Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Thaddeus Metz
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Issue ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Common Part ◽  
Communal Relationship ◽  
Respect For Autonomy ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Better Than

Chapter 1 explains and motivates the project of advancing an African moral theory, after which it provides an overview of the book. An African moral theory is a basic, comprehensive principle distinguishing right from wrong actions that is informed by mores salient particularly in the sub-Saharan region. It is advanced as a rival to the principles of utility and of respect for autonomy, the primary Western answers to the important question of what all right actions have in common. Part I of the book discusses the meta-ethical issue of how to justify an African moral theory. Part II identifies three major candidates for a moral theory in the African tradition, and argues that one, grounded on communal relationship, is most promising. Part III argues that the relational moral theory does better than the principles of utility and of respect for autonomy at accounting for a wide array of applied controversies.

Environmental Ethics

2021 ◽  
pp. 147-168
Author(s):  
Thaddeus Metz
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Ethics ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Moral Consideration ◽  
Intrinsic Properties ◽  
Communal Relationship

This chapter begins Part III, which argues that the relational moral theory of rightness as friendliness is a strong competitor to Western principles in many applied ethical contexts. Chapter 8 articulates and defends a novel, relational account of moral status, according to which an entity is owed moral consideration roughly to the degree that it is capable of being party to a communal relationship. One of its implications is that many animals have a moral status but not one as high as ours, which many readers will find attractive, but which utilitarianism and Kantianism cannot easily accommodate. Relational moral status also grounds a promising response to the ‘argument from marginal cases’ that animals have the same moral status as incapacitated humans: even if two beings have identical intrinsic properties, they can differ in the extent to which they can relate and hence differ in their degree of moral status.

Earth as a Snowball

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Zalasiewicz ◽  
Mark Williams
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Rock Fragments ◽  
Sedimentary Deposits ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Rock Strata ◽  
Louis Agassiz ◽  
Better Than

Our attempts to reconstruct the climate of the distant Archaean in Chapter 1 might seem a little like reading a volume of Tolstoy’s War and Peace recovered from a burnt-out house. Most of the pages have turned to ash, and only some scattered sentences remain on a few charred pages. The Proterozoic Eon that followed began 2.5 billion years ago, thus is not quite so distant from us in time. We know it a little better than the Archaean—at least a handful of pages from its own book have survived. And this book is long—the Proterozoic lasted nearly two billion years. This is as long as the Hadean and Archaean together, and not far short of half of Earth’s history. Like many a soldier’s account of war, it combined long periods of boredom and brief intervals of terror—or their climatic equivalents, at least. The latter included the most intense glaciations that ever spread across the Earth. Some of these may have converted the planet into one giant snowball. The earliest traces of glaciation on Earth are seen even before the Proterozoic, in rock strata of Archaean age, 2.9 billion years old, near the small South African town of Pongola. These rocks include sedimentary deposits called tillites, which are essentially a jumble of rock fragments embedded in finer sediment. The vivid, old-fashioned term for such deposits is ‘boulder clays’, while the newer and more formal name is ‘till’ for a recent deposit and ‘tillite’ for the hardened, ancient version. Many of the ancient blocks and boulders in the tillites of Pongola are grooved and scratched—a tell-tale sign that they have been dragged along the ground by debris-rich ice. This kind of evidence is among the first ever employed by scientists of the mid-nineteenth century, such as Louis Agassiz and William Buckland, to tell apart ice-transported sediments from superficially similar ones that had formed as boulder-rich slurries when rivers flooded or volcanoes erupted. Ice, then, appeared on Earth in Archaean times.

Epilogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 241-242
Author(s):  
Thaddeus Metz
Keyword(s):  
Moral Obligation ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
African Country ◽  
Good Position ◽  
African Students ◽  
Intellectual Traditions ◽  
Moral Theories ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Political Philosopher ◽  
Do So

At the end of the first chapter (1.5), I noted that, since having moved to an African country, I have considered myself to have had a moral obligation to engage with its intellectual traditions when teaching and researching. I would have rightly felt guilt had I taught merely Western ethics to African students and contributed only Euro-American-Australasian perspectives to journals published in the sub-Saharan region. Having been principally trained as an analytic moral and political philosopher, I have been in a good position to articulate normative-theoretic interpretations of African morality, to evaluate these moral theories by appealing to intuitions, and to apply them to a range of practical controversies. Now, it would be welcome if the relational moral theory I have defended in this book could explain why I had a duty to make such a contribution to the field. And indeed it does. I have had an obligation of some weight to teach and research African philosophical ideas as I am particularly able to do so for a reason that is by now familiar to the reader. In the way that a newly trained doctor has an obligation of some weight to give something back to his country before emigrating (...

scholarly journals Contrasting Response Mechanisms of Maize Lines to Striga hermonthica

Agriculture ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 485
Author(s):  
Nnanna N. Unachukwu ◽  
Abebe Menkir ◽  
Adekemi Stanley ◽  
Ebenezer O. Farombi ◽  
Melaku Gedil
Keyword(s):  
Cost Effective ◽  
Resistance Mechanisms ◽  
Control Measures ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Striga Hermonthica ◽  
Maize Line ◽  
Parasitic Weed ◽  
Resistant Lines ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Better Than

Strigahermonthica (Del.) Benth is a parasitic weed that devastates cereals in Sub-Saharan Africa. Several control measures have been proposed for the parasite, of these, host plant resistance is considered the most cost-effective for poor farmers. Some tolerant/resistant lines have been developed and these lines display tolerance/resistance mechanisms to the parasite. A series of studies was done to investigate some of the mechanisms through which a resistant (TZISTR1108) and a susceptible (5057) maize line responds to S. hermonthica infestation, as well as the effects of parasitism on these lines. In this study, TZISTR1108 stimulated the germination and attachment of fewer S. hermonthica plants than 5057, both in the laboratory and on the field. In TZISTR1108, the growth of the S. hermonthica plants, that successfully attached, was slowed. When compared to the un-infested plants, the infested resistant plants showed fewer effects of parasitism than the infested susceptible plants. The infested TZISTR1108 plants were more vigorous, taller and resembled their un-infected counterparts. There were substantial reductions in the stomatal conductance and nitrogen content of the 5057 upon infestation. The resistant inbred line showed multiple mechanisms of resistance to S. hermonthica infestation. It thrives better than the susceptible line by reducing the attachment of S. hermonthica and it delays the parasite’s development.

Utilitarianism Shot Down by Its Own Men?

2003 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 447-454
Author(s):  
TUIJA TAKALA
Keyword(s):  
Moral Theory ◽  
Value Of Life ◽  
Material World ◽  
The Sacrifice ◽  
Better Than

I think that utilitarianism is a good moral theory, and definitely better than its rivals, deontology and teleology. For practical purposes in multicultural contexts, at least, I think that no one should overlook a theory that is able to take into account a variety of ethical views and accommodate the ever-changing facts of the material world. But utilitarianism has a bad reputation in bioethics. It is often seen as the inhumane theory that allows the sacrifice of minorities, the killing of the innocent, and simplistic calculations on the value of life. Hardly anyone cares to remember that most formulations of the theory do not allow these actions. The economic doctrine sometimes labeled as utilitarianism could be guilty as charged, but ethics and economy are not interchangeable words. Also as a theory that can actually propose answers to no-win situations, utilitarianism has been an easy target for criticism.

scholarly journals Predictive value of retinal function by the Purkinje test in patients scheduled for cataract surgery in Kinshasa, DR Congo

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (9) ◽  
pp. 1392-1395
Author(s):  
Serge Dinkulu ◽  
◽  
Edith Mukwanseke ◽  
Longo Flavien Lutete ◽  
Adrian Hopkins ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Acuity ◽  
Cataract Surgery ◽  
Care Center ◽  
Preoperative Assessment ◽  
Retinal Function ◽  
Ophthalmological Examination ◽  
Dr Congo ◽  
Small Incision Cataract Surgery ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Better Than

AIM: To assess the retinal function in patients with dense cataracts in resource poor settings in Kinshasa, DR Congo. METHODS: In a tertiary eye care center, the Purkinje entoptic test was performed as part of the ophthalmological examination in 98 eyes in patients with cataract, using a penlight. Totally 92 cataract patients including 86 patients suffered from unilateral and 6 from bilateral cataracts were included in the study. The investigator asked the patients about their perception of the vascular pattern most commonly described as a leafless or dead tree. Visual acuity≥6/60 was considered an indication of good visual function and visual acuity<6/60 of poor function. Following small incision cataract surgery, best corrected visual acuity (BCVA) was determined and compared with the preoperative findings. RESULTS: Out of 98 eyes, there were 80 (81.6%) where the Purkinje entoptic phenomenon was reported by the patients. After cataract surgery, out of the 80 eyes, there were 75 (93.8%) with a BCVA of better than 6/60, whereas in 5 eyes (6.2%), BCVA was 6/60 or less. Out of the 18 eyes (18.4%) where no Purkinje tree was recognized, there were 14 (77.8%) with BCVA of better than 6/60, whereas in 4 (22.2%) BCVA was 6/60 or less. CONCLUSION: The Purkinje entoptic test is successfully used for preoperative assessment of retinal function in patients with dense cataract. However, further investigation and refinement of the test is necessary to validate the method for use in sub-Saharan conditions.

Equity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irit Samet
Keyword(s):  
Moral Theory ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Family Resemblance ◽  
Coherent System ◽  
Social Perceptions ◽  
Private Law ◽  
System P ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Common

The Law of Equity is a unique junction where doctrinal private law, moral theory, and social perceptions of justice meet. This book explores the general principles that underlie Equity’s intervention in the Common Law, with Chapter 1 arguing that Equity should be preserved as a separate body of law which aims to align moral and legal duties in private law. Chapter 2 discusses the importance of proprietary estoppel and concludes with the argument that Equity, via the doctrine of proprietary estoppel, is redressing a significant failure in the Common Law to tackle behaviour that disregards both morality and efficiency. Chapter 3 deals with fiduciary law, highlighting the disadvantages of transforming the equitable duty of loyalty into an ordinary contractual obligation. Chapter 4 examines the clean hands doctrine, in which Equity employs the concept of integrity to construct a coherent system of reasoning about this highly-complex area. Finally, Chapter 5 discusses some findings from the analysis of fiduciary law, proprietary estoppel, and the clean hands doctrine. It highlights the family resemblance between the different doctrines we survey, and points out three areas where the distinctive nature of Equity serves the legal ideal of Accountability Correspondence, in a way that often increases the efficiency of the system.

Contextualism

2020 ◽  
pp. 108-127
Author(s):  
Alastair Norcross
Keyword(s):  
Moral Theory ◽  
Moral Discourse ◽  
Practical Significance ◽  
Contextualist Approach ◽  
Better Than ◽  
Context Of Utterance

Although consequentialism is not fundamentally concerned with such staples of moral theory as rightness, duty, obligation, goodness of actions, and harm, such notions may nonetheless be of practical significance. A contextualist approach to all these notions makes room for them in ordinary moral discourse, but also illustrates why there is no room for them at the level of fundamental moral theory. Roughly, to say that an act is right is to say that it is at least as good as the appropriate alternative, to say an act is good is to say that it is better than the appropriate alternative, to say an act harms someone is to say that it makes them worse off than they would have been on the appropriate alternative. In each case, “appropriate” is an indexical, whose referent is fixed by the context of utterance. This approach also makes room for an account of supererogation.

A Relational Moral Theory

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thaddeus Metz
Keyword(s):  
Moral Theory ◽  
Global South ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Ethical Thought ◽  
Common Assumption ◽  
Respect For Autonomy ◽  
Relational Perspective ◽  
International Audience ◽  
Standing Question ◽  
Blind Spots

A Relational Moral Theory provides a new answer to the long-standing question of what all morally right actions might have in common as distinct from wrong ones, by drawing on neglected resources from the Global South and especially the African philosophical tradition. The book points out that the principles of utility and of respect for autonomy, the two rivals that have dominated Western moral theory for about two centuries, share an individualist premise. Once that common assumption is replaced by a relational perspective that has been salient in African ethical thought, a different comprehensive principle focused on harmony or friendliness emerges, one that is shown to correct the blind spots of the Western principles and to have implications for a wide array of applied controversies that an international audience of moral philosophers, professional ethicists, and similar thinkers will find attractive.

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