Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. A Relational Moral Theory: African Ethics in and Beyond the Continent.Thaddeus Metz - 2022 - 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 a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  • 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   40 citations  
  • Personhood and a Meaningful Life in African Philosophy.Motsamai Molefe - 2020 - South African Journal of Philosophy 39 (2): 194-207.
    This article proffers a personhood-based conception of a meaningful life. I look into the ethical structure of the salient idea of personhood in African philosophy to develop an account of a meaningful life. In my view, the ethics of personhood is constituted by three components, namely (1) the fact of being human, which informs (2) a view of moral status qua the capacity for moral virtue, and (3) which specifies the final good of achieving or developing a morally virtuous character. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • The Moral Standing of Social Robots: Untapped Insights from Africa.Nancy S. Jecker, Caesar A. Atiure & Martin Odei Ajei - 2022 - Philosophy and Technology 35 (2):1-22.
    This paper presents an African relational view of social robots’ moral standing which draws on the philosophy of ubuntu. The introduction places the question of moral standing in historical and cultural contexts. Section 2 demonstrates an ubuntu framework by applying it to the fictional case of a social robot named Klara, taken from Ishiguro’s novel, Klara and the Sun. We argue that an ubuntu ethic assigns moral standing to Klara, based on her relational qualities and pro-social virtues. Section 3 introduces (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   24 citations  
  • (1 other version)Artificial intelligence and African conceptions of personhood.C. S. Wareham - 2021 - Ethics and Information Technology 23 (2):127-136.
    Under what circumstances if ever ought we to grant that Artificial Intelligences (AI) are persons? The question of whether AI could have the high degree of moral status that is attributed to human persons has received little attention. What little work there is employs western conceptions of personhood, while non-western approaches are neglected. In this article, I discuss African conceptions of personhood and their implications for the possibility of AI persons. I focus on an African account of personhood that is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  • Why Reconciliation Requires Punishment but Not Forgiveness.Thaddeus Metz - 2022 - In Krisanna M. Scheiter & Paula Satne (eds.), Conflict and Resolution: The Ethics of Forgiveness, Revenge, and Punishment. Switzerland: Springer Nature. pp. 265-281.
    Adherents to reconciliation, restorative justice, and related approaches to dealing with social conflict are well known for seeking to minimize punishment, in favor of offenders hearing out victims, making an apology, and effecting compensation for wrongful harm as well as victims forgiving offenders and accepting their reintegration into society. In contrast, I maintain that social reconciliation and similar concepts in fact characteristically require punishment but do not require forgiveness. I argue that a reconciliatory response to crime that includes punitive disavowal (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • African Communitarianism and Difference.Thaddeus Metz - 2020 - In Elvis Imafidon (ed.), Handbook on African Philosophy of Difference. Springer. pp. 31-51.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Animals and African Ethics.Kai Horsthemke - 2017 - Journal of Animal Ethics 7 (2):119-144.
    African ethics is primarily concerned with community and harmonious communal relationships. The claim is frequently made on behalf of African moral beliefs and customs that, in stark contrast with Western moral attitudes and practices, there is no comparable objectification and exploitation of other-than-human animals and nature. This article investigates whether this claim is correct by examining the status of animals in religious and philosophical thought, as well as traditional cultural practices, in Africa. I argue that moral perceptions and attitudes on (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   21 citations  
  • Core aspects of ubuntu: A systematic review.C. Ewuoso & S. Hall - 2019 - South African Journal of Bioethics and Law 12 (2):93.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • A Relational Approach to Rationing in a Time of Pandemic.Luís Cordeiro-Rodrigues & Cornelius Ewuoso - 2022 - Journal of Value Inquiry 56 (3):409-429.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • (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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Anthropological Crisis or Crisis in Moral Status: a Philosophy of Technology Approach to the Moral Consideration of Artificial Intelligence.Joan Llorca Albareda - 2024 - Philosophy and Technology 37 (1):1-26.
    The inquiry into the moral status of artificial intelligence (AI) is leading to prolific theoretical discussions. A new entity that does not share the material substrate of human beings begins to show signs of a number of properties that are nuclear to the understanding of moral agency. It makes us wonder whether the properties we associate with moral status need to be revised or whether the new artificial entities deserve to enter within the circle of moral consideration. This raises the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Individualism in African Moral Cultures.Motsamai Molefe - 2017 - Cultura 14 (2):49-68.
    This article repudiates the dichotomy that African ethics is communitarian (relational) and Western ethics is individualistic. ‘Communitarianism’ is the view that morality is ultimately grounded on some relational properties like love or friendship; and, ‘individualism’ is the view that morality is ultimately a function of some individual property like a soul or welfare. Generally, this article departs from the intuition that all morality including African ethics, philosophically interpreted, is best understood in terms of individualism. But, in this article, I limit (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • African Communitarian Ethics: An Externalist Justification for Altruism.Idowu Odeyemi - 2024 - Philosophical Forum (1):109-127.
    The most popular defense of altruism has come from ethicists, mostly Western ethicists, who argue that for an action to hold any justification as it pertains to altruistic commitments, such an altruistic action must stem from the agent’s internal states such as beliefs, practical reasoning, desires, or deliberative attitudes. I refer to this as the internalist justification for altruism. On this internalist approach, the mere recognition of others—which I shall refer to as an externalist justification—albeit necessary for an agent who (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • A critique of Thad Metz’s African theory of moral status.Motsamai Molefe - 2017 - South African Journal of Philosophy 36 (2):195-205.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Do solidarity and reciprocity obligations compel African researchers to feedback individual genetic results in genomics research?Dimpho Ralefala, Mary Kasule, Ambroise Wonkam, Mogomotsi Matshaba & Jantina de Vries - 2020 - BMC Medical Ethics 21 (1):1-11.
    BackgroundA key ethical question in genomics research relates to whether individual genetic research results should be disclosed to research participants and if so, which results are to be disclosed, by whom and when. Whilst this issue has received only scarce attention in African bioethics discourse, the extension of genomics research to the African continent has brought it into sharp focus.MethodsIn this qualitative study, we examined the views of adolescents, parents and caregivers participating in a paediatric and adolescent HIV-TB genomic study (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • The Ubuntu Challenge to Business: From Stakeholders to Relationholders.Minka Woermann & Schalk Engelbrecht - 2019 - Journal of Business Ethics 157 (1):27-44.
    This paper addresses whether, and to what extent, the African ethic of Ubuntu can contribute to ethical thinking in general and provide an alternative to stakeholder theory specifically. The conception of Ubuntu that is employed to further the analysis is Thaddeus Metz’s Ubuntu principle of right action, which focuses on promoting harmonious social relations premised on a shared identity and solidarity amongst people. This principle is used to develop an Ubuntu heuristic for organisational decision-making, which serves as the basis for (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • How to Do African Ethics: Reply to Six Critics.Thaddeus Metz - 2023 - African Philosophical Inquiry 11:123-150.
    This essay is a lengthy response to six contributors to a special issue edited by Adeshina Afolayan and devoted to critical discussions of _A Relational Moral Theory: African Ethics in and Beyond the Continent_. Key topics include: the proper role of metaphysics when doing moral philosophy; the appropriate aims of moral philosophy in the light of relational values and properties; the ir/relevance of imperceptible agents for an African ethic; the un/attractiveness of the principle that one morally should promote the common (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • (1 other version)Relational Ethics and Partiality: A Critique of Thad Metz’s ‘Towards an African Moral Theory’.Motsamai Molefe - 2017 - Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 64 (152):53-76.
    In this article, I question the plausibility of Metz’s African moral theory from an oft-neglected moral topic of partiality. Metz defends an Afro-communitarian moral theory that posits that the rightness of actions is entirely definable by relationships of identity and solidarity (or, friendship). I offer two objections to this relational moral theory. First, I argue that justifying partiality strictly by invoking relationships (of friendship) ultimately fails to properly value the individual for her own sake – this is called the ‘focus (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • "Human" Dignity Beyond the Human.Matthew Wray Perry - forthcoming - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.
    Many approaches to dignity endorse the Human Scope Thesis (HST), according to which almost all humans and almost only humans have dignity. I argue that justifications for this thesis are doomed to fail. Proponents of the HST can be broadly divided into two camps, according to how they defend this thesis against the Scope Challenge. This challenge states that there is no non-arbitrary way of restricting the scope of dignity that includes almost all and almost only humans. Naturalistic Accounts attempt (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Political Philosophy in the Global South: Harmony in Africa, East Asia, and South America.Thaddeus Metz - 2023 - In Uchenna B. Okeja (ed.), Routledge Handbook of African Political Philosophy. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 369-383.
    Harmony as a basic value is neglected in internationally influential philosophical discussions about rights, power, and other facets of public policy; it is not prominent in articles that appear in widely read journals or in books published by presses with a global reach. Of particular interest, political philosophers and policy makers remain ignorant of the similarities and differences between various harmony-oriented approaches to institutional choice from around the world. In this chapter, I begin to rectify these deficiencies by critically discussing (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Ubuntu philosophy and the consensus regarding incidental findings in genomic research: a heuristic approach.Cornelius Ewuoso - 2020 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 23 (3):433-444.
    This study adopts a heuristic technique to argue the thesis that a set of norms rooted in the African philosophy of Ubuntu can usefully supplement current research guidelines for dealing with incidental findings discovered in genomic research. The consensus regarding incidental findings is that there is an ethical obligation to return individual genetic incidental findings that meet the threshold of analytic and clinical validity, have clinical utility, and are actionable, provided that research contributors have not opted out from receiving such (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • African Conceptions of Age‐Based Moral Standing: Anchoring Values to Regional Realities.Nancy S. Jecker - 2020 - Hastings Center Report 50 (2):35-43.
    Is age discrimination ethically objectionable? One puzzle is that we sometimes assume that the target of both age discrimination and ageism must be older people, yet in poorer nations, older people are generally shown more respect. This article explores the ethical question. It looks first at ethical arguments favoring age discrimination toward younger people in low‐income, less industrialized countries of the global South, using sub‐Saharan Africa as an illustration. It contrasts these with arguments favoring age discrimination toward older people in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Addressing more-than-human care through Yorùbá environmental ethics.Aanuoluwapo Fifebo Sunday - 2025 - Environmental Values 34 (1):43-59.
    This article presents more-than-human care ethics from a Yorùbá (African) perspective with a focus on water in Yorùbá belief. The view I develop in this article to show beyond human care, how nature cares for itself is encapsulated in the notion of ‘mutual courteousness’. The article demonstrates that this mutual courteousness approach engrained in Yorùbá ontology, epistemology, and axiology possesses a sound possibility for enabling the overhauling of our understanding of conservation towards seeing it as a more-than-human process. This shared (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Are Humans More Equal Than Other Animals? An Evolutionary Argument Against Exclusively Human Dignity.Rainer Ebert - 2020 - Philosophia 48 (5):1807-1823.
    Secular arguments for equal and exclusively human worth generally tend to follow one of two strategies. One, which has recently gained renewed attention because of a novel argument by S. Matthew Liao, aims to directly ground worth in an intrinsic property that all humans have in common, whereas the other concedes that there is no morally relevant intrinsic difference between all humans and all other animals, and instead appeals to the membership of all humans in a special kind. In this (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • A Critique of Thaddeus Metz's Modal Relational Account of Moral Status.Olusegun Steven Samuel & Ademola Kazeem Fayemi - 2020 - Theoria 67 (162):28-44.
    This article is a critique of Thaddeus Metz’s modal relational approach to moral status in African ethics. According to moral relationalism, a being has moral status if it exhibits the capacity for communal relationship as either a subject or an object. While Metz defends a prima facie plausibility of MR as an African account of moral status, this article provides a fresh perspective to the debate on moral status in environmental and ethical discourse. It raises two objections against MR: the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • An Afro-Communitarian Relational Approach to Brain Surrogates Research.Luís Cordeiro-Rodrigues & Cornelius Ewuoso - 2021 - Neuroethics 14 (3):561-574.
    Carrying out research on brains is important for medical advances in various diseases. However, such research ought not be carried out on human brains because the benefits do not outweigh the potential risks. A possible alternative is the use of brain surrogates. Nevertheless, some scholars who uphold a threshold account of moral status suggest the possibility that, with technological advances in the near future, more advanced brain surrogates will have very similar features to humans. This may suffice for these having (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Ubuntu and the Problem of Belonging.Olusegun Steven Samuel - 2024 - Ethics, Policy and Environment 27 (3):350-370.
    This paper proposes an original ubuntu-inspired account of human-animal moral status for engaging the problem of belongingness—the ethico-ecological community view. This account embodies two integrated features: locatedness and relationality. While locatedness prompts us to attend to the embeddedness of beings in the built and natural environment, relationality allows the discussion to focus on human-nonhuman interdependencies. I argue that a deep sense of both features prompts us to move the moral status conversation away from capacities to a non-capacity-based approach, thereby helping (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Rethinking Personhood through the Lens of Life Forms, Communality, and Moral Agency.Adetula Bolanle, Piyali Mitra & Victor Chidi Wolemonwu - 2024 - American Journal of Bioethics 24 (1):64-67.
    In her paper titled “The End of Personhood,” Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby (2024) takes a swipe at the functionalist account of personhood. The problem with the functionalist view of personhood is that...
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • The differentiation argument: If newborns outrank animals, so do fetuses.Kyle Blanchette - 2021 - Bioethics 35 (2):207-213.
    Common‐sense morality seems to dictate that newborn babies strictly outrank non‐human animals on an ordered list of subjects of moral consideration. This is best described as the view that newborn babies have a higher moral status than any non‐human animal. In this article, I will argue that this common‐sense claim about the special moral status of newborn babies makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that fetuses, including pre‐conscious fetuses, also have a higher moral status than any non‐human animal—indeed, as (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • African bioethics: methodological doubts and insights.John Barugahare - 2018 - BMC Medical Ethics 19 (1):98.
    A trend called ‘African bioethics’ is growing on the continent due to perceptions of existing bioethics, especially guidelines for international collaborative research, as ‘ethical imperialism’. As a potential alternative to ‘Western Principlism,’ ‘African bioethics’ is supposed to be indigenous to Africa and reflective of African identity. However, despite many positive insights in the on-going discussions, it is feared that the growth of bioethics in Africa lacks a clear direction. Some of the views threaten to distort the essence of bioethics and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Decolonising Knowledge: Can Ubuntu Ethics Save Us from Coloniality?Piet Naude - 2019 - Journal of Business Ethics 159 (1):23-37.
    This essay discusses whether an indigenous African ethic, as expressed in ubuntu, may serve as an example of how to decolonise Western knowledge. In the first part, the key claims of decolonisation of knowledge are set out. The second part analyses three strategies to construct models of ‘African’ ethics, namely transfer, translation and stating of a substantive rival model as contained in ubuntu ethics. After a critical appraisal of this substantive proposal, part three indicates the potential and limitation of the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Personhood and (Rectification) Justice in African Thought.Motsamai Molefe - 2018 - Politikon:1- 18.
    This article invokes the idea of personhood (which it takes to be at the heart of Afrocommunitarian morality) to give an account of corrective/rectification justice. The idea of rectification justice by Robert Nozick is used heuristically to reveal the moral-theoretical resources availed by the idea of personhood to think about historical injustices and what would constitute a meaningful remedy for them. This notion of personhood has three facets: (1) a theory of moral status/dignity, (2) an account of historical conditions and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Patient confidentiality, the duty to protect, and psychotherapeutic care: perspectives from the philosophy of ubuntu.Cornelius Ewuoso - 2021 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 42 (1):41-59.
    This paper demonstrates how ubuntu relational philosophy may be used to ground beneficial coercive care without necessarily violating a patient’s dignity. Specifically, it argues that ubuntu philosophy is a useful theory for developing necessary conditions for determining a patient’s potential dangerousness; setting reasonable limits to the duty to protect; balancing the long-term good of providing unimpeded therapy for patients who need it with the short-term good of protecting at-risk parties; and advancing a framework for future case law and appropriate regulations (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Biocentrism, Ecocentrism, and African Modal Relationalism: Etieyibo, Metz, and Galgut on Animals and African Ethics.Kai Horsthemke - 2017 - Journal of Animal Ethics 7 (2):183-189.
    In this brief reply to the essays by Edwin Etieyibo, Thad Metz, and Elisa Galgut, I argue that African morality is neither biocentric nor ecocentric in the sense of accepting that “there is no significant moral difference between animal and human slaughter and rituals,” and that African modal relationalism is problematic in both its empirical assumptions and its normative counsel. I concede that anthropocentrism, whether this involves the view that only human beings merit moral treatment or the view that any (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • African relational ontology, personhood and immutability.Luis Cordeiro-Rodrigues - 2022 - South African Journal of Philosophy 41 (3):306-320.
    In the Western theist tradition, the conception of a person tends to be understood as an intrinsic property. Hence, the classification of someone as a person does not depend on relational aspects of that person. From this, Western theists often understand that their conception of God as a person does not clash with the idea of immutability. In this article, I challenge the idea that being a person and being immutable are compatible properties by using Afro-communitarian philosophy and, more specifically (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Defending a Relational Account of Moral Status.Thaddeus Metz - 2023 - In Mbih Jerome Tosam & Erasmus Masitera (eds.), African Agrarian Philosophy. Springer Verlag. pp. 105-124.
    For the more than a decade, I have advanced an account of what makes persons, animals, and other beings entitled to moral treatment for their own sake that is informed by characteristically African ideas about dignity, a great chain of being, and community. Roughly according to this account, a being has a greater moral status, the more it is capable of communing (as a subject) or of us communing with it (as an object). I have mainly argued that this characteristically (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Personhood and Partialism in African Philosophy.Molefe Motsamai - 2018 - African Studies 3.
    This article ascertains what philosophical implications can be drawn from the moral idea of personhood dominant in African philosophy. This article aims to go beyond the oft-made submission that this moral idea of personhood is definitive of African moral thought. It does so by advancing discourse with regards to personhood by exploring its relationship with another under-explored idea in African ethics, the idea of partialism. This article ultimately argues that the idea of personhood can be associated with two (related) sorts (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Personhood and Rights in an African Tradition.Molefe Motsamai - 2017 - Politikon:1-15.
    It is generally accepted that the normative idea of personhood is central to African moral thought, but what has not been done in the literature is to explicate its relationship to the Western idea of rights. In this article, I investigate this relationship between rights and an African normative conception of personhood. My aim, ultimately, is to give us a cursory sense why duties engendered by rights and those by the idea of personhood will tend to clash. To facilitate a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Looking Back and Forward: Relational African Bioethics and Why Personhood is Not Dead.Motsamai Molefe & Luís Cordeiro-Rodrigues - 2024 - American Journal of Bioethics 24 (1):62-64.
    In her new article in the American Journal of Bioethics, Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby (2024) provides at least three reasons that support her argument that the concept of personhood must be abandoned...
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • A Model of Virtuous Leadership in Africa: Case Study of a Nigerian Firm.Adeyinka Adewale - 2020 - Journal of Business Ethics 161 (4):749-762.
    The nature and extent of Africa’s leadership challenge has been explored from multi-theoretical perspectives finding that amongst other issues, it is ethical in nature. This study therefore aimed to investigate and present a model of virtuous leadership within an indigenous African firm’s context drawing from the African virtue ethics of Afro-communitarianism. Using a qualitative case study design, it explored a model of virtuous leadership within a leading Nigerian pharmaceutical brand. Data was collected from multiple primary sources including semi-structured interviews and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Is and Ought? How the (Social) Ontological Circumscribes the Normative.Dorothea Gädeke - 2020 - The Journal of Ethics 24 (4):509-525.
    Is normative theory grounded in ontology and if so, how? Taking a debate between Kwame Gyekye and Thaddeus Metz as my point of departure, my aim in this article is to show that something normative does indeed follow from ontological views: The social ontological, I maintain, circumscribes the normative without, however, fully determining its content. My argument proceeds in two steps: First, I argue that our social ontological position constrains what kind of normative theory we may plausibly defend. A relational (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Ubuntu in Elephant Communities.Birte Wrage, Dennis Papadopoulos & Judith Benz-Schwarzburg - 2024 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 10 (4):814-835.
    African (Bantu) philosophy conceptualizes morality through ubuntu, which emphasizes the role of community in producing moral agents. This community is characterized by practices that respond to and value interdependence, such as care, cooperation, and respect for elders and ancestral knowledge. While there have been attributions of morality to nonhuman animals in the interdisciplinary animal morality debate, this debate has focused on Western concepts. We argue that the ubuntu conception of morality as a communal practice applies to some nonhuman animals. African (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Popper’s Politics and Law in the Light of African Values.Thaddeus Metz - 2020 - Jus Cogens 2:185-204.
    Karl Popper is famous for favoring an open society, one in which the individual is treated as an end in himself and social arrangements are subjected to critical evaluation, which he defends largely by appeal to a Kantian ethic of respecting the dignity of rational beings. In this essay, I consider for the first time what the implications of a characteristically African ethic, instead prescribing respect for our capacity to relate communally, are for how the state should operate in an (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Superlongevity and African Ethics.Christopher S. Wareham - forthcoming - Journal of Applied Philosophy.
    I apply African moral precepts to the topic of ‘superlongevity’. I make the case that African theories give rise to three specific sorts of moral concern about life extension that are distinct from similar objections in Western literature: first, superlongevity presents a challenge to identity; second, significantly longer lives face increased challenges to their meaningfulness; third, life extension may be socially divisive, undermining key tenets of sharing a way of life and communing harmoniously with others. Although these distinctive concerns are (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Disruptive Emotions and Affective Injustice Within an African-Inspired Relational Ethics.Mary Carman - 2024 - Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 71 (179):28-52.
    Forms of African relational ethics that prioritise the value of harmony struggle to accommodate arguably valuable disharmony, such as disruptive emotions like anger. A wider literature on political emotions has defended the value of such emotions and even proposed that a particular form of injustice, affective injustice, can arise if we fail to create space for them. While it has recently been proposed that Thaddeus Metz's African-inspired relational moral theory can accommodate disruptive emotions and address affective injustice, in this philosophical (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • A Relational View of Homosexuality.Luís Cordeiro-Rodrigues - 2024 - The Monist 107 (3):251-263.
    Homosexuality is criminalised and socially condemned in many places in Africa. This fact seems to suggest that African moral philosophy would likely render homosexuality immoral. Indeed, some of the African philosophical literature tries to suggest that homosexuality is morally wrong. Contrasting with this view, in this article, I will show that Afro-communitarian ethics implies that homosexuality is morally permissible and, indeed, can be an excellent way to promote social harmony. I defend this theory by drawing out the implications of social (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark