Results for 'Thaddeus Metz'

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  1. How Much Punishment Is Deserved? Two Alternatives to Proportionality.Thaddeus Metz & Mika’il Metz - 2022 - Philosophies 7 (2):1-13.
    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, part of a special issue on the geometry of desert, we maintain that a desert theorist is not conceptually or otherwise required to hold a proportionality (...)
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  2. Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study.Thaddeus Metz - 2013 - New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
    What makes a person's life meaningful? Thaddeus Metz offers a new answer to an ancient question which has recently returned to the philosophical agenda. He proceeds by examining what, if anything, all the conditions that make a life meaningful have in common. The outcome of this process is a philosophical theory of meaning in life. He starts by evaluating existing theories in terms of the classic triad of the good, the true, and the beautiful. He considers whether meaning (...)
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  3. Judging Because Understanding: A Defence of Retributive Censure.Thaddeus Metz - 2006 - In Pedro Alexis Tabensky (ed.), Judging and Understanding: Essays on Free Will, Narrative, Meaning and the Ethical Limits of Condemnation. Ashgate Pub Co. pp. 221-40.
    Thaddeus Metz defends the retributive theory of punishment against challenges mounted by some of the contributors to this collection. People, he thinks, ought to be censured in a way that is proportional to what they have done and for which they are responsible. Understanding does not conflict with judging. On the contrary, according to him, the more we understand, the better we are able to censure appropriately. Metz’s argument is Kantian insofar as he argues that ‘respect for (...)
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  4. Ubuntu as a Moral Theory: Reply to Four Critics.Thaddeus Metz - 2007 - South African Journal of Philosophy 26 (4):369-87.
    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; whether consequentialism exhausts the proper way to respond to the value of a (...)
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  5. A Relational Moral Theory: African Ethics in and Beyond the Continent.Thaddeus Metz - 2021 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    _A Relational Moral Theory_ draws on neglected resources from the Global South and especially the African philosophical tradition to provide a new answer to a perennial philosophical question: what do all morally right actions have in common as distinct from wrong ones? Metz points out that the principles of utility and of respect for autonomy, the two rivals that have dominated Western moral theory for the last two centuries, share an individualist premise. Once that common assumption is replaced by (...)
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  6. (1 other version)Toward an african moral theory.Thaddeus Metz - 2007 - Journal of Political Philosophy 15 (3):321–341.
    In this article I articulate and defend an African moral theory, i.e., a basic and general principle grounding all particular duties that is informed by sub-Saharan values commonly associated with talk of "ubuntu" and cognate terms that signify personhood or humanness. The favoured interpretation of ubuntu (as of 2007) is the principle that an action is right insofar as it respects harmonious relationships, ones in which people identify with, and exhibit solidarity toward, one another. I maintain that this is the (...)
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  7. The Motivation for “Toward an African Moral Theory”.Thaddeus Metz - 2007 - South African Journal of Philosophy 26 (26):331-335.
    Here I introduce the symposium issue of the South African Journal of Philosophy that is devoted to critically analysing my article “Toward an AfricanMoral 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 of the article, but also provide a sketch (...)
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  8. (1 other version)The final ends of higher education in light of an african moral theory.Thaddeus Metz - 2009 - Journal of Philosophy of Education 43 (2):179-201.
    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. Then, I spell out an intuitively attractive (...)
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  9. (2 other versions)Ancillary Care Obligations in Light of an African Bioethic: From Entrustment to Communion.Thaddeus Metz - 2017 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 38 (2):111–126.
    Henry Richardson has recently published the first book ever devoted to ancillary care obligations, which roughly concern what medical researchers are morally required to provide to participants beyond what safety requires. In it Richardson notes that he has presented the ‘only fully elaborated view out there’ on this topic, which he calls the ‘partial-entrustment model’. In this article, I provide a new theory of ancillary care obligations, one that is grounded on ideals of communion salient in the African philosophical tradition (...)
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  10. Engaging with the Philosophy of D A Masolo.Thaddeus Metz - 2013 - Quest 25:7-15.
    This is an introduction to the special issue of Quest devoted to D. A. Masolo’s latest book, Self and Community in a Changing World. It situates this book in relation to not only Masolo’s earlier research on African philosophy but also the field more generally, sketches the central positions of the contributions to the journal issue, and in light of them makes some critical recommendations for future reflection.
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  11. Recent Work on the Meaning of Life.Thaddeus Metz - 2002 - Ethics 112 (4):781-814..
    A critical overview of mainly Anglo-American philosophical literature addressing the meaning of life up to 2002.
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  12. African Values and Human Rights as Two Sides of the Same Coin: Reply to Oyowe.Thaddeus Metz - 2014 - African Human Rights Law Journal 14 (2):306-21.
    In an article previously published in this Journal, Anthony Oyowe critically engages with my attempt to demonstrate how the human rights characteristic of South Africa’s Constitution can be grounded on a certain interpretation of Afro-communitarian values that are often associated with talk of ‘ubuntu’. Drawing on recurrent themes of human dignity and communal relationships in the sub-Saharan tradition, I have advanced a moral-philosophical principle that I argue entails and plausibly explains a wide array of individual rights to civil liberties, political (...)
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  13. Critical Notice:Baier and Cottingham on the Meaning of Life.Thaddeus Metz - 2005 - Disputatio 1 (19):215-228.
    I examine two recent books by analytic philosophers that address the underexplored topic of whether the meaning of life depends on the existence of a supernatural realm including God and a soul. John Cottingham’s On the Meaning of Life defends a supernaturalist conception of life’s meaning, whereas Kurt Baier’s Problems of Life and Death defends the opposite, naturalist perspective. I show that their respective arguments are worth serious consideration, indicate some potential weaknesses in them, and suggest some other argumentative strategies (...)
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  14. Is Life’s Meaning Ultimately Unthinkable?: Guy Bennett-Hunter on the Ineffable.Thaddeus Metz - 2016 - Philosophia 44 (4):1247-1256.
    In this critical notice of Guy Bennett-Hunter’s book _Ineffability and Religious Experience_, I focus on claims he makes about what makes a life meaningful. According to Bennett-Hunter, for human life to be meaningful it must obtain its meaning from what is beyond the human and is ineffable, which constitutes an ultimate kind of meaning. I spell out Bennett-Hunter’s rationale for making this claim, raise some objections to it, and in their wake articulate an alternative conception of ultimate meaning.
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  15. Meaning and Medicine: An Underexplored Bioethical Value.Thaddeus Metz - 2021 - Ethik in der Medizin 33 (4):439-453.
    In this article, part of a special issue on meaning in life and medical ethics, I argue that several issues encountered in a bioethical context are not adequately addressed only with values such as morality and welfare. I maintain, more specifically, that the value of what makes a life meaningful is essential to being able to provide conclusive judgements about which decisions to make. After briefly indicating how meaningfulness differs from rightness and happiness, I point out how it is plausibly (...)
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  16. (1 other version)The Concept of a Meaningful Life.Thaddeus Metz - 2001 - American Philosophical Quarterly 38 (2):137-153.
    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 satisfactory analysis the concept of a meaningful life that (...)
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  17. 6 Das Sinnvolle und das Lebenswerte.Thaddeus Metz - 2013 - In Matthias Hoesch, Sebastian Muders & Markus Rüther (eds.), Glück - Werte - Sinn: Metaethische, ethische und theologische Zugänge zur Frage nach dem guten Leben. Boston: Walter de Gruyter. pp. 109-126.
    Zur Klärung ihrer Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede.
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  18. The Good, the True and the Beautiful: Toward a Unified Account of Great Meaning in Life.Thaddeus Metz - 2011 - Religious Studies 47 (4):389-409.
    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, noting a common flaw that supernaturalism (...)
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  19. (1 other version)How to Ground Animal Rights on African Values: A Reply to Horsthemke.Thaddeus Metz - 2017 - Journal of Animal Ethics 7 (2):163-174.
    I seek to advance plausible replies to the several criticisms Kai Horsthemke 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 (...)
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  20. New developments in the meaning of life.Thaddeus Metz - 2007 - Philosophy Compass 2 (2):196–217.
    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 (2002-2007). 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.
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  21. Neutrality, Partiality, and Meaning in Life.Thaddeus Metz - 2017 - De Ethica 4 (3):7-25.
    Discussion of whether values and norms are neutral or not has mainly appeared in works on the nature of prudential rationality and morality. Little systematic has yet appeared in the up and coming field of the meaning of life. What are the respects in which the value of meaningfulness is neutral or, in contrast, partial, relational, or ‘biased’? In this article, I focus strictly on answering this question. First, I aim to identify the salient, and perhaps exhaustive, respects in which (...)
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  22. Values in China as Compared to Africa: Two Conceptions of Harmony.Thaddeus Metz - 2017 - Philosophy East and West 67 (2):441-465.
    Given a 21st 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? Establishing that central to both non-Western, indigenous value systems are ideals of harmonious relationships, I compare and contrast traditional African and Chinese conceptions of harmony and analyze a number of respects in which an appeal to this value (...)
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  23. Harmonizing global ethics in the future: a proposal to add south and east to west.Thaddeus Metz - 2014 - Journal of Global Ethics 10 (2):146-155.
    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 and criminal justice. For each major issue, it suggests that harmony likely has implications that differ (...)
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  24. Recent Work in African Political and Legal Philosophy.Thaddeus Metz - 2021 - Philosophy Compass 16 (9):1-10.
    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 research agendas. My aims are to enable readers to obtain a bird’s-eye picture (...)
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  25. (2 other versions)Replacing Development: An Afro-communal Approach to Global Justice.Thaddeus Metz - 2017 - Philosophical Papers 46 (1):111-137.
    In this article, I consider whether there are values intrinsic to development theory and practice that are dubious in light of a characteristically African ethic. In particular, I focus on what a certain philosophical interpretation of the sub-Saharan value of communion entails for appraising development, drawing two major conclusions. One is that a majority of the criticisms that have been made of development by those sympathetic to African values are weak; I argue that, given the value of communion, development should (...)
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  26. The Ethics of Routine HIV Testing: A Respect-Based Analysis.Thaddeus Metz - 2005 - South African Journal on Human Rights 21 (3):370-405.
    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 issues at stake, bringing out (...)
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  27. An African Theory of Social Justice.Thaddeus Metz - 2016 - In Camilla Boisen & Matt Murray (eds.), Distributive Justice Debates in Political and Social Thought: Perspectives on Finding a Fair Share. Routledge. pp. 171-190.
    A comprehensive account of justice grounded on salient Afro-communitarian values, the article attempts to unify views about the distribution of economic resources, the protection of human rights and the provision of social recognition as ultimately being about proper ways to value loving relationships.
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  28. (2 other versions)Ubuntu as a Moral Theory and Human Rights in South Africa.Thaddeus Metz - 2011 - African Human Rights Law Journal 11 (2):532-559.
    There are three major reasons that ideas associated with ubuntu are often deemed to be an inappropriate basis for a public morality. One is that they are too vague, a second is that they fail to acknowledge the value of individual freedom, and a third is that they a fit traditional, small-scale culture more than a modern, industrial society. In this article, I provide a philosophical interpretation of ubuntu that is not vulnerable to these three objections. Specifically, I construct a (...)
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  29. An African Egalitarianism: Bringing Community to Bear on Equality.Thaddeus Metz - 2015 - In George Hull (ed.), The Equal Society: Essays on Equality in Theory and Practice. Lexington Books. pp. 185-208.
    I consider what prima facie attractive communitarian ethical perspectives salient among indigenous African peoples entail for distributive justice within a state, and I argue that they support a form of economic egalitarianism that differs in several important ways from varieties common in contemporary Anglo-American political philosophy. In particular, the sort of economic egalitarianism I advance rivals not only luck-oriented variants from the likes of Ronald Dworkin, G. A. Cohen and theorists inspired by them such as Richard Arneson, Carl Knight and (...)
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  30. Just the Beginning for Ubuntu: Reply to Matolino and Kwindingwi.Thaddeus Metz - 2014 - South African Journal of Philosophy 33 (1):65-72.
    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 (...)
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  31. Relational Ethics.Thaddeus Metz & Sarah Clark Miller - 2013 - In Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell. pp. 1-10.
    An overview of relational approaches to ethics, which contrast with individualist and holist ones, particularly as they feature in the Confucian, African, and feminist/care traditions.
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  32. (1 other version)How the West Was One: The Western as Individualist, the African as Communitarian.Thaddeus Metz - 2015 - Educational Philosophy and Theory 47 (11):1175-1184.
    There is a kernel of truth in the claim that Western, and especially Anglo-American-Australasian, normative philosophy, including that relating to the philosophy of education, is individualistic; it tends to prize properties that are internal to a human being such as her autonomy, rationality, pleasure, desires, self-esteem, self-realization and virtues relating to, say, her intellect. One notable exception is the idea that students ought to be educated in order to be citizens, participants in a democratic and cosmopolitan order, but, compared to (...)
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  33. The Western Ethic of Care or an Afro-Communitarian Ethic?: Finding the Right Relational Morality.Thaddeus Metz - 2013 - Journal of Global Ethics 9 (1):77-92.
    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 African ethic are more or less the same or share many commonalities. While the two ethical (...)
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  34. 與非洲相比在中國的價值.Thaddeus Metz - 2000 - In Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (ed.), 汉学与当代中国座谈会文集(2017). China Social Sciences Press. pp. 612-619.
    Chinese (character) translation of part of an article that appeared in Philosophy East and West (2017).
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  35. African and western moral theories in a bioethical context.Thaddeus Metz - 2009 - Developing World Bioethics 10 (1):49-58.
    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 and of the sorts of factors (...)
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  36. (3 other versions)African Values and Capital Punishment.Thaddeus Metz - 2011 - In Gerard Walmsley (ed.), African Philosophy and the Future of Africa. Council for Research in Values and Philosophy. pp. 83-90.
    What is the strongest argument grounded in African values, i.e., those salient among indigenous peoples below the Sahara desert, for abolishing capital punishment? I defend a particular answer to this question, one that invokes an under-theorized conception of human dignity. Roughly, I maintain that the death penalty is nearly always morally unjustified, and should therefore be abolished, because it degrades people’s special capacity for communal relationships. To defend this claim, I proceed by clarifying what I aim to achieve in this (...)
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  37. An Overview of African Ethics.Thaddeus Metz - 2017 - In Isaac E. Ukpokolo (ed.), Themes, Issues and Problems in African Philosophy. Cham: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 61-75.
    A reprint of 'African Ethics' from the _International Encyclopedia of Ethics_ (2015), but expanded to include discussion of more topics, texts and authors.
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  38. Traditional African Religion as a Neglected Form of Monotheism.Thaddeus Metz & Motsamai Molefe - 2021 - The Monist 104 (3):393–409.
    Our aims are to articulate some core philosophical positions characteristic of Traditional African Religion and to argue that they merit consideration as monotheist rivals to standard interpretations of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. In particular, we address the topics of how God’s nature is conceived, how God’s will is meant to bear on human decision making, where one continues to exist upon the death of one’s body, and how long one is able to exist without a body. For each of these topics, (...)
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  39. A Bioethic of Communion: Beyond Care and the Four Principles with Regard to Reproduction.Thaddeus Metz - 2018 - In Marta Soniewicka (ed.), The Ethics of Reproductive Genetics - Between Utility, Principles, and Virtues. Cham: Springer Verlag. pp. 49-66.
    English-speaking research on morally right decisions in a healthcare context over the past three decades has been dominated by two major perspectives, namely, the Four Principles, of which the principle of respect for autonomy has been most salient, and the ethic of care, often presented as a rival to not only a focus on autonomy but also a reliance on principles more generally. In my contribution, I present a novel ethic applicable to bioethics, particularly as it concerns human procreation, that (...)
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  40. Meaning as a Distinct and Fundamental Value: Reply to Kershnar.Thaddeus Metz - 2014 - Science, Religion and Culture 1 (2):101-106.
    In this article, I reply to a critical notice of my book, Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study, that Stephen Kershnar has published elsewhere in this issue of Science, Religion & Culture. Beyond expounding the central conclusions of the book, Kershnar advances two major criticisms of it, namely, first, that I did not provide enough evidence that meaning in life is a genuine value-theoretic category as something distinct from and competing with, say, objective well-being, and, second, that, even if there (...)
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  41. The Nature of Reactive Practices: Exploring Strawson’s Expressivism.Thaddeus Metz - 2008 - South African Journal of Philosophy 27 (3):49-63.
    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 characterize 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, questioning whether it coheres with standard retributive understandings of why, when and where the (...)
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  42. Hayatin Anlami.Thaddeus Metz - 2023 - Öncül.
    Translation of 'The Meaning of Life' (second revised edition for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) into Turkish by Beyza Nur Dogan.
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  43. Censure theory and intuitions about punishment.Thaddeus Metz - 2000 - Law and Philosophy 19 (4):491-512.
    Many philosophers and laypeople have the following two intuitions about legal punishment: the state has a pro tanto moral reason to punish all those guilty of breaking a just law and to do so in proportion to their guilt. Accepting that there can be overriding considerations not to punish all the guilty in proportion to their guilt, many philosophers still consider it a strike against any theory if it does not imply that there is always a supportive moral reason to (...)
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  44. Confucian Harmony from an African Perspective.Thaddeus Metz - 2016 - African and Asian Studies 15 (1):1-22.
    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 salient work in English-speaking Confucian thought, and critically reflect on them in light of a (...)
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  45. (1 other version)The immortality requirement for life's meaning.Thaddeus Metz - 2003 - Ratio 16 (2):161–177.
    Many religious thinkers hold the immortality requirement, the view that immortality of some kind is necessary for life to have meaning. After clarifying the nature of the immortality requirement, this essay examines three central arguments for it. The article establishes that existing versions of these arguments fail to entail the immortality requirement. The essay then reconstructs the arguments, and it shows that once they do plausibly support the immortality requirement, they equally support the God-centred requirement, the view that God's existence (...)
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  46. A Relational Theory of Mental Illness: Lacking Identity and Solidarity.Thaddeus Metz - 2021 - Synthesis Philosophica 71 (1):65-81.
    In this article I aim to make progress towards the philosophical goal of ascertaining what, if anything, all mental illnesses have in common, attempting to unify a large sub-set of them that have a relational or interpersonal dimension. One major claim is that, if we want a promising theory of mental illness, we must go beyond the dominant western accounts of mental illness/health, which focus on traits intrinsic to a person such as pain/pleasure, lethargy/liveliness, fragmentation/integration, and falsehood/authenticity. A second major (...)
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  47. Realism and the Censure Theory of Punishment.Thaddeus Metz - 2002 - In Patricia Smith & Paolo Comanducci (eds.), Legal Philosophy: General Aspects. Franz Steiner Verlag. pp. 117-29.
    I focus on the metaphysical underpinnings of the censure theory of punishment, according to which punishment is justified if and because it expresses disapproval of injustice. Specifically, I seek to answer the question of what makes claims about proportionate censure true or false. In virtue of what is it the case that one form of censure is stronger than another, or that punishment is the censure fitting injustice? Are these propositions true merely because of social conventions, as per the dominant (...)
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  48. The Proper Aim of Therapy: Subjective Well-Being, Objective Goodness, or a Meaningful Life?Thaddeus Metz - 2018 - In Alexander Batthyany, Pninit Russo-Netzer & Stefan Schulenberg (eds.), Clinical Perspectives on Meaning: Positive and Existential Psychotherapy. Springer. pp. 17-35.
    Therapists and related theorists and practitioners of mental health tend to hold one of two broad views about how to help patients. On the one hand, some maintain that, or at least act as though, the basic point of therapy is to help patients become clear about what they want deep down and to enable them to achieve it by overcoming mental blockages. On the other hand, there are those who contend that the aim of therapy should instead be to (...)
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  49. (1 other version)Could God's purpose be the source of life's meaning?Thaddeus Metz - 2000 - Religious Studies 36 (3):293-313.
    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 not vulnerable to these reductio arguments. However, I (...)
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  50. (1 other version)Human Dignity, Capital Punishment, and an African Moral Theory: Toward a New Philosophy of Human Rights.Thaddeus Metz - 2010 - Journal of Human Rights 9 (1):81-99.
    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. Then, I draw on one major strand of Afro-communitarian thought to develop a (...)
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