ABSTRACT
Practical reasons generated by love pose a familiar challenge to modern moral theories: the reasons of partiality can conflict with the impartial reasons of morality. In this chapter, I consider whether a distinctively African ethical theory—ubuntu—might be especially well suited to meet the challenge. I argue that on what seems to me its best interpretation, ubuntu turns out to face the same problem as modern Western moral theories. In particular, these accounts can secure impartial reasons but have difficulty in accounting for the partial reasons of our closest relationships of love. Though the Western and African accounts end up facing the same challenge, the explanations in the two cases are interestingly different due to their radically different starting points.
