Thaddeus Metz

Can a state seek to promote a thick conception of the good (such as fostering a kind of meaning or excellence in people's lives) without treating its citizens disrespectfully? The predominant answer among friends of the principle of respect for persons is "no." The most powerful Kantian objection to non-liberalism or perfectionism is the claim that citizens who do not share the state's conception of the good would be wronged in that the state would treat a certain way of life as more important than its citizens' capacities to choose their own ways of life. I sketch a new non-liberal principle for political decision-making and show that, unlike other forms of non-liberalism, it is not vulnerable to this major respect-based objection. 'Open perfectionism' is the view that state enforcement of a conception of the good favoured by the majority is permissible if and only if the minority has the substantial ability to avoid the territory in which the conception of the good is enforced. I argue that it is a realistic possibility for some non-liberal states to provide a fair opportunity to their dissenters to avoid the imposition of non-liberal policies and that the Kantian liberal's central complaint would not apply to non-liberal states if they were to provide such an opportunity. The principle of respect for persons grounds the most influential argument for liberalism, and so showing that open perfectionism is consistent with liberal intuitions about free choice promises to help to transcend the long-standing conflict between non-liberalism and Kantian liberalism.

I critically examine the South African university student and worker protests of 2015/2016 in light of moral principles governing the use of force that are largely uncontested in both the contemporary Western and African philosophies of just war, violence and threats. Amongst these principles are: “discrimination”, according to which force should be directed not towards innocent bystanders but instead should target those particularly responsible for injustice; “likely success”, meaning that, instead of being counter-productive, the use of force must be reasonably expected to advance a just cause; and “last resort”, which entails that only the least force necessary to rebut injustice should be employed. I invoke these and related principles to appraise a wide array of types of student/worker protests, noting which of them accorded with the principles and which did not. I also reply to defences that some South Africans have recently made of protesting with coercion and destruction.

In this chapter I critically discuss the meta-ethical and normative ethical foundations of Nkrumah’s philosophy as discussed in Consciencism. With respect to meta-ethics, I address Nkrumah’s characteristically African attempt to ground ethics on metaphysics, and, specifically, his claim that a basic egalitarian moral principle follows from a materialist ontology. Granting Nkrumah that reality is ultimately physical and that the physical is unitary, I argue that nothing logically follows about whether human beings have an equal worth. However, on Nkrumah’s behalf I sketch some additional premises that, if added, would make the inference from materialism to egalitarianism stronger. Regarding Nkrumah’s normative ethics, many of Nkrumah's passages appear to be contradictory, with some focusing on dignity as per the Kantian and others advocating welfarism à la the utilitarian. Here, I again work to strengthen Nkrumah’s overall perspective, by arguing that his remarks about how to treat others can be viewed as coherent once a certain conception of dignity, which I have defended elsewhere, is invoked.

I argue that, even supposing substantive principles of distributive justice entail that animals warrant constitutional protection, there are other, potentially weightier forms of injustice that would probably be done by interpreting a Bill of Rights as implicitly applying to animals, namely, formal injustice and compensatory injustice. Formal injustice would result from such a reading of the Constitution in that the state would fail to speak with one voice upon newly according legal rights to animals. Compensatory injustice would likely result from such a reading, at least in a South African context, in that the law would not only suppress facets of culture that many Africans deem important to their self-conception, but also require spending scarce resources on animals that could have gone toward saving African lives and livelihoods. If the state must choose between acting for the sake of the urgent interests of animals and those of humans, humans must take priority, even assuming that animals have a worth that morally forbids harming them in our private lives.

We seek to outline philosophical answers to the questions of why punish, whom to punish and how much to punish, with illustrations from the South African legal system. We begin by examining the differences between forward- and backward-looking moral theories of legal punishment, their strengths and also their weaknesses. Then, we ascertain to which theory, if any, contemporary South Africa largely conforms. Finally, we discuss several matters of controversy in South Africa in the context of forward- and backward-looking theories, including the death penalty, mandatory minimum sentences and victim impact statements.

In this chapter, a reprint of an article initially appearing in the Journal of Moral Education (2010), we provide a theoretical reconstruction of sub-Saharan ethics that we argue is a strong competitor to typical Western approaches to morality. According to our African moral theory, actions are right roughly insofar as they are a matter of living harmoniously with others or honouring communal relationships. After spelling out this ethic, we apply it to several issues in both normative and empirical research into morality. With regard to normative research, we compare and contrast this African moral theory with utilitarianism and Kantianism in the context of several practical issues. With regard to empirical research, we compare and contrast our sub-Saharan ethic with several of Lawrence Kohlberg’s views on the nature of morality. Our aim is to highlight respects in which the African approach provides a unitary foundation for a variety of normative and empirical conclusions that are serious alternatives to dominant Western views.

I develop an account of the property in virtue of which actions are wrong that retains the notion of unreasonableness but rejects Scanlon's contractualist framework. Specifically, I maintain (roughly) that the property of treating another unreasonably better explains what makes an act wrong than does the property of it being prohibited by principles that contractors with an ideal motivation could not reasonably reject. One advantage of my alternative is a more straightforward way to capture duties towards animals.

The field of bioethics is replete with applications of moral theories such as utilitarianism and Kantianism. For a given dilemma, even if it is not clear how one of these western philosophical principles of right (and wrong) action would resolve it, one can identify many of the considerations that each would conclude is relevant. The field is, in contrast, largely unaware of an African account of what all right (and wrong) actions have in common and of the sorts of factors that for it are germane to developing a sound response to a given bioethical problem. My aim is to help rectify this deficiency by first spelling out a moral theory grounded in the mores of many sub-Saharan peoples, and then applying it to some major bioethical issues, namely, the point of medical treatment, free and informed consent, standards of care and animal experimentation. For each of these four issues, I compare and contrast the implications of the African moral theory with utilitarianism and Kantianism, my overall purposes being to highlight respects in which the African moral theory is distinct and to demonstrate that the field should take it at least as seriously as it does the Western theories.

At least the three major academic debates one encounters about human rights in an African context are usefully framed in terms how they relate to community in various ways. Specifically, this entry first discusses disputes among moral anthropologists and political scientists about the extent to which human rights were present in pre-colonial, communal sub-Saharan societies; then it takes up ways in which group-based claims have significantly influenced human rights discourse and observance in post-war Africa; and finally it discusses how professional philosophers in and from Africa have tended to view human rights through communitarian lenses.