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)

This article attempts to defend Kwame Gyekye’s moderate communitarianism (MC) from the trenchant criticism that it is as defective as radical communitarianism (RC) since they both fail to take rights seriously. As part of my response, I raise two critical questions. Firstly, I question the supposition in the literature that there is such a thing as radical communitarianism. I point out that talk of radical communitarianism is tantamount to attacking a “straw-man.” Secondly, I question the efficacy of the criticism that (...) MC does not take rights seriously, given that there is no account of what it means to take rights seriously in the African tradition. This criticism, insofar as it does not specify a criterion of what it means to take rights seriously, remains defective. The central contribution of this article is to call our attention to the fact that the intellectual culture of rights will surely be affected by Afro-communitarianism, which emphasises our duties to all. (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)

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)

In African philosophical literature, and especially in Afro-communitarianism, there are discussions about the value of the relationship an individual has with her respective community. By community, reference is made to the metaphysical holistic view of community which includes all beings in nature. But since the article deals with gender, which is a social construction, most of the arguments appeal to a narrower version of community, that of human beings. Therefore, discussions about “value” refer to the value that is given to (...) the relationship that surpasses any individual value, and it applies or appeals to human beings. One implication of this understanding and the prioritisation of the relationship is that identity is something that is conferred by this sort of relationship. In this article, we argue that this way of understanding “identity” from an Afro-communitarian world view has something to offer in understanding or conceptualising gender(ed) identity(ies). The assumption is that gender identity will be understood as socially conferred and most importantly, one that takes community as essential. (shrink)

This article critically examines the competitive, adversarial nature of the Western neoliberal style of democracy. Specifically, this article focuses on Amartya Sen’s notion of a “universal democracy” as a means of addressing socio-economic inequalities through Sen’s capability approach. Sen’s capability theory has become an acclaimed and widely used theory to evaluate and understand development and inequalities. However, we employ a distinctive critique by engaging Amartya Sen through Herbert Marcuse’s analysis of one dimensionality and the adversarial nature of Western democracy. We (...) further highlight how contemporary neoliberal society employ a particular, adversarial form of public participation. Through this, we underline the various neoliberal problemata, such as Western idealism, political passivity, and a “flattening of choice,” within contemporary democracies and locate how their competitive, winner-take-all nature has become essential to contemporary, Western democratic models. Consequently, we argue that democracy, as a functional concept and form of public engagement, should be fundamentally re-examined in order to address inequalities. (shrink)

The article argues the thesis that institutions have aprima facieobligation to fund the feedback of individual findings in genomic research conducted on the African continent by drawing arguments from an underexplored Afro-communitarian view of distributive justice and rights of researchers to be aided. Whilst some studies have explored how institutions have a duty to support return as a form of ancillary care or additional foreseeable service in research by mostly appealing to dominant principles and theories in the Global North, this (...) mostlynormative studyexplores this question by appealing to underexplored African philosophy. This is a new way of thinking about institutional responsibility to fund feedback and responds to the call to decolonise health research in Africa. Further studies are required to study how thisprima facieobligation will interact with social contexts and an institution’s extant relationships to find an actual duty. The research community should also work out procedures, policies and governance structures to facilitate feedback. In our opinion, though the impacts of feeding back can inform how institutions think about their actual duty, these do not obliterate the binding duty to fund feedback. (shrink)

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)

A large and important part of social relations is gender relations between men and women. Over time, the manifestation of such relations has often been one of violence, particularly violence against women. Different approaches have been deployed to deal with the experience of gender-based violence (GBV). One popular approach is the human rights framework that suggest that GBV can be addressed by granting certain rights to women. We argue that while a human rights framework holds some promise in resolving GBV, (...) it is limited in some ways because it does not take the cultural perceptions of gender relations that envision gender duties into account. As part of our argument, we show that social relations in African communities ought to be primarily based on the principle of duty to the other, rather than an emphasis on rights. We conclude that there is a need to complement the rights-based approach with a duty-based approach to effectively address GBV. (shrink)