On Metz's view, the best interpretation of ubuntu is that it enjoins agents always to promote harmony in the community. However, while I endorse the claim that intuitions play a foundational role in moral thinking, I am less sanguine about two aspects of Metz's particular employment of the intuitions he focuses on. First, I doubt the intuitions from which he begins are of the right sort to play the role he would like them to play. Second, I doubt that the (...) explanation that Metz provides for these foundational intuitions is likely to succeed. One might helpfully characterise the nature of my difference with Metz in terms of the thought that Metz's explanation of the way in which intuitions are to be made to cohere is too Kantian for my taste. In this paper, I draw attention to some structural features of Metz's employments of pro tanto intuitions before sketching an alternative approach to the understanding of such intuitions and applying some aspects of this alternative approach to our thinking about African moral philosophy. The result presents a rival that I hope will appear more attractive than Metz's own. South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 26 2007: pp. 356-363. (shrink)

Our purpose in this paper is to consider a procedural objection to the death penalty. According to this objection, even if the death penalty is deemed, substantively speaking, a morally acceptable punishment for at least some murderers, since only a small proportion of those guilty of aggravated murder are sentenced to death and executed, while the majority of murderers escape capital punishment as a result of arbitrariness and discrimination, capital punishment should be abolished. Our targets in this paper are two (...) recent attempts, by Thomas Hurka and Michael Cholbi respectively, to defend the view that ‘levelling down’ (that is, reducing the punishment imposed on a criminal from the punishment he absolutely deserves to a less severe punishment in order to achieve proportionality relative to the criminals who have escaped the punishment they absolutely deserve) is, in the context of capital punishment, morally permissible. We argue that both Hurka and Cholbi fail to show why the arbitrariness and discrimination objection impugns the death penalty. (shrink)

The error theory has, for some time, served as a last resort for those who would like to take moral realism seriously but who cannot countenance the thought that moral properties might be non-natural. As soon as their attempts to ‘square' moral properties with natural properties appear to be in trouble, such philosophers resort to the line that the error theory is true. But the error theory trades mostly upon Mackie's influential argument from queerness. Here I attempt two main things. (...) First I argue that the relation at which Mackie's queerness argument is best directed is that of something's being a reason for something else. Second, I argue that error theorists had best back off from the queerness argument since, if sound, it implies that there are not even any reasons for belief: and therefore no reasons to believe the error theory itself. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.24(1) 2005: 1-13. (shrink)

This paper has three parts. You are to do all three parts. Read the instructions for each part carefully. Each part is worth 100 marks. The total value is 300 marks.