A communitarian perspective, which is characteristic of African normative thought, accords some kind of primacy to society or a group, whereas human rights are by definition duties that others have to treat individuals in certain ways, even when not doing so would be better for others. Is there any place for human rights in an Afro-communitarian political and legal philosophy, and, if so, what is it? I seek to answer these questions, in part by critically exploring one of the most (...) influential theoretical works on human rights in a sub-Saharan setting, namely, Claude Ake’s ‘The African Context of Human Rights’. Ake famously maintains that a typically Western approach to rights is inappropriate in the sub-Saharan region, in two major respects. First, Ake contends that although a human rights legal framework might be suitable for an ‘individualistic’ society, it is not for one of the sort common among traditional black peoples, for whom group rights are alone apt. Second, Ake maintains that, insofar as rights are relevant, rights to socio-economic goods are of much more importance in an African context than rights to civil liberties, due process and the like. Using Ake’s article as a foil, I draw on values salient in sub-Saharan moral worldviews to construct a unified philosophy of rights that not only provides reason to doubt his two claims, but also offers a promising way to reconcile a communitarian framework with a robust prizing of human rights alongside ones that are more collectively oriented. In short, I aim to provide a principled foundation for the core elements of the African Charter of Human and Peoples’ Rights. (shrink)

To the authors’ knowledge, not much has been said or done in African philosophical circles with regard to providing a theoretical framework from which the discrimination against African women with disabilities can be addressed. In this article, the authors show how such a framework can be grounded in Innocent Asouzu’s complementarism. Their contention, one grounded in this framework, is that this discrimination has its roots in an isolationist, elitist, and exclusivist mindset/metaphysics. The authors further argue that one way to overcome (...) this problematic mindset is to replace it with one that views each individual human being as a missing link of reality, that is, a complementary philosophy. The hope is that with this replacement the gaze that subconsciously views women living with disability as a group that is distinguishable from other human beings will be summarily abandoned. (shrink)

In this article I draw on resources from the African philosophical tradition to construct a theory of human rights grounded on dignity that presents a challenge to the globally dominant, autonomy-based approach. Whereas the latter conceives of human rights violations as degradations of our rational nature, the former does so in terms of degradations of our relational nature, specifically, our capacity to be party to harmonious or friendly relationships. Although I have in the past presented the basics of the Afro-relational (...) approach, in this article I defend it from objections and also go on the offensive by arguing that understanding the human rights violations of torture and rape to be (roughly) behavior that treats innocent parties in an extremely discordant or unfriendly way is, if not more plausible than standard Kantian understandings, then at least a promising alternative to them. (shrink)

In this paper I present a critique of some aspects of Thad Metz’s attempt to develop an African moral theory grounded on the value of ubuntu. I question the sense in which this theory is African, as well as his attempt to ground human rights on his single value theory of ubuntu. In a number of publications Thad Metz has given a clear, analytic account of what ubuntu is. Metz’s work on ubuntu does two things: 1) explains the content of (...) ubuntu: what the value/virtue is; 2) presents a moral theory according to which appealing to ubuntu as a basic value enables us to explain what makes all actions right or wrong. He calls this an African moral theory. It is the second part I am skeptical about. He makes it plausible that ubuntu is an important value. And he shows how we can give it some clear content. However, I argue that he does not make plausible a single-value ethical theory based on ubuntu; it is not plausible as an ethical theory, and it is not plausible that such a theory is African in any significant sense. (shrink)

Discussion of sexuality in African cultures has a long history, but since the 1990s ethical reflections on homosexuality on the continent have often degenerated into furors and provoked a spate of anti-gay legislation in several countries. Refutations of homophobic dispositions encounter as barrier a pervasive belief in African cultures, that childbearing for community replenishment is a cherished moral duty. Several philosophers consider these to be exaggerated inhibitions that unjustifiably impede social acceptance of homosexuality, and have proposed as a solution what (...) they consider to be self-justifying political-moral principles, that terminate in value-pluralistic ideas such as the acceptance of the equality of sexual orientations and vindication of the right to the freedom to choose and satisfy sexual desire. I question the adequacy of such self-justificatory normative principles and consider the solutions they proffer as depreciating the moral point of the African pro-natalist position. Consequently, I develop a moral argument grounded in the ontology of Kwame Gyekye’s moderate communitarian theory of personhood as the most persuasive justification for homosexuality. (shrink)

Definition of the problem: The ethical debate about assisted suicide remains controversial and is also based in part on assumptions that are taken for granted, but which, on closer inspection, lack a justification. Arguments: The article develops a new approach by focusing on the social dimension of the denial of meaning in life, which is often expressed by suicides. For a fundamental social connection is included in the human orientation towards the goal of a meaningful life, namely an implicit appreciation (...) of human beings as potential sources of meaning and as subjects of judgments about the meaningfulness. Suicides tend to deny this connection. Conclusion: This understanding of suicide can, among other things, adequately understand the meaning of (assisted) suicide and justify the widely shared assumptions of a primacy of suicide prevention and a conscientious objection right of doctors. (shrink)

Reprint of an article that first appeared in Monash Bioethics Review (2018).

While there is a budding literature on media ethics in the light of characteristic sub-Saharan moral values, there is virtually nothing on wartime reporting more specifically. Furthermore, the literature insofar as it has a bearing on wartime reporting suggests that embedded journalism and patriotic journalism are ethically justified during war. In this essay, I sketch a prima facie attractive African moral theory, grounded on a certain interpretation of the value of communal relationship, and bring out what it entails for the (...) ways journalists should report on war. My aims are the normative ones of showing how this Afro-communal ethic can provide a unitary foundation for a wide array of plausible conclusions about reporting on war, and, in particular, can avoid objectionable implications such as support for embedded and patriotic journalism. (shrink)

There has been the recurrent suspicion that community, harmony, cohesion, and similar relational goods as understood in the African ethical tradition threaten to occlude difference. Often, it has been Western defenders of liberty who have raised the concern that these characteristically sub-Saharan values fail to account adequately for individuality, although some contemporary African thinkers have expressed the same concern. In this chapter, I provide a certain understanding of the sub-Saharan value of communal relationship and demonstrate that it entails a substantial (...) allowance for difference. I aim to show that African thinkers need not appeal to, say, characteristically Euro-American values of authenticity or autonomy to make sense of why individuals should not be pressured to conform to a group’s norms regarding sex and gender. A key illustration involves homosexuality. (shrink)

Over the last two decades, the capabilities approach has become an increasingly influential theory of development. It conceptualises human wellbeing in terms of an individual's ability to achieve functionings we have reason to value. In contrast, the African ethic of ubuntu views human flourishing as the propensity to pursue relations of fellowship with others, such that relationships have fundamental value. These two theoretical perspectives seem to be in tension with each other; while the capabilities approach focuses on individuals as the (...) locus of ethical value, an ubuntu ethic concentrates on the relations between individuals. In this article, we ask: to what extent is the capabilities approach compatible with this African ethical theory? We argue that, on reflection, relations play a much stronger role in the capabilities approach than often assumed. There is good reason to believe that relationality is part of the concept of a capability itself, where such relationality has intrinsic ethical value. This understanding of the ethical centrality of relations grounds new normative perspectives on the capabilities approach, and offers a more comprehensive grasp of the relevance of relationships to empirical enquiry. (shrink)

I aim to more fully develop a theory of meaning in life based on the concept of life force that is important to a substantial number of Africans in the sub-Sahara region. While life force implies a large invisible ontology, Thaddeus Metz has recently developed an entirely naturalistic version of it known as liveliness. However, he also offers two objections that hinge on the idea that life force cannot accommodate intuitions that certain types of knowledge and progress are valuable for (...) their own sakes. I respond by noting that elsewhere Metz has developed a defense of the intrinsic value of knowledge by appealing to the idea that meeting a person's existential needs can be important for self-realization and hence for their meaning. If this is right, then the community ought to support such a person in their pursuit of knowledge even if doing so leads to no useful outcomes. (shrink)

I examine the standard view of dignity in Western literature and Metz’s African community view of dignity as a capacity for communal harmonious living. I argue that moral dignity is not just having a capacity for harmonious communal living, but the moral use of such capacity for the promotion of love, friendship, positive identity and active solidarity, which involves normatively prescriptive and evaluative elements. Thus, a plausible African communal conception of moral dignity, which is founded on a moral conception of (...) personhood and community, involves a combination of capacity and agency that is conceptually tied to communal responsibility and respect for self and others. This indicates that human capacities do not have an inherent moral worth. Capacities are instrumentally good and their worth depends on how they are used to promote the moral good of communal well-being, on which individual well-being or dignity depends. This view captures the various use-senses of dignity, addresses many of the problems with many of the analyses of dignity in the literature, and also indicates its relevance. (shrink)

A political challenge facing constitutional democracies in Africa is the lack of adequate representation and participation of citizens in democratic processes and institutions. This challenge is manifest in the vesting of power solely in, and the exercise of this power by, a sectional group – the majority party – to the exclusion of others; as evinced in the liberal democratic systems extensively practised on the continent. Wiredu proposes as a solution to these challenges the adoption of consensual democracy; an indigenous, (...) non-party democratic system rooted in the traditional African humanist and communitarian conceptions of the individual and the community, in which political decisions are characteristically reached by consensus. In this article, I present a critical exposition of Wiredu’s consensual democracy and defend it against liberal democracy on the one hand, and criticisms levelled against it on the other hand. I also offer some modifications to Wiredu’s theory in a bid to render it more suitable for practice in Africa. (shrink)

Supposing that an African metaphysics grounded on the notion and/or value of vitality is true, can it do a better job in terms of informing an African religious ethics than its Western counterparts, specifically, the Divine Command theory (DCT)? By ‘religious ethics’, in this article, I have in a mind a meta-ethical theory i.e., an account of moral properties whether they are best understood in spiritual rather than physical terms. In this article, I articulate an under-explored African meta-ethical theory grounded (...) on vitality, and I argue that the Euthyphro problem is not a successful objection against it like it is usually thought to be for DCT. This relative advantage of the vitalist meta-ethics does not necessarily render it plausible, but it gives us some ground to seriously consider the future of African religious ethics grounded on it. (shrink)

In this article, I address some central issues in journalism ethics from a fresh perspective, namely, one that is theoretical and informed by values salient in sub-Saharan Africa. Drawing on a foundational moral theory with an African pedigree, which is intended to rival Western theories such as Kantianism and utilitarianism, I provide a unified account of an array of duties of various agents with respect to the news/opinion media. I maintain that the ability of the African moral theory to plausibly (...) account for issues such as proper content, investigative ethics, and freedom of speech means that it should be taken seriously by media ethicists and merits being paired up against competing approaches in future work. (shrink)

The belief that human rights are culturally relative has been reinforced by recent attempts to develop more plausible conceptions of human rights whose philosophical foundations are closely aligned with culture-specific ideas about human nature and/or dignity. This paper contests specifically the position that a conception of human rights is culturally relative by way of contesting the claim that there is an African case in point. That is, it contests the claim that there is a unique theory of rights. It analyses (...) three examples of what often passes as African conception of human rights arguing that they have little or nothing to do with human rights, are simply inadequate or are not African in the sense at issue in a cultural relativism. Along the way, it distinguishes between two meanings of the term African contending that to the extent that the practice of prizing the ‘community’ higher than any other value is definitive of African, the idea of African human rights remains suspect. (shrink)

There has been a strong impetus to set the definitional parameters of study in African political philosophy and theory. Many scholars advance the idea of a discipline intended to provide lessons that stem from “original” African moral, ideological, and political traditions. Often, these traditions and their ideas are presented as holding categorical moral substance in so far as they are seen to be specific to a culturally essentialist understanding of “Africa.” In turn, an influential part of the literature estimates the (...) normative value of the intellectual ideas and arguments afforded by a varied historical, socio‐cultural and economic African geography by the degree to which, in being tethered to a seemingly homogenous, “culturally African” influence, these ideas can be opposed to a “Western” equivalent. In this article, I argue that the effects on the discipline of attending to, and being defined by, this cultural essentialism are at best unclear, at worst detrimental. I aim to contribute to the side of those who advocate a universalist perspective to the study of African political philosophy and thought, and who argue for jettisoning an unhelpful dichotomy between “West” and “African,” in favour of a methodological, conceptual and historical specificity that allows the discipline to be truly useful to itself and to others. (shrink)

Cultural differences pose a serious challenge to the ethics and governance of artificial intelligence from a global perspective. Cultural differences may enable malignant actors to disregard the demand of important ethical values or even to justify the violation of them through deference to the local culture, either by affirming the local culture lacks specific ethical values, e.g., privacy, or by asserting the local culture upholds conflicting values, e.g., state intervention is good. One response to this challenge is the human rights (...) approach to AI governance, which is intended to be a universal and globally enforceable framework. The proponents of the approach, however, have so far neglected the challenge from cultural differences or left out the implications of cultural diversity in their works. This is surprising because human rights theorists have long recognized the significance of cultural pluralism for human rights. Accordingly, the approach may not be straightforwardly applicable in “non-Western” contexts because of cultural differences, and it may also be critiqued as philosophically incomplete insofar as the approach does not account for the role of culture. This commentary examines the human rights approach to AI governance with an emphasis on cultural values and the role of culture. Particularly, I show that the consideration of cultural values is essential to the human rights approach for both philosophical and instrumental reasons. (shrink)

It has become increasingly common to point out that African morality is under-represented in ethical theorizing. However, it is less common to find arguments that this under-representation is unjustified. This latter claim tends to be simply assumed. In this paper I draw together arguments for this claim. In doing so, I make the case that the relative lack of attention paid to African moral ideas conflicts with epistemic and ethical values. In order to correct these shortcomings, moral theorists, broadly construed (...) as including descriptive and normative disciplines, have a duty to engage with and actively explore African moral ideas. I claim that Moral Foundations Theory is well suited to a descriptive exploratory project, and could provide a significant contribution to normative, African-derived moral theories that could be epistemically and ethically superior to their Western counterparts. (shrink)

In this article I address the question of what makes addiction morally problematic, and seek to answer it by drawing on values salient in the sub-Saharan African philosophical tradition. Specifically, I appeal to life-force and communal relationship, each of which African philosophers have at times advanced as a foundational value, and spell out how addiction, or at least salient instances of it, could be viewed as unethical for flouting them. I do not seek to defend either vitality or community as (...) the best explanation of when and why addiction is immoral, instead arguing that each of these characteristically African values grounds an independent and plausible account of that. I conclude that both vitalism and communalism merit consideration as rivals to accounts that Western ethicists would typically make, according to which addiction is immoral insofar as it degrades rationality or autonomy, as per Kantianism, or causes pain or dissatisfaction, à la utilitarianism. (shrink)

African ethicists have so far not agreed on a single, precise, secular and comprehensive basic norm, an Afro-Grundnorm, which captures the core values of Ubuntu sub-Saharan African cosmopolitanism. This article constructs and proffers the ‘double-dignity’ Grundnorm that partly shares with Western stoic cosmopolitans the view that our common human ontological capacity for autonomy identifies us as members of the human species. This capacity grants our first dignity, inherent dignity. Inherent dignity only grants our universal basic (security and subsistence) rights. Our (...) duties to care of each other derive from the second dignity, acquired dignity. Acquired dignity itself derives from our second ontological capacity, our capacity for communion. Unlike inherent dignity, acquired dignity is neither universal nor automatically present in us. It is earned when we commune with others in fostering harmony as we earn ‘full personhood’. Since fostering harmony starts with nurturing communal identities and solidarities, Ubuntu entails efficiency-model moderate cosmopolitanism which permits prioritizing serving our immediate associates or compatriots not because of their special moral worthiness but because we more efficiently serve humanity at large when we do so. (shrink)

An important belief in African Traditional Religion holds that everything, both animate and inanimate objects, are imbued with an imperceptible energy known as life force. Since life force is the greatest value, it is the grounds of morality. However, it is undertheorized in contemporary African ethics, with work on personhood and harmonious relationships taking centerstage. I seek to fill this gap in the literature by further developing an entirely secular and naturalistic moral theory of life force that avoids metaphysical controversies (...) and is known as liveliness, which was first gestured at by Thaddeus Metz (2012, 2022). I demonstrate that while a series of objections that Metz levels against liveliness affect teleological versions, they do not apply with equal force to deontological versions. Liveliness, particularly deontological versions, ought to be considered as a contender for the best African moral theory alongside those that focus on personhood or harmonious relationships. (shrink)

The central role of human dignity in ethics and law stands in striking contrast to the disagreement regarding the meaning and normative content of this concept. Each competing theory of human dignity also has serious problems. Against the background of this situation, the meaning-oriented theory of human dignity suggests a new understanding that can integrate a number of conceptions of human dignity and resolve their theoretical problems. According to this new theory, respect for human dignity consists in respect for human (...) beings as beings that confer meaning and need meaning. The integrative and problem-solving power of this new approach is demonstrated here by examining two lines of theory: on the one hand, the Kantian tradition of an autonomy-oriented understanding of human dignity, and on the other hand, a theory that focuses on individual identity and protection against humiliation. (shrink)

Theoria, Volume 88, Issue 3, Page 666-678, June 2022.

Since the publication of his A Theory of Justice (TJ), John Rawls has revolutionized political philosophy in many ways, including the understanding of human rights. His theory of rights in TJ is drawn from a comprehensive liberal doctrine and is limited to the domestic society. However, his account of human rights developed in his last major work, The Law of Peoples, claims to be politically free standing, following the model of his Political Liberalism. For Rawls, human rights are necessary conditions (...) for social cooperation. They are meant to serve as one of the principles of foreign policy of the reasonable liberal peoples, in their relations with non-liberal societies. Rawls believes that his category of human rights cannot be rejected by non-liberal peoples as parochial or particular to the Western tradition, because they are not based on any comprehensive doctrine. On the other hand, however, many African scholars have dismissed the current international human rights regime on the account of being too liberal, and not corresponding to the African communalist worldview. It is in that regard that The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and subsequent African human rights instruments were adopted to dress a list of human rights that take into account African history, civilization, and values. Thus, in three main sections, this article examines whether the Rawlsian account and the African view of human rights can enrich each other, or whether they are completely opposed. (shrink)

The literature on the question of life’s meaning has primarily focused on agent-centred paths to meaningfulness. This path involves an individual making a concerted effort towards achieving meaningfulness in life. Thus, even in defining meaning or presenting a concept of meaning, philosophers often approach such a description from an agent-centred perspective. In this essay, I articulate a patient-centred approach to meaning particularly from the African philosophical perspective. Drawing chiefly from African relational viewpoints, I develop the “patient-centred variable”, which ought to (...) be contemplated by any definition of what meaningfulness entails. This patient-centred variable is the idea that a life can be meaningful (at least, momentarily) if it receives from other people acts that are considered (within a particular societal context) acts of love, communion and/or kindness, which transcend normal relationality among human beings and elicit personal feelings of esteem and worthiness. I begin by extracting clues from African metaphysics and from practical ethical values, which all suggest the plausibility of received meaning. Then I conceptualise what I call the patient-centred variable (PcV), and present it as a plausible and necessary addition (not a stand-alone concept of meaning) to any conceptual analysis of meaning. (shrink)

The Philosophical Forum, Volume 53, Issue 1, Page 31-45, Spring 2022.

The International Bill of Human Rights (IBHR) enjoys universal acclaim as the source of the best standards and definition of human rights. This paper argues that the IBHR is inspired by liberalism and harbours ambiguities that open the door to a neoliberal seizure of the rights agenda; and that this effectively destabilises the focus on the IBHR on socio-economic and community rights, and therefore its stated ideal of the equal value of all human rights. I argue that Kwame Gyekye's moderate (...) communitarian political philosophy affords a viable philosophical basis for justification of a more balanced conception of human rights than the theoretical basis of the IBHR does. (shrink)

The power of the scientific enterprise presents multiple avenues for harnessing and increasingly controlling biological phenomena and instituting interventions in different areas of biomedicine (Af...