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Philosophy is rational enquiry that addresses fundamental matters of human life and that transcends science in some way. Here, Metz discusses ways in which philosophers are particularly well qualified to address difficult questions pertaining to COVID-19.

Este artículo busca proporcionar una descripción completa y fundamental de por qué los epítetos raciales y slurs similares son inmora-les, allá donde lo sean. Considera tres teorías prin-cipales, según las cuales, a grandes rasgos, son inmorales porque son dañinos (bienestarismo), porque socavan la autonomía (kantianismo) o porque son hostiles (un enfoque relacional poco discutido informado por ideas del Sur Glo-bal). Este artículo presenta nuevas objeciones a las dos primeras teorías y concluye a favor de la última justificación. Se muestra que considerar que los slurs son inmorales en la medida en que son hostiles captura las ventajas de las otras teo-rías evitando sus desventajas. This article 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 objections to the former two theories, and concludes in favour of the latter rationale. Deeming slurs to be wrong insofar as they are unfriendly is shown to capture the advantages of the other theories, while avoiding their disadvantages.

Acknowledging a twenty-first-century context of sophisticated market economies and other Western influences such as Christianity, what similarities and differences are there between characteristic indigenous values of sub-Saharan Africa and China, and how do they continue to influence everyday life in these societies? After establishing that ideals of harmonious relationships are central to both non-Western value systems, traditional African and Chinese conceptions of harmony are compared and contrasted, and a number of aspects are analyzed in which the appreciation of this value affects contemporary political, economic, and social interaction.

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 logical space for at least two other, non-proportionate ways of meting out deserved penalties, and we also argue that they have important advantages relative to the dominant, proportionality approach.

[...]one might appeal to the presence of a soul in all living human beings, but Jecker and Atuire instead usefully strive to provide a new secular theoretical ground. In this brief critical notice, I have not been able to address the many other interesting topics that Jecker and Atuire take up in their book.v I have focused on the way they theorise the moral status of human beings, but they have original and sophisticated (even if naturally contested) relational ideas about the standing of animals, non-living parts of nature, aliens, robots, and even zombies that will make readers think. Recent works in Confucianism aim to extend to aspects of nature the concepts of humaneness, harmony, familial relationship, and cosmic order, which traditionally have been centered on human beings.

I seek to advance plausible replies to the several criticisms Kai Horsthemke (2015) makes of “African modal relationalism,” his label for my theory of animal rights with a sub-Saharan pedigree. Central to this view is the claim that, roughly, a being has a greater moral status the more it is in principle capable of relating communally with characteristic human beings. Horsthemke maintains that this view is anthropocentric and speciesist, is poorly motivated relative to his egalitarian-individualist approach, and does not have the implications that I contend. I aim to rebut these and related criticisms, contending that African modal relationalism is in fact a promising way to philosophically ground animal rights.

I argue that strong intuitions about how the state ought to allocate healthcare are incompatible with quite influential autonomy-centric and neutral strains of liberal political theory. Specifically, I maintain that it is uncontroversial that we should routinely distribute medical treatments in public hospitals in ways that have little to no bearing on patients’ ability to pursue a wide array of ends and further that we cannot easily avoid making judgments of which ways of life are good (or bad) when making such distributions. These intuitions tell against the principles that the state in general should aim merely to protect individuals’ rights to choose their own ways of life and should not take sides on which lives are good (or bad) when adopting policy or law. I show that this tension, which has not been addressed in the literature, manifests in at least three types of healthcare decisions, viz., which types of treatments should be offered to patients, how to prioritize among types of treatments, and who should receive a certain type of treatment. I do not prescribe how to resolve the tension, that is, whether to reject autonomy-centric and neutral forms of liberalism or revise judgments about how public medical facilities should allocate healthcare, but instead I establish the point that one must choose between them.

The dominant conceptions of moral status in the English-speaking literature are either holist or individualist, neither of which accounts well for widespread judgments that: animals and humans both have moral status that is of the same kind but different in degree; even a severely mentally incapacitated human being has a greater moral status than an animal with identical internal properties; and a newborn infant has a greater moral status than a mid-to-late stage foetus. Holists accord no moral status to any of these beings, assigning it only to groups to which they belong, while individualists such as welfarists grant an equal moral status to humans and many animals, and Kantians accord no moral status either to animals or severely mentally incapacitated humans. I argue that an underexplored, modal-relational perspective does a better job of accounting for degrees of moral status. According to modal-relationalism, something has moral status insofar as it capable of having a certain causal or intensional connection with another being. I articulate a novel instance of modal-relationalism grounded in salient sub-Saharan moral views, roughly according to which the greater a being's capacity to be part of a communal relationship with us, the greater its moral status. I then demonstrate that this new, African-based theory entails and plausibly explains the above judgments, among others, in a unified way.

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, would it be reasonable to prefer God as characteristically conceived by African philosophers of religion to exist instead of the Abrahamic conception of God? At this stage of enquiry, I answer that, in respect of the range of people to whom God's purpose would apply, a more African view of God would plausibly offer a greater meaning, but that, concerning what the content of God's purpose would be, the Abrahamic view appears to offer a greater one. I conclude by reflecting on this mixed verdict and by suggesting respects in which non-purposive facets of the African and Abrahamic conceptions of God could also have implications for life's meaning.

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 ideals of ubuntu are appropriate only for a bygone, pre-modern age. Since there is nothing ethically promising about ubuntu for today's society, and since elite appeals to it serve undesirable purposes there, the authors conclude that ubuntu in academic and political circles 'has reached its end'. In this article, I respond to Matolino and Kwindingwi, contending that, in fact, we should view scholarly enquiry into, and the political application of, ubuntu as projects that are only now properly getting started.