-3-434 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Em…
Moral Demands in Nonideal Theory
Moral Combat
Moral Demands in Nonideal Theory
Book Review| October 01 2001 MORAL DEMANDS IN NONIDEAL THEORY MORAL DEMANDS IN NONIDEAL THEORY. By Liam B. Murphy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xiii, 168. Thaddeus Metz Thaddeus Metz Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2001) 110 (4): 614–617. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-110-4-614 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Thaddeus Metz; MORAL DEMAN…
Respect for Persons and Perfectionist Politics
The Reasonable and the Moral
I develop an account of the property in virtue of which actions are wrong that retains the notion of unreasonableness but rejects Scanlon's contractualist framework. Specifically, I maintain (roughly) that the property of treating another unreasonably better explains what makes an act wrong than does the property of it being prohibited by principles that contractors with an ideal motivation could not reasonably reject. One advantage of my alterna…
Justice as Fairness
Justice as Fairness
Book Review| October 01 2002 Justice as Fairness: A Restatement John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Edited by Erin Kelly. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. xviii, 214. Thaddeus Metz Thaddeus Metz Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2002) 111 (4): 618–620. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-111-4-618 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary …
Utilitarianism and the Meaning of Life
This article addresses the utilitarian theory of life's meaning according to which a person's existence is significant just in so far as she makes those in the world better off. One aim is to explore the extent to which the utilitarian theory has counter-intuitive implications about which lives count as meaningful. A second aim is to develop a new, broadly Kantian theory of what makes a life meaningful, a theory that retains much of what makes th…
Open Perfectionism and Global Justice
The Justice of Crime Prevention
The Kantian principle that persons must be treated with respect is the most widely accepted normative foundation of a constitutional democracy. Because the state must treat citizens as free and equal persons or in a way consistent with their dignity, it is obligated to abide by majority rule but to ensure that a constitution prevents a majority from violating minority rights to civil liberty and due process. My broad purpose in this article is to…
The Ethics of Routine Hiv Testing
Routine testing is a practice whereby medical professionals ask all patients whether they would like an HIV test, regardless of whether there is anything unique to a given patient that suggests the presence of HIV. In three respects I aim to offer a fresh perspective on the debate about whether a developing country with a high rate of HIV infection morally ought to adopt routine testing. First, I present a neat framework that organises the moral …
God's purpose as irrelevant to life's meaning
Elsewhere I have contended that if a God-centred account of meaning in life were true, it would not be because meaning comes from fulfilling God's purpose for us. Specifically, I have argued that this ‘purpose theory’ of life's meaning cannot be the correct God-based view since God would have to be atemporal, immutable, and simple for meaning to logically depend on His existence, and since such a being lacking extension could not be purposive. Ja…
Toward an African Moral Theory
IN the literature on African ethics, one finds relatively little that consists of normative theorization with regard to right action, that is, the articulation and justification of a comprehensive, basic norm that is intended to account for what all permissible acts have in common as distinct from impermissible ones.1 By “African ethics” I mean values associated with the largely black and Bantu-speaking peoples residing in the sub-Saharan part of…
Ubuntu as a Moral Theory
In this article, I respond to questions about, and criticisms of, my article “Towardan African Moral Theory” that have been put forth by Allen Wood, Mogobe Ramose, Douglas Farland and Jason van Niekerk. The major topicsI address include: what bearing the objectivity of moral value should have on cross-cultural moral differences between Africans and Westerners; whether a harmonious relationship is a good candidate for having final moral value; whe…
The Motivation for “Toward an African Moral Theory”
Here I introduce the symposium issue of the South African Journal of Philosophy that is devoted to critically analysing my article “Toward an African Moral Theory.” In that article, I use the techniques of analytic moral philosophy to articulate and defend a moral theory that both is grounded on the values of peoples living in sub-Saharan Africa and differs from what is influential in contemporary Western ethics. Here, I not only present a précis…
New Developments in the Meaning of Life
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. 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
Respect for Persons Permits Prioritizing Treatment for Hiv/Aids
I defend a certain claim about rationing in the context of HIV/AIDS, namely, the ‘priority thesis’ that the state of a developing country with a high rate of HIV should provide highly active anti‐retroviral treatment (HAART) to those who would die without it, even if doing so would require not treating most other life‐threatening diseases. More specifically, I defend the priority thesis in a negative way, by refuting two influential and important…
The Nature of Reactive Practices
I aim to answer the questions of whether reactive practices such as gratitude and punishment are inherently expressive, and, if so, in what respect. I distinguish seven ways in which one might plausibly characterise reactive practices as essentially expressive in nature, and organise them so that they progress in a dialectical order, from weakest to strongest. I then critically discuss objections that apply to the strongest conception, questionin…
The Final Ends of Higher Education in Light of an African Moral Theory
From the perspective of an African ethic, analytically interpreted as a philosophical principle of right action, what are the proper final ends of a publicly funded university and how should they be ranked? To answer this question, I first provide a brief but inclusive review of the literature on Africanising higher education from the past 50 years, and contend that the prominent final ends suggested in it can be reduced to five major categories.…
Higher Education, Knowledge for Its Own Sake, and an African Moral Theory
The African ethic of Ubuntu/Botho
In this article 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 empirical research into morality. With rega…
African and Western Moral Theories in a Bioethical Context
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 …
Sociology (66 obras) · Philosophy (59 obras) · Epistemology (56 obras) · Political science (52 obras) · Law (49 obras) · African cultural and philosophical studies (38 obras) · Political Philosophy and Ethics (36 obras) · Environmental ethics (34 obras) · Psychology (29 obras) · Philosophy (22 obras)