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 (...) moral theory grounded on southern African worldviews, one that suggests a promising new conception of human dignity. According to this conception, typical human beings have a dignity in virtue of their capacity for community, understood as the combination of identifying with others and exhibiting solidarity with them, where human rights violations are egregious degradations of this capacity. I argue that this account of human rights violations straightforwardly entails and explains many different elements of South Africa’s Bill of Rights and naturally suggests certain ways of resolving contemporary moral dilemmas in South Africa and elsewhere relating to land reform, political power and deadly force. (shrink)

This chapter critically explores contemporary philosophical understandings of whether meaning in life might depend on the presence or absence of an afterlife. After distinguishing various kinds of afterlife, it focuses most on the potential relevance of an eternal one, and considers at length the extreme but common views amongst philosophers that an eternal afterlife would be either necessary for a meaningful life or, conversely, sufficient for a meaningless one. It concludes by considering the plausibility of a more moderate view, that (...) an eternal afterlife could substantially enhance the meaning of our lives, even if they would not be meaningless without it. The aim of the chapter is not to defend some overall thesis about these positions, but rather to acquaint the reader with recent English-speaking philosophical discussions of them. (shrink)

In the contemporary study of religion there seems to be an exaggeration of the distinction between religion and spirituality, not only to the point of separation, but worse still, in terms of a superiority-inferiority hierarchy that gives rise to a value judgement between spirituality and religion. Could this be a sign of the persisting Western hegemony in the study of religion? This article suggests that the consideration of religion and spirituality as disparate entities may be necessary in some societies but (...) not sufficient for a global perspective. Could there be an integrative model that would lend itself for an inclusive exchange in the study of religion and spirituality? Basing itself particularly within the literature of the psychological study of religion, this essay develops a multidimensional matrix of religion and/or spirituality that attempts to be, at the same time, parsimonious and comprehensive, which includes constructs like ‘religious-spirituality’. Religious-spirituality is suggested to be similar to Allport’s concept of ‘intrinsic religiosity’, having a three dimensional movement marked by an upwardly-directed vertical spirituality, inwardly-directed interior spirituality, and outwardly-directed horizontal spirituality. (shrink)