This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction West African Conceptions of Person East and Southern African Conceptions of Person Concluding Remarks.

This article explores various analytical issues involved in conceptualizing the interrelationships of gender, class, race and ethnicity and other social divisions. It compares the debate on these issues that took place in Britain in the 1980s and around the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism. It examines issues such as the relative helpfulness of additive or mutually constitutive models of intersectional social divisions; the different analytical levels at which social divisions need to be studied, their ontological base and their relations (...) to each other. The final section of the article attempts critically to assess a specific intersectional methodological approach for engaging in aid and human rights work in the South. (shrink)

In this article I examine the proposition that severe cognitive disability is an impediment to moral personhood. Moral personhood, as I understand it here, is articulated in the work of Jeff McMahan as that which confers a special moral status on a person. I rehearse the metaphysical arguments about the nature of personhood that ground McMahan’s claims regarding the moral status of the “congenitally severely mentally retarded” (CSMR for short). These claims, I argue, rest on the view that only intrinsic (...) psychological capacities are relevant to moral personhood: that is, that relational properties are generally not relevant. In addition, McMahan depends on an argument that species membership is irrelevant for moral consideration and a contention that privileging species membership is equivalent to a virulent nationalism (these will be discussed below). In consequence, the CSMR are excluded from moral personhood and their deaths are less significant as their killing is less wrong than that of persons. To throw doubt on McMahan’s conclusions about the moral status and wrongness of killing the CSMR I question the exclusive use of intrinsic properties in the metaphysics of personhood, the dismissal of the moral importance of species membership, and the example of virulent nationalism as an apt analogy. I also have a lot to say about McMahan’s empirical assumptions about the CSMR. (shrink)

The commonplace view of autonomy involves the ability of individuals to be self-governing and self-legislating, and to make freely and reflectively deliberate choices and decisions. This idea of autonomy — that persons are metaphysically free, that is, that they have free will and may use reason to choose how they shall act — is considered to be a defining feature of a responsible person. There is a commonplace view that autonomy is intrinsically good such that overriding it cannot be justified.1 (...) This intrinsic value implies a negative sense of autonomy, which involves non-interference with one’s free choices, as opposed to a positive sense, which involves helping or enabling one to.. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between the African communitarian conception of personhood and gender. Defenders of this conception of personhood generally hold that an individual is defined in reference to the community, or that personhood is something that is acquired in community. Such characterisations often ignore the role, if any, that gender plays in that conception of personhood. Our aim in this paper is to critically explore the relationship between the two. In doing this we advance a number of claims. (...) First, we point out that the supposed gender-neutrality of the African communitarian idea of personhood is a more general feature of African philosophy that, for instance, evinces a general lack of attention to issues of gender violence and discrimination. Second, we briefly survey the literature on the communitarian idea of personhood in African thought, in particular the views of Ifeanyi Menkiti and Kwasi Wiredu. Our aim is to demonstrate our hypothesis that this idea of personhood is often construed as a gender-neutral concept. Third, we argue that the relational and community-based nature of the communitarian idea of personhood indicates that it is in fact a gendered notion. We conclude that the assumed gender-neutrality is in conflict with the gendered nature of the communitarian idea of personhood. Fourth, we explore a probable objection to our claim that the communitarian idea of personhood is gendered and therefore vulnerable to gender inequality, by examining Ifi Amadiume’s position that the notion of gender in traditional African cultures was fluid and indicated complementarity rather than inequality between the sexes. We argue that Amadiume’s case is not convincing. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Communitarianism in African Systems of Thought Self as a Metaphysical Collectivity The Cultivation of the Person: Culture as Education and Vice Versa Communication and Communalism Communitarianism and Modern Society in Africa Communitarianism and Individual Rights Conclusion.