Thaddeus Metz

For more than ten years, I have advanced a conception of human dignity informed by ideas about community salient in the African philosophical tradition. According to it, an individual has a dignity if she is by her nature able to commune with others and to be communed with by them. I have argued that this conception of dignity grounded on our communal nature not only helps to make good foundational sense of many characteristically African moral prescriptions, but also constitutes a strong rival to the globally dominant Kantian account in terms of our capacity for autonomy/rationality. In this contribution, I provide a summarizing statement of my position and articulate some reasons why I believe it should be considered philosophically defensible. Of particular interest, I argue that it is able to account for certain human rights better than three other conceptions of human dignity salient in the African tradition, viz., the views that we have a dignity in virtue of our vitality, moral behaviour, or capacity to care for others.

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.

An idea salient in the African and East Asian philosophical traditions is that the right sort of socio-political interaction would be similar to the intuitive ways that family members ought to relate to each other. Applying this perspective to economic and ecological inequalities, I articulate some principles implicit in healthy familial relationships, show what they entail for certain aspects of distributive justice at the national level, and contend that the implications are plausible relative to competing theories such as utilitarianism, Rawlsianism, and the Capabilities Approach. Specifically, I maintain that reflection on familial norms suggests that an array of objective goods, particularly ones pertaining to relationality, the development of talents, and life, should be central to what the state distributes, an account that rivals subjective well-being, primary goods, or democratically chosen capabilities. When it comes to how much the state should ideally ensure each citizen has, reflection on familial norms supports a new, balancing approach, according to which all have a comparable share of resources needed for objective goodness, but more go to those with great ability or great disability, an approach that differs, and plausibly so, from maximizing, prioritizing the worst off, equalizing, or providing a sufficient minimum.

When it comes to how to hold people responsible for wrongdoing, much of the African philosophical tradition focuses on reconciliation as a final aim. This essay expounds an interpretation of reconciliation meant to have broad appeal, and then draws out its implications for responsibility in respect to three matters. First, when it comes to criminal justice, prizing reconciliation entails that offenders should be held responsible to “clean up their own mess,” i.e., to reform their characters and compensate victims in ways they find burdensome, an approach to punishment that differs from deterrence and desert theories. Second, regarding civil justice, reconciliation means that holding responsible to compensate wrongful harm means improving victims’ quality of life in ways they accept, which contrasts with a common prescription to put victims in the condition they would have been in had the wrong not occurred. Third, reconciliation can involve putting on trial more than just the direct offender, for instance family members who had been able to influence his behavior and were allied with him. The chapter provides reason to take the reconciliatory approaches seriously that will be found prima facie attractive by those from a variety of backgrounds.

Given the pain, discomfort, anxiety, heartbreak, and boredom that most humans experience in their lives, is it morally permissible to create them? Some philosophers lately have answered ‘No’, contending that it is wrong to create a new human life when one could avoid doing so, because it would be bad for the one created. This view is known as ‘anti-natalism’. Some contributors to this volume argue that anti-natalism is true because: agents have a prima facie duty to prevent suffering; it is immoral to violate another’s right not to be harmed without having consented to it; and it is a serious wrong to exploit the weakness of a poorly off being to become a biological parent. Others here argue against anti-natalism on the ground, for instance, that many of our lives are not so bad and in fact are quite good and that the logic of anti-natalism absurdly entails pro-mortalism, the view that we should kill off as many people as possible. This book explores these and related issues concerning the evaluative question of how to judge the worthwhileness of lives and the normative question of what basic duties entail for the creation of new lives. Most chapters initially appeared as part of a special issue of the _South African Journal of Philosophy_ (2012) and are here reprinted along with two additional essays on the topic.

The Abrahamic faiths of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are typically recognized as the world’s major monotheistic religions. However, African Traditional Religion is, despite often including lesser spirits and gods, a monotheistic religion with numerous adherents in sub-Saharan Africa; it includes the idea of a single most powerful God responsible for the creation and sustenance of everything else. This Element focuses on drawing attention to this major world religion that has been much neglected by scholars around the globe, particularly those working in the West or Northern Hemisphere. It accomplishes this primarily by bringing it into conversation with topics in the Anglo-American philosophy of religion.

Karl Marx's normative views have routinely been contrasted with moral-political theories such as utilitarianism and Rawlsian justice. They have not been systematically contrasted with characteristically African, and specifically communal, values, with post-independence African leaders such as Nyerere and Nkrumah instead having emphasized the similarities. In this article, a work of analytic philosophy, I sketch the essentials of Marx’s approach to the human good, especially his early writings on alienation from 1843-1845, and weigh them up against a theoretical interpretation of the under-explored African moral-political tradition. According to the latter perspective, a person displays human excellence insofar as she prizes communal relationships, ones of sharing a way of life and caring for others’ quality of life. My aims are to identify key differences between this Afro-communalism and the young Marx’s views, and, where they diverge, to provide some reasons for favouring one approach over the other. I conclude that insofar as the two ethics differ, the African ideal is the better candidate for capturing a moral point view, one that includes human rights, whereas Marx’s is preferable, and even compelling to a wide contemporary audience, as a broader account of how to live well.

In this article, I briefly reply to four critics who critically engage with my book God, Soul and the Meaning of Life in a special issue of the International Journal of Philosophy and Theology. I view them mainly as addressing the ‘meaning’ of God in three distinct senses, namely, in terms of how best to understand the word ‘God’ and related terms such as ‘the spiritual’, whether God is central to what gives our lives a particular sort of final value, and how beliefs about God might be central to interpreting what on the face of it are non-religious beliefs and practices in contemporary Western society. My remarks are intended to continue the dialogue about these definitional, axiological, and hermeneutic meanings of God.

I propose a theory of punishment that is unfamiliar in the West, according to which the state normally ought to have offenders reform their characters and compensate their victims in ways the offenders find burdensome, thereby disavowing the crime and tending to foster improved relationships between offenders, their victims, and the broader society. I begin by indicating how this theory draws on under-appreciated ideas about reconciliation from the Global South, and especially sub-Saharan Africa, and is distinct from the protection and retribution theories that have dominated the Western philosophy of punishment for about 250 years. Then I argue that it neatly avoids objections to them and is prima facie plausible in its own right. I conclude that this reconciliation theory of state punishment should be taken seriously by philosophers of law and policy makers.

When it comes to the question of how much the state ought to punish a given offender, the standard understanding of the desert theory for centuries has been that it should give him a penalty proportionate to his offense, that is, an amount of punishment that fits the severity of his crime. In this article, part of a special issue on the geometry of desert, we maintain that a desert theorist is not conceptually or otherwise required to hold a proportionality requirement. We show that there is logical space for at least two other, non-proportionate ways of meting out deserved penalties, and we also argue that they have important advantages relative to the dominant, proportionality approach.

This chapter demonstrates that the African philosophical tradition offers four interesting ways to broaden global thought about human rights, where all four involve an appeal to the value of community in some way. Firstly, some African philosophers are skeptical about the normative category of human, i.e., individual rights, with some appealing to communal considerations to deny they exist at all and others doing so to argue that they should not play a central role in moral-political thought. Secondly, there is the view, enshrined in the African (“Banjul”) Charter of Human and Peoples’ Rights for more than 40 years, that there are group rights and not merely rights of individuals. Thirdly, some thinkers in the African tradition have held that we have dignity because of relational features such as our ability to enter into community with others, contrasting with more globally familiar features such as our autonomy, rationality, or life. Fourthly, many African political philosophers hold that there is a human right to have a voice in any major political decision, a kind of democracy that would forge community among all by forbidding rule by a majority. The chapter argues that the grounds for skepticism about human rights are weak and instead that a communitarian foundation of human rights and its implications for group rights and democratic rights should be taken seriously by a global audience.

In this article, part of a special issue on meaning in life and medical ethics, I argue that several issues encountered in a bioethical context are not adequately addressed only with values such as morality and welfare. I maintain, more specifically, that the value of what makes a life meaningful is essential to being able to provide conclusive judgements about which decisions to make. After briefly indicating how meaningfulness differs from rightness and happiness, I point out how it is plausibly central to making decisions in six ‘life and death’ matters. My aim is not to draw any firm conclusions about what to do when it comes to these topics, but rather to show that in order to arrive at any, one cannot plausibly ignore the category of life’s meaning that has, until recently, been nearly absent from Western bioethics since its inception.

I begin by constructing a religio-philosophical argument informed by ideas salient in the African tradition for thinking that we should express gratitude to God for having been giving a dignity-conferring life-force, after which I defend the argument from value-theoretic criticisms (I set aside metaphysical issues altogether). For example, I respond to the objections that having an inherent dignity is not a benefit of a sort warranting gratitude and that those with bad lives have no reason to be grateful. I conclude roughly that, while those with unavoidably bad lives indeed have some reason to be disappointed about the quality of their life, that is compatible with there also being some reason for them to express gratitude for their dignified life-force. I conclude the chapter by considering the prospects for secularizing the African rationale.

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.

Shortened and mildly revised version of an essay that initially appeared in Murove (ed.) African Ethics (2009). This chapter is a work of applied ethics that aims to provide a convincing comprehensive account of how a government official in a post-independence sub-Saharan country should make decisions about how to allocate goods such as civil service jobs and contracts with private firms. Should such a person refrain from considering any particulars about potential recipients, or might it be appropriate to consider, for example, family membership, party affiliation, race, or revolutionary stature as reasons to benefit certain individuals at some cost to the public? Which of these factors should be considered an unjust or corrupt basis on which to allocate state goods and which should not? Drawing on an African ethic, this chapter answers these questions with what it calls a “moderate partialism,” according to which a government agent may rightly favor at some cost to the public veterans and victims of state injustices, but not those in her family or party. This chapter seeks to provide a new, unified explanation of why characteristically sub-Saharan values permit some forms of partiality, such as the preferential hiring of those who suffered from or struggled against colonialism, but forbid other, nepotist or prebendalist forms of partiality.

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.

Insofar as value theory is relevant to the philosophy of medicine, two goods have dominated reflection: well-being and morality. This essay casts doubt on whether those values are sufficient to resolve an array of important debates about medical practice, maintaining that the value of what makes a life meaningful should play a much larger role. After first indicating how meaningfulness differs from happiness and rightness, the essay argues that meaningfulness cannot reasonably be ignored when thinking comprehensively about the proper aims of medicine, the appropriate constraints on their pursuit, and the effective means by which to realize them. The essay’s goal is not to draw any firm conclusions about the suitable ends, constraints, and means of medical practice, but rather to show that, in order to arrive at any, one has to consider the category of life’s meaning, which should be much more prominent in the philosophy of medicine than it has been.

This article, part of a special issue on 'Expressing Hatred', seeks to provide a comprehensive and fundamental account of why racial epithets and similar slurs are immoral, whenever they are. It considers three major theories, roughly according to which they are immoral because they are harmful (welfarism), because they undermine autonomy (Kantianism), or because they are unfriendly (an under-considered, relational approach informed by ideas from the Global South). This article presents new objections to the former two theories, and concludes in favour of the latter rationale. Deeming slurs to be wrong insofar as they are unfriendly is shown to capture the advantages of the other theories, while avoiding their disadvantages.

On the rise over the past 20 years has been ‘moderate supernaturalism’, the view that while a meaningful life is possible in a world without God or a soul, a much greater meaning would be possible only in a world with them. William Lane Craig can be read as providing an important argument for a version of this view, according to which only with God and a soul could our lives have an eternal, as opposed to temporally limited, significance, by virtue of our moral choices then making an ultimate difference. I present two major objections to this position. On the one hand, I contend that if God existed and we had souls that lived forever, then, in fact, all our lives would turn out the same. On the other hand, I maintain that, if this objection is wrong, so that our moral choices would indeed make an ultimate difference and thereby confer an eternal significance on our lives (only) in a supernatural realm, then Craig could not capture the view, aptly held by moderate supernaturalists, that a meaningful life is possible in a purely natural world. An eternal significance would be ‘too big’, reducing any meaning possible during an earthly life to nothing by comparison. I conclude that moderate supernaturalists would be wise to avoid appealing to eternal (or infinite) meaning when spelling out the way God and a soul could alone impart a great meaning to our lives; some other notion of greatness should be considered, perhaps one involving a temporary afterlife.

The core idea of A Relational Theory of Justice is that normative political and legal philosophy should be grounded on people’s relational features, in particular their ability to commune with others and be communed with by them. Usually, philosophers of justice in the West have based their views on people’s intrinsic features, ones that make no essential reference to others, such as their autonomy, self-ownership, or well-being. In addition, often critics of basing politics and law on justice, whether in the African, feminist/care, Marxian, or Confucian traditions, have appealed to non-intrinsic values as leverage, roughly contending that relationships are more important than justice. In contrast to both major camps, this book articulates and defends accounts of justice based on the dignity of people’s relational nature. A proper valuation of people’s capacity to be party to communal relationships does not transcend categories of justice, but instead calls for certain sorts that differ in plausible ways from those grounded on intrinsic properties. Applications are discussed in the contexts of political, economic, compensatory, criminal, transitional, and global justice. Available for download is the Table of Contents.