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)

Of all the ethical questions, the one of what we owe our fellow humans seems to be both the most pressing and the one around which there is the least agreement. Plausible-looking answers range from the extremely demanding claim that we are obliged to give to others until giving to them costs us more than it benefits them, to the minimally demanding claim that we are not obliged to give to others at all, but that it would be nice if (...) we did. The minimally demanding view often combines with the view that beneficence is the responsibility of governments rather than individuals, and with the thought that we dispense with our duties by paying our taxes. The minimally demanding view, however, does not deal well with the intuitions that we have about clear cases like Peter Singer's example of our duty to save a baby who is lying face down in a pond when we can do so at little cost to ourselves. There seems, here, to be a duty of beneficence that is not reflected in the claim that it would merely be nice to help the baby; it exists regardless of the taxes we pay. Our thinking about beneficence needs to be sensitive to clear intuitions such as this. This paper is essentially a methodological consideration of the role that intuitions like the above might play in moral reasoning. (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.