Thaddeus Metz

In this article I spell out a conception of dignity grounded in African moral thinking that provides a plausible philosophical foundation for human rights, focusing on the particular human right not to be executed by the state. I first demonstrate that the South African Constitutional Court’s sub-Saharan explanations of why the death penalty is degrading all counterintuitively entail that using deadly force against aggressors is degrading as well. Then, I draw on one major strand of Afro-communitarian thought to develop a novel conception of dignity as the view that what is special and inviolable about human nature is our capacity for harmonious relationships. I argue that a principle of respect for the dignity of such a capacity entails that the death penalty is an indignity but that deadly force in self- or other-defense need not be, and I contend that this African- inspired principle promises to do no worse than the more Western, Kantian principle of respect for autonomy at accounting for a broad range of human rights.

I seek to advance enquiry into the philosophical question of in virtue of what human beings have a dignity of the sort that grounds human rights. I first draw on values salient in sub-Saharan African moral thought to construct two theoretically promising conceptions of human dignity, one grounded on vitality, or liveliness, and the other on our communal nature. I then argue that the vitality conception cannot account for several human rights that we intuitively have, while the community conception can do so. I conclude that, of plausible theories of human dignity with an African pedigree, the field ought to favour a community-based view and critically compare it in future work with the Kantian, autonomy-based view that dominates Western thinking about dignity.

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.

I aim to answer the questions of whether reactive practices such as gratitude and punishment are inherently expressive, and, if so, in what respect. I distinguish seven ways in which one might plausibly characterize reactive practices as essentially expressive in nature, and organise them so that they progress in a dialectical order, from weakest to strongest. I then critically discuss objections that apply to the strongest conception, questioning whether it coheres with standard retributive understandings of why, when and where the reactive practice of punishment is justified.

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.

In this article I articulate and defend an African moral theory, i.e., a basic and general principle grounding all particular duties that is informed by sub-Saharan values commonly associated with talk of "ubuntu" and cognate terms that signify personhood or humanness. The favoured interpretation of ubuntu (as of 2007) is the principle that an action is right insofar as it respects harmonious relationships, ones in which people identify with, and exhibit solidarity toward, one another. I maintain that this is the most defensible moral theory with an African pedigree at the time, and that it should be developed further with an eye to rivalling dominant Western theories such as utilitarianism and Kantianism. (NB: a mildly revised version, avoiding some typos and phrases that invite misinterpretation, appeared as a chapter in Isaac Ukpokolo, ed., _Themes, Issues and Problems in African Philosophy_ London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 97-119.)

In this chapter I articulate and defend a basic principle capturing the underlying structure of an attractive sort of national reconciliation that accounts for a wide array of disparate judgments about the subject. There are extant theories of national reconciliation in the literature, most of which are informed by Kantian, liberal-democratic and similar perspectives. In contrast to these, I spell out a theory grounded on a comparatively underexplored sub-Saharan ethic. My foremost aim is to demonstrate how African ideals about communal relationship, still largely unfamiliar to an international audience, do a promising job of providing a unified foundation for the roles of truth-telling, apology, forgiveness, compensation, amnesty and related practices often associated with national reconciliation.

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.

Concomitant with the rise of rationalizing accountability in higher education has been an increase in theoretical reflection about the forms accountability has taken and the ones it should take. The literature is now peppered by a wide array of distinctions (e.g. internal/external, inward/ outward, vertical/horizontal, upward/downward, professional/public, political/economic, soft/ hard, positive/negative), to the point that when people speak of ‘accountability’ they risk speaking past one another, having some of these distinctions in mind and not others. Furthermore, often these distinctions are vague and cross-cut each other in ways that are as yet unclear. The field could benefit from having a comprehensive framework in which to place these distinctions and to view their relations. My aim in this article is to provide an analytical tool by which to classify important debate about what accountability in higher education has been and ought to be. Beyond organizing such debate, this schema will serve the purposes of revealing ambiguities in terms, conflations of ideas, assumptions that warrant questioning, and gaps in present research agendas.

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.

Many countries in Africa, and more generally those in the Global South with tropical areas, are plagued by illnesses that the wealthier parts of the world (mainly ‘the West’) neither suffer from nor put systematic effort into preventing, treating or curing. What does an ethic with a recognizably African pedigree entail for the ways various agents ought to respond to such diseases? As many readers will know, a characteristically African ethic prescribes weighty duties to aid on the part of those in a position to do so, and it therefore entails that there should have been much more contribution from the Western, ‘developed’ world. However, what else does it prescribe, say, on the part of sub-Saharan governments and the African Union, and are they in fact doing it? I particularly seek to answer these questions here, by using the 2013-16 Ebola crisis in West Africa to illustrate what should have happened but what by and large did not.

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 article, written for the generally educated reader, I summarize my latest thinking about a dilemma that I believe current theoretical reflection faces about the proper ultimate aims of a public university. Specifically, I make the following three major points: (1) On the one hand, all dominant theories of how properly to spend public resources entail that academics should not pursue knowledge for its own sake and should rather devote their energies toward promoting some concrete public good (such as citizenship, justice, autonomy or the like). (2) On the other hand, that view of the academic enterprise entails patent absurdities. (3) The dilemma is best resolved by articulating a new theory of how public resources ought to be spent, one according to which the point of the state and its public institutions ought to be to _balance_ the realization of final goods.

Over the last two decades, the capabilities approach has become an increasingly influential theory of development. It conceptualises human wellbeing in terms of an individual's ability to achieve functionings we have reason to value. In contrast, the African ethic of ubuntu views human flourishing as the propensity to pursue relations of fellowship with others, such that relationships have fundamental value. These two theoretical perspectives seem to be in tension with each other; while the capabilities approach focuses on individuals as the locus of ethical value, an ubuntu ethic concentrates on the relations between individuals. In this article, we ask: to what extent is the capabilities approach compatible with this African ethical theory? We argue that, on reflection, relations play a much stronger role in the capabilities approach than often assumed. There is good reason to believe that relationality is part of the concept of a capability itself, where such relationality has intrinsic ethical value. This understanding of the ethical centrality of relations grounds new normative perspectives on the capabilities approach, and offers a more comprehensive grasp of the relevance of relationships to empirical enquiry.

Characteristic of the contemporary field of life's meaning has been the combination of monism in method and naturalism in substance. That is, much of the field has sought to reduce enquiry into life's meaning to one question and to offer a single principle as an answer to it, with this principle typically focusing on ways of living in the physical world as best known by the scientific method. T. J. Mawson's new book, God and the Meanings of Life, provides fresh reason to doubt both this form and this content and also develops positive alternatives to them. In this critical notice of Mawson's book, I consider several of the central arguments that he gives for a pluralist supernaturalism, explaining why I remain unconvinced.

In this article I consider what the implications of ubuntu, interpreted as an African moral philosophy, are for self-expression as a value that the media could help to promote. In contrast to the natural hunches that self-expression is merely a kind of narcissism or makes sense for only individualist cultures to prize, I argue that an attractive construal of ubuntu entails that self-expression can play an important communitarian role. The mass media can be obligated to enable people to express themselves since doing so can be one way for people to share with and care for others

In this article, I respond to questions about, and criticisms of, my article “Towardan African Moral Theory” that have been put forth by Allen Wood, Mogobe Ramose, Douglas Farland and Jason van Niekerk. The major topicsI address include: what bearing the objectivity of moral value should have on cross-cultural moral differences between Africans and Westerners; whether a harmonious relationship is a good candidate for having final moral value; whether consequentialism exhausts the proper way to respond to the value of a harmonious relationship; what makes a moral theory count as “African”; how the existing literature on African ethics relates to the aim of analytically developing and defending a single foundational moral principle; whether the intuitions I appeal to ground an African moral theory are pro tanto rightmakers or general moral truths; whether the moral theory I defend can capture pro tanto rightness; and whether the best interpretation of African ethics is self-regarding (deeming the only basic moral reason for action to be that it would develop one's own valuable human nature) or other-regarding (holding that a certain kind of harmonious relationship between individuals could ground a basic moral reason for action) .

If contemporary African political philosophy is going to develop substantially in fresh directions, it probably will not be enough, say, to rehash the old personhood debate between Kwame Gyekye and Ifeanyi Menkiti, or to nit-pick at Gyekye’s system, as much of the literature in the field has done. Instead, major advances are likely to emerge on the basis of new, principled interpretations of sub-Saharan moral thought. In recent work, I have fleshed out two types of moral theories that have a clearly sub-Saharan basis, that differ from Gyekye’s moral perspective, and that also happen to constitute genuine rivals to dominant Western theories such as utilitarianism, Kantianism and contractualism. In catchwords, these African moral theories are constituted by ideals regarding community or friendliness, on the one hand, and vitality or liveliness, on the other. In this article I sketch these two under-explored ethical perspectives and then suggest several respects in which their implications for salient political controversies are novel and revealing. Sometimes the new African moral theories—and the community-based one in particular--entail different conclusions from Gyekye's position, while other times their conclusions are the same as Gyekye’s, but they provide different rationales for them that are more compelling than his.

In this chapter, I critically explore John Cottingham's most powerful argument for the thesis that the existence of God is necessary for meaning in life. This is the argument that life would be meaningless without an invariant morality, which could come only from God. After demonstrating that Cottingham's God-based ethic can avoid not only many traditional Euthyphro meta-ethical concerns, but also objections at the normative level, I consider whether it can entail the unique respect in which morality is normative, and, upon considering various ways to develop the view, I conclude that it can. However, I then raise another objection that I maintain cannot be replied to satisfactorily. The objection is that, if we had conclusive evidence for a God-based meta-ethic, then our evidence for the existence of God and of wrongness would be comparable, but they are not, either for Cottingham or for readers more generally. That is, I argue that it is incoherent to claim to know that wrongness is a function of God, given that one knows that wrongness exists, but does not know that God does. I also present an alternative, naturalist meta-ethic that avoids this incoherence, fits better with our extant metaphysical knowledge, and grounds an invariant moral system.