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 (...) conception of harmony that is salient in the sub-Saharan African tradition. Hence, this article aims to continue the nascent dialogue between indigenous Chinese and African philosophical traditions that has only just begun. Li responds to this critical notice in the same issue of the journal. (shrink)

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 (...) implications that I contend. I aim to rebut these and related criticisms, contending that African Modal Relationalism is in fact a promising way to philosophically ground animal rights. (shrink)

_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 (...) relational perspective given prominence in African ethical thought, a different comprehensive principle, one focused on harmony or friendliness, emerges. Metz argues that this principle corrects the blind spots of the Western moral principles, and has implications for a wide array of controversies in applied ethics that an international audience of moral philosophers, professional ethicists, and similar thinkers will find compelling. (shrink)

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 (...) from approaches that currently dominate Western thought, namely those of utility, autonomy and capability. Lacking the space to systematically defend harmony as a fundamental value, it nonetheless urges theorists not to neglect it in future work. (shrink)

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 (...) perspectives are indeed sisters, in this article I argue, first, that they are not identical twins, and, more strongly, that the family resemblance between the two is significantly less than has been recognized. I highlight key differences between representative forms of an ethic of care and a sub-Saharan communitarian morality, after which I argue, second, that the latter better captures some central feminist concerns and moral considerations generally. That is, I maintain that an African ideal of community, when understood in a philosophically refined way, provides an important, relational corrective to the ethic of care. (shrink)

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 (...) ethics is fundamental because it helps us think about conservation, action, and virtues in a reciprocal spectrum beyond human caring. The paper argues that water conservation debates surrounding non-native ownership and management in Nigeria should not only be human or economically motivated but should present a holistic and sustainable approach to environmental interactions. Employing the method of philosophical analysis, this article explores the environmental ethics rooted in the Yorùbá culture of Southwestern Nigeria. (shrink)

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 (...) wants to perform an altruistic act, is insufficient in accounting for the agent’s altruism. This paper offers an African model of communitarian ethics (ACE) under which the externalist justification for altruism is satisfied. I argue that at its core, ACE holds a normative conception of community and personhood that accounts for a sufficient externalist justification for altruism, which proponents of internal altruism have argued is insufficient. (shrink)

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...

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...

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 (...) foreboding that we are at the gates of an anthropological crisis: the properties bound to moral agency have been exclusively possessed in the past by human beings and have shaped the very definition of being human. In this article, I will argue that AI does not lead us to an anthropological crisis and that, if we adhere to the history and philosophy of technology, we will notice that the debate on the moral status of AI uncritically starts from an anthropology of properties and loses sight of the relational dimension of technology. First, I will articulate three criteria for analyzing different anthropological views in philosophy of technology. Second, I will propose six anthropological models: traditional, industrial, phenomenological, postphenomenological, symmetrical, and cyborg. Third, I will show how the emergence of AI breaks with the dynamics of increased relationality in the history and philosophy of technology. I will argue that this aspect is central to debates about the moral status of AI, since it sheds light on an aspect of moral consideration that has been obscured. Finally, I will reject entirely relational approaches to moral status and propose two hybrid possibilities for rethinking it. (shrink)

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 (...) Afro-communitarian metaphysics of personhood. Afro-communitarian metaphysics is fundamentally relational, i.e. it understands that most properties of the world depend on the existence of other entities. More precisely, personhood is a property that depends on the existence of relatable beings. But if this is true, then it is not possible to hold that an entity that has the property of personhood also has the property of immutability. More specifically, an entity that is a person has to change due to the fact that personhood is a relational property. This is because it is a necessary condition for being a person that one relates to others, i.e. one only becomes a person when this relation occurs. Hence, the process of becoming a person requires a moment before the relation with another and one after; thereby, the feature of being a person requires the feature of change. With respect to the Christian conception of God, what this implies is that if theist philosophers wish to understand Him as a person, they have to also accept that God is not immutable. For if other beings besides Him are not eternal, then it is only possible that He can be a person when these other beings first started existing. This is the case because the kind of relationality needed to be a person is not simply to relate to something (like emptiness), but to do something that makes Him addressable (which requires that the thing He relates to has the capacity to address Him). This means there are two moments of existence where He has distinct properties and, therefore, is mutable. (shrink)

According to a diverse and widely popular family of moral theories, there is a class of individuals – typically humans or persons – who have the very same, full moral status. Individuals not falling into that class count for less, or not at all, morally speaking. In this article, I identify two problems for such theories, the mapping problem and the problem of misgrounded value, and argue that they are serious enough to be decisive. I will then propose an alternative (...) account of full and equal moral status that avoids those problems. In grounding full moral status in phenomenal consciousness, it preserves the idea that you and I are equal, but at the same time radically expands the community of moral equals. I conclude by discussing some practical implications of my proposal. (shrink)

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 (...) African and relational approach to moral status is a better account than salient Western approaches, especially individualist views associated with utilitarianism and Kantianism. Over the years, several commentators have raised criticisms of my approach, including that it objectionably: entails that we may rightly dominate mentally incapacitated human beings; prioritizes mentally incapacitated human beings over animals with similar cognitive abilities without sufficient justification; entails that intelligent aliens lack moral status; cannot make sense of our duties towards the dead; and is unable to account for the standing of species as distinct from their members. In this chapter I provide a comprehensive response to these and related objections, defending the initial account as an attractive way to understand what makes a being matter morally for non-instrumental reasons. (shrink)

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 (...) the way harmony has figured into political philosophies from three major traditions in the Global South, namely, African ubuntu, East Asian Confucianism, and South American buen vivir. I point out that, although harmony is at the core of all three political philosophies, it is conceived in different ways, entailing incompatible prescriptions about things such as who should make laws and which sorts of beings have rights against the state. Such contrasting views call for rigorous cross-cultural dialogue amongst theorists of harmony, beyond mounting challenges to more individualist approaches that have been salient in modern Western political thought. (shrink)

Scholars in the field of environmental and animal ethics have propounded theories that outline what, in their view, ought to constitute an ethical relationship between humans and the environment and humans and nonhuman animals respectively. In the field of animal ethics, the contributions by Western scholars to theorize a body of animal ethics, either as an ethic in its own right or as a branch of the broader field of environmental ethics is clearly seen. Consequently, there are, notably, two main (...) schools of thought in the field of animal ethics. These are the ‘welfarist’ and the ‘rightist’ approaches (Regan, 2006; Owoseni & Olatoye, 2014). Unfortunately, a clearly concerted effort to theorize on animal ethics from an African perspective is at the minimal, although there is a lot written in African environmental ethics, broadly construed. It is within this context that this study locates an African animal ethic within the two main theories in the global animal ethics debate, using traditional Akan ontology and ethics particularly, those that speak to their relationship with the environment and, especially animals. Thus, using Akan ontological worldview and ethics as foundational sources, alongside learned principles from the emerging theories in African environmental ethics, the study seeks to find the place of Akan animal ethics within the rightist and welfarist debates. (shrink)

This article evaluates the moral status of hominins, and obligations we may have towards them. In exploring these ethical considerations, I consider one of the most recent hominin finds: the ‘graveyard’ of Homo naledi in the Dinaledi caves at the Cradle of Humankind in South Africa. I argue that findings about H. naledi establish a pro tanto duty not to excavate their remains.

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 (...) capability criterion inherent in MR is not only exogenous to African thought but also undermines the viability of MR; and MR cannot account for the standing of species populations. Both objections have severe implications for biodiversity conservation efforts in Africa and beyond. (shrink)

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. (...) In light of the ethics of personhood, I will propose the view that a meaningful life is a function of achieving moral excellence or perfection. The moral perfection proposed here, to embody a meaningful life, is of a deontological and satisficing kind. The achievement of satisfactory levels of moral excellence, within sociopolitical and moral limits, captures the essence of a meaningful life. I conclude the article by considering objections against the view proposed here. (shrink)

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 (...) article, I argue that both strategies necessitate drawing a line that is both arbitrary and implausibly opens a moral gulf between individuals whose difference from one another in terms of empirical reality is entirely unremarkable, providing reasons to reject them that go beyond the standard objections in the literature. I conclude that, if all humans are to be included in the community of equals, we must lay to rest the idea that we can do so without also including a wide range of non-human animals. (shrink)

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 (...) open society. I argue that while an under-appreciated Afro-communal moral foundation does not prescribe a closed society, it supports an open society politics and law of a sort different from the one that Popper specifies. For Popper, the state in an open society should improve social arrangements albeit without seeking to promote a particular conception of the good life, should protect rights that merely serve the function of facilitating individual choice, and should employ majoritarian democracy to be able to avoid unwelcome rulers and policies. On all three counts, I show that a relational ethic typical of the African philosophical tradition, but having broad intuitive appeal, entails different, intuitively attractive approaches to politics and law. (shrink)

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 (...) but not necessarily forgiveness is supported by an analogy with resolving two-person conflict and by relational facets of human dignity. I also specify a novel account of the type of penalty that is justified by reconciliation, namely, burdensome labor that is likely to foster moral reform on the part of wrongdoers and to compensate their victims, which would serve neither retributive nor deterrent functions. I illustrate this conception of punishment in contexts that include having cheated on an exam at a university, engaged in criminal behavior such as robbery, and committed atrocities during large-scale social conflict. (shrink)

Abstract A COMPARISON OF THE VIEWS OF AUGUSTINE SHUTTE AND THADDEUS METZ ON AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY AND UBUNTU ETHICS In the theoretical study of Ethics much emphasis has traditionally been placed on established ethical theories, via approaches typified e.g. as deontological, divine command, utilitarian, virtue ethics and natural ethics. At UWC all these approaches, very much entrenched in the Western academic canon, have been taught, together with ethical views carried by the world religions. Over the last few years, however, an interest (...) in the study of African ideas (philosophy, theology, worldview studies, especially around the elusive but fascinating concept of Ubuntu) has grown. This study is an attempt to make a contribution towards a more serious exchange with African ethical ideas and their application in a global context. In this mini-thesis I compare the views of two academics, Augustine Shutte and Thaddeus Metz, who have actively and deliberately worked in the field of African philosophy and ethics. Through this comparative study of two rather different readings of Ubuntu philosophy, I wish to contribute to the growing interest in ethical views and discourse emanating from African ways of looking at the world and at humanity. The well-known, recently deceased, Augustine Shutte, a Catholic scholar of repute, taught Philosophy at the University of Cape Town, and published books such as Philosophy for Africa, The Mystery of Humanity; Ubuntu, An ethic for a New South Africa and The Quest for Humanity in Science and Religion, The South African Experience. The other scholar, the American born philosopher Thaddeus Metz, started teaching Philosophy at the University of Johannesburg and shifted his intellectual attention to African ideas and ethics. Coming from a rational Kantian approach, mixed with utilitarian ethical concerns, Metz discovered the difficulty of adding another “African mix” to main stream academia, based on the comprehensive scope of the very inclusive look at what it means to be human in the quite unique African worldview. He has published widely and in depth on many aspects of this “clash of cultures” while also holding on to enlightenment ideals and an ongoing conversation with science, especially also social science. These two authors thus share many concerns and interests, but also represent two different angles and approaches into African philosophy and ethics. The question for this limited study is formulated in the short introduction: How do Shutte and Metz connect the ethical implications of a widely shared “African worldview” with the core idea of Ubuntu, and which ethical implications do they draw from their reading of Ubuntu – for Africa and the world? These questions are addressed via five chapters: In the first an introduction to the research focus and question and the second of these the field of African Philosophy and Ethics is briefly covered via appropriate literature, thus providing a framework for comparing Shutte and Metz. The third chapter deals with Shutte’s search for an Ubuntu approach to South Africa’s problems within the African and global context - via his emphasis on an inclusive anthropology of caring and justice in which the pitfalls of individualism, materialism and consumerism can be avoided while promoting a sustainable work ethos and attunement with “science”. The fourth chapter focuses on Metz’ critical deontological approach, and his attempt to take the comprehensive African worldview seriously in conversation with utility, reason and science. In the fifth chapter the comparison of these two overlapping, but still quite different with an approach that can lead to a concrete ethical conclusion and application for South Africa, Africa and the world. (shrink)

Much of the debate about post-secularism has presumed a background of Western countries and the sort of statutory law that legislatures should make, and how they should make it, in the light of residents’ religious attitudes and practices. In this chapter I address a fresh context, namely, that of South Africa and the way that courts have interpreted, and should interpret, law in the face of African traditional religions. Specifically, I explicate the fact that, by South Africa's famously progressive Constitution, (...) religious customs already count as law, and I illustrate how such customary law could work with three court cases related to indigenous African spirituality. Then, I lay out and evaluate the two central arguments that jurists have made in favour of South Africa's Constitutional practice of deeming long-standing religious ways of life to be sources of law. I contend that these influential arguments for customary law, which are substantially individualist, are weak, and also sketch more promising rationales, which invoke more communitarian considerations. My aim is not so much to convince the reader that South Africa’s approach to post-secularism is justified as to identify some argumentative strategies that particularly promise to justify it. (shrink)

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 (...) (3) the achievement of moral excellence by the agent (personhood). This article argues that a just society is a function of (1) and (2), and it further argues that the aim of rectification justice is to correct these two facets of a society, which are necessary for (3) to be possible. The aim of correcting history just is to make personhood a possibility for all humanity, particularly of those who were victims of past injustices. (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)

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 (...) myself to the literature in the African moral tradition; and, I argue that it is best construed in terms of individualism contrary to the popular stance of communitarianism. I defend my view by invoking two sorts of evidences. (1) I invoke prima facie evidence, which shows that both secular and religious moral thinkers in the tradition tend to understand it in individualistic terms. And, (2) I invoke concrete evidence, I show that the two terms that can be said to be definitive features of African ethical framework, namely: personhood and dignity, are individualistic. I conclude by considering possible objections against my defense of individualism as a central feature of African ethics. (shrink)

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 (...) the African continent remain resolutely anthropocentric. Although values like ubuntu or ukama have been expanded to include nonhuman nature, animals are characteristically not seen to have any rights, and human duties to them are almost exclusively “indirect.” I conclude by asking whether those who, following their own liberation, continue to exploit and oppress other creatures—simply because they can—are not thereby contributing to their own dehumanization. (shrink)

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 (...) problem’ in the literature. Second, I argue that a relationship-based theory cannot accommodate the agent-related partiality since it posits some relationship to be morally fundamental. My critique ultimately reveals the inadequacy of a relationship-based moral theory insofar as it overlooks some crucial moral considerations grounded on the individual herself in her own right. (shrink)

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 (...) of partialisms: agent-related and other-centered partialisms. (shrink)

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 (...) meaningful philosophical discussion, I locate this engagement in the context of a debate between Ifeanyi Menkiti and Kwame Gyekye about the nature of Afro-communitarianism, whether it will ground rights as primary or secondary. I endorse Menkiti’s stance that duties are primary and rights secondary; and, I also problematize moderate communitarianism for taking a Western stance by employing a naturalist approach to rights. (shrink)

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 (...) harmony, and also respond to potential objections from African intellectuals and new natural law theorists. (shrink)

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 (...) elephant communities are highly cooperative and structured around elders; they alloparent, protect their communities, mourn their dead, and pass on cultural knowledge between generations. Identifying these as important moral practices, ubuntu provides a theoretical framework to expand our ethical concern for elephants to their communities. In practice, this will deepen our understanding of the wrongness of atrocities like culling for population management or trophy hunting. (shrink)

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 (...) to find a property which roughly matches the HST, while Conventionalist Accounts attempt to explain why endorsing the HST is necessary to achieve coherence with the human rights project. I argue that neither strategy overcomes the Scope Challenge. I then draw out the important implications of this. Even as dignity retains relevance to all humans, it must move beyond the mere human, so as to include nonhuman animals. (shrink)

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 (...) to disrupt unjustified human moral superiority over animals in a way that commits us to environmental flourishing. (shrink)

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 (...) in the care of psychotherapy patients. Issues regarding the decision to breach medical confidentiality in psychotherapeutic care are ultimately reserved for the courts. Professional assessment might be an important first step in this process, and court rulings govern most aspects of this assessment. However, current case law, especially in the United States, places an unreasonable expectation on psychotherapists to protect all at-risk parties or foresee that a patient intends to follow through on said threats. It has largely failed to guarantee psychotherapy patients unlimited access to care, while potentially inhibiting future honest communication between patients and health professionals and endangering the safety of others. Of these decisions, the two most prominent are the 1976 Tarasoff decision and the 2016 Volk decision. This paper argues for the possibility of grounding good laws in ubuntu African philosophy in a way that protects others from harm and ensures unimpeded access to care without necessarily breaching medical confidentiality. (shrink)

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 (...) the same moral status as humans, and as a result, the situation may have implications for brain research, indeed, leading to the implication that this ought also not to be carried out upon brain surrogates. In this article, we present a relational approach to moral status which upholds that brain surrogates do not have the same moral status as human beings. Hence, brain research ought not be rejected on the grounds of equality of moral status between humans and brain surrogates. (shrink)

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 (...) in Botswana on how solidarity and reciprocity obligations could guide decisions about feedback of individual genetic research results. Data were collected using deliberative focus group discussions and in-depth interviews.ResultsFindings from 93 participants demonstrated the importance of considering solidarity and reciprocity obligations in decisions about the return of individual genetic research results to participants. Participants viewed research participation as a mutual relationship and expressed that return of research results would be one way in which research participation could be reciprocated. They noted that when reciprocity obligations are respected, participants feel valued and not respecting reciprocity expectations could undermine participant trust and participation in future studies.ConclusionsWe conclude that expectations of solidarity and reciprocity could translate into an obligation to feedback selected individual genetic research results in African genomics research. (shrink)

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 (...) high as newborn babies. While this conclusion does not quite entail that abortion is generally seriously immoral, it does seem to follow that it would be no less difficult to justify (even relatively early) abortion than it would be to justify killing a newborn. (shrink)

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 (...) high‐income, more industrialized countries of the global North, particularly the United States and United Kingdom. Finally, it considers what role, if any, differences in life expectancy, infant and child mortality, and prospects for healthy lives should play in the moral embrace of a particular view by a community. It argues that there can be reasons to favor different types of discrimination in different parts of the world. (shrink)

Philosophers have been intrigued by the problem of evil for centuries: How can God and evil coexist? This article tries to answer this question by using Kongolese religious thought from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I contend that the Kongolese view gleaned from historical sources and complemented by contemporary African philosophical scholarship contains sufficient resources to reply to this problem coherently. Particularly, I argue that, from the Kongolese viewpoint, evil in the world can be explained as follows. God and other (...) morally good entities are not morally perfect and may commit moral errors. Moreover, God does not have unlimited power over morally bad entities who may commit moral wrongs. This view, I contend, deserves consideration since, unlike the mainstream Western perspective, it does not imply the unacceptable view that horrendous evils are morally justified. (shrink)

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 (...) a relationholder theory. It is argued that this relationholder theory can overcome the weaknesses identified with a libertarian account of stakeholder theory, as well as serve as a profitable framework for determining both the purpose of the firm, and the responsibilities that management has towards those parties who affect, and who are affected by, the firm. (shrink)

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 (...) decolonisation project: possibilities lie in the -contextualisation of knowledge, whereas limitations are related to constructing an alternative to what is known as ‘scientific’ knowledge. As far as the author knows, this is the first attempt to frame ethics in terms of the epistemological search for ‘decolonised’ knowledge. (shrink)

The ongoing debate on how best to regulate international commercial surrogacy defies consensus, as the most cogent normative and jurisprudential grounds for and against non-altruistic surrogacy remain controversial. This paper contributes to the debate by focusing on social justice issues arising from transnational, moneymaking surrogacy, with a focus on the Global South. It argues that existing theoretical perspectives on balancing interests, rights, privileges, and resources in the context of cross-border surrogacy—such as cosmopolitanism, communitarianism, liberal feminism, radical feminism, and neorealism—are not (...) sufficient to treat the question of justice underpinning transnational surrogacy in the Global South. An Afro-communal theory of social justice is proposed as an alternative model for addressing the shortcomings in existing global justice theories. Building on Thaddeus Metz’s construction of Afro-communal social theory and a bioethic of communion, this article reveals the fundamental nature of injustices in the Global South surrogacy foray. This approach provides prima facie grounds for making commercial surrogacy more just in the evolving global order. (shrink)

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 (...) a second fictional case, taken from McKeown’s novel, Machines Like Me, in which a social robot named Adam displays intrinsic qualities, such as sentience, rationality, and deductive moral reasoning, yet lacks close social ties to particular people. We argue that Adam is not a person in the African sense; however, he qualifies as a person according to many standard Western views, such as Kantian and utilitarian ethics. Section 4 further elaborates the African relational view by comparing the moral standing of social robots and humans in a forced choice scenario. Section 5 replies to objections. We conclude that an African relational approach captures important insights about the moral standing of social robots that many Western accounts miss and should be better incorporated into global frameworks for designing and deploying social robots. (shrink)

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 (...) good; the nature of virtue (vice) and its relation to rightness (wrongness); and how to capture self-regarding virtues and duties to oneself theoretically. (shrink)