Thaddeus Metz

There has been the recurrent suspicion that community, harmony, cohesion, and similar relational goods as understood in the African ethical tradition threaten to occlude difference. Often, it has been Western defenders of liberty who have raised the concern that these characteristically sub-Saharan values fail to account adequately for individuality, although some contemporary African thinkers have expressed the same concern. In this chapter, I provide a certain understanding of the sub-Saharan value of communal relationship and demonstrate that it entails a substantial allowance for difference. I aim to show that African thinkers need not appeal to, say, characteristically Euro-American values of authenticity or autonomy to make sense of why individuals should not be pressured to conform to a group’s norms regarding sex and gender. A key illustration involves homosexuality.

Many values originating in Africa and in China, and ones that continue to influence much of everyday communication in those societies, are aptly placed under the common heading of 'harmony'. After first spelling out what harmony involves in substantially Confucian China, and then in Africa, this article notes respects in which the Confucian and African conceptions of harmony are similar, an awareness of which could facilitate smooth communication. The article then indicates respects in which the Confucian and African conceptions of harmony are different, a lack of awareness of which could undermine smooth communication The point of the article is to facilitate Sino-African communication by means of an awareness of indigenous moral-philosophical mindsets that continue to be salient in China and Africa, despite the influence of the West.

The dominant view amongst contemporary Western philosophers about the essence of a natu­ ral object is that it is constituted by its intrinsic properties. The ontological approach salient in the African philosophical tradition, in contrast, accounts for a thing’s essence by appeal to its relational properties. The Afro­relational ontology is under­developed, with the primary aim of this article being to help rectify that weakness. Specifically, this article’s aims are: to articulate an African approach to understanding the essence of a concrete, natural thing in terms of its relationships; to illustrate the Afro­relational approach with the examples of the self and of water; to contrast the Afro­relational characterization of the essence of the self and of water with a typically Western construal in terms of their intrinsic properties; and finally to provide an initial defence of the Afro­relational approach, both by responding to some objections facing it and by providing some new, positive reasons to take it seriously.

This chapter explores prominent respects in which humility figures into ubuntu, the southern African (and specifically Nguni) term for humanness often used to capture moral philosophies and cultures indigenous to the sub-Saharan region. The chapter considers respects in which humility is prescribed by ubuntu, understood not just as a relational normative ethic, but also as a moral epistemology. Focusing specifically on philosophical ideas published in academic fora over the past 50 years or so, the chapter contends that, although the concept of humility has not often been explicitly invoked in them to make sense of African normative ethics and moral epistemology, it is a useful lens through which to view key facets of these literate philosophies. In many ways, by ubuntu we are to be humble in respect of what an individual should claim from others, how she should appraise her own virtue, and what she may claim to know about morality (although no suggestion is made that it is some kind of ‘master virtue’ for the tradition).

In this article, I seek to answer the following cluster of questions: What would a characteristically African, and specifically relational, conception of a criminal trial’s final end look like? What would the Afro-relational approach prescribe for sentencing? Would its implications for this matter forcefully rival the kinds of penalties that judges in South Africa and similar jurisdictions typically mete out? After pointing out how the southern African ethic of ubuntu is well understood as a relational ethic, I draw out of it a certain conception of reconciliation that I advance as a strong candidate for being the proper final end of a criminal trial. I argue that, far from requiring forgiveness, seeking reconciliation can provide strong reason to punish offenders. Specifically, a reconciliatory sentence is one that roughly has offenders reform their characters and compensate their victims in ways the offenders find burdensome, thereby disavowing the crime and tending to foster cooperation and mutual aid. I argue that this novel account of punishment is a prima facie attractive alternative to more familiar retributive and deterrence rationales, and that it entails that widespread practices such as imprisonment and mandatory minimum sentences are unjust.

Part of a symposium devoted to ‘Prediction, Understanding, and Medicine’, in which Alex Broadbent argues that the nature of medicine is determined by its competences, i.e., which things it can do well. He argues that, although medicine cannot cure well, it can do a good job of enabling people not only to understand states of the human organism and of what has caused them, but also to predict future states of it. From this Broadbent concludes that medicine is (at least in part) essentially a practice of understanding and predicting, not curing. In reply to this bold position, I mount two major criticisms. First, I maintain that the reasons Broadbent gives for doubting that medicine can cure provide comparable reason for doubting that medicine can provide an understanding; roughly, the best explanation of why medicine cannot reliably cure is that we still lack much understanding of health and disease. Second, I object to the claim that a practice is medical only if it facilitates understanding and prediction. Although Broadbent has brought to light certain desirable purposes of medicine that are under-appreciated, my conclusion is that he has not yet provided enough reason to think that understanding and prediction are essential to it. Instead of supposing that medicine has an essence, in fact, I suggest that its nature is best understood in terms of a property cluster.

In “Are Certain Knowledge Frameworks More Congenial to the Aims of Cross-Cultural Philosophy? A Qualified Yes,” Leigh Jenco responds to an article in which I had argued for a similar conclusion. I had contended roughly that the positing of objective truth combined with a fallibilist epistemology best explains why a philosopher from one culture could learn something substantial from another culture. In her response, Jenco contends that this knowledge framework does not account adequately for the intuition that various philosophical traditions have an equal standing and that traditions other than one’s own are not to be considered inferior. In addition, according to Jenco, an appeal to objective truth on the part of one epistemic culture is unavoidably oppressive, or overly risks being so, with regard to another one. In this brief reply, I argue that an appeal to objective truth in the realms of epistemology and morality in fact makes the most sense of Jenco’s concerns about inegalitarianism and oppression.

I consider the implications of two globally influential love-centred value systems for how to respond to painful memories that are a consequence of large-scale social conflict. More specifically, I articulate a moral-philosophical interpretation of the sub-Saharan worldview of ubuntu, and consider what it entails for responding to such trauma. According to this ethic, one should strive to become a real person, which one can do insofar as one honours those capable of communal (or broadly loving) relationships, ones of identity and solidarity with others. I compare the implications of this ubuntu ethic with those of prominent Christian principles such as the golden rule and the commandment to love one's neighbour, noting some similarities between them, but emphasizing differences. Salient topics addressed are reconciliation with others, reconciliation to one's situation, punishment and forgiveness.

With her new book, The Conceptual Foundations of Transitional Justice, Colleen Murphy has advanced novel, comprehensive and sophisticated philosophical accounts of both what severely conflict-ridden societies should be aiming for and how they should pursue it. Ultimately grounded on a prizing of rational agency, Murphy maintains that these societies, roughly, ought to strive for a stable and legitimate democratic polity committed to not repeating gross historical injustice and do so in ways that do right by victims. In this article, I argue, contra Murphy, that achieving democratic rights to political participation should not be considered an essential aim of transitional justice, and that, in contrast, doing right by victims should be considered an essential aim of it, not merely an appropriate means to achieving other aims. In addition, I highlight an issue downplayed in Murphy’s book, namely, the need to make trade-offs amongst the aims of transitional justice, which becomes particularly pressing upon accepting that doing right by victims is one of them.

Philosophy is often labelled the ‘Queen of the Sciences’, meaning that it not merely gave birth to most other disciplines, but also has continued to influence their course. This chapter proceeds on these assumptions as well as the idea that post-independence, academic African philosophy ought to shape the development of other disciplines. It addresses the clusters of Law/Politics, Business/Management, Economics/Development Studies, Sociology/Anthropology, Psychology/Medicine, Education, Religious Studies/Theology, and Ecology, pointing out how these fields have been enriched by engaging with ideas salient in the African philosophical tradition, and making suggestions about additional ways in which it promises to be revealing with respect to them.

In an article previously published in this Journal, Anthony Oyowe critically engages with my attempt to demonstrate how the human rights characteristic of South Africa’s Constitution can be grounded on a certain interpretation of Afro-communitarian values that are often associated with talk of ‘ubuntu’. Drawing on recurrent themes of human dignity and communal relationships in the sub-Saharan tradition, I have advanced a moral-philosophical principle that I argue entails and plausibly explains a wide array of individual rights to civil liberties, political power, criminal procedures and economic resources. Oyowe’s most important criticism of my theory is in effect that it is caught in a dilemma: either the principle I articulate can account for human rights, in which case it does not count as communitarian, or it does count as the latter, but cannot account for the former. In this article, I reply to Oyowe, contending that he misinterprets key facets of my theory to the point of not yet engaging with its core strategy for deriving human rights from salient elements of ubuntu. I conclude that Oyowe is unjustified in claiming that there are ‘theoretical lapses’ that ‘cast enormous doubts’ on my project of deriving human rights from a basic moral principle with a recognizably sub-Saharan and communitarian pedigree.

In “Happiness Is the Wrong Metric,” Amitai Etzioni largely argues that human beings are motivated by more than just their own happiness, whether conceived in terms of pleasant experiences or fulfilled preferences, and that the state should attend to more than merely people’s happiness. He contends that people are often disposed to seek out, and that public policy ought to promote, what is morally right and good. While not disagreeing with this thrust of Etzioni’s position, I maintain in my contribution that it is too narrow. There is a large range of goods that people tend to pursue, and that social and political institutions should plausibly foster, which are reducible to neither happiness nor morality. They are values that are instead well captured by the concept of what makes a life meaningful. If Etzioni is correct that the state ought to enable people to live morally upright lives, then it has no less reason to enable them to live meaningful ones, too.

Three of the great sources of meaning in life are the good, the true, and the beautiful, and I aim to make headway on the grand Enlightenment project of ascertaining what, if anything, they have in common. Concretely, if we take a (stereotypical) Mother Teresa, Mandela, Darwin, Einstein, Dostoyevsky, and Picasso, what might they share that makes it apt to deem their lives to have truly mattered? I provide reason to doubt two influential answers, noting a common flaw that supernaturalism and consequentialism share. I instead develop their most plausible rival, a naturalist and non-consequentialist account of what enables moral achievement, intellectual reflection, and aesthetic creation to confer great meaning on a person's life, namely, the idea that they do so insofar as a person transcends an aspect of herself in some substantial way. I criticize several self-transcendence theories that contemporary philosophers have advanced, before presenting a new self-transcendence view and defending it as the most promising.

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 a prior issue of Developing World Bioethics, Cheryl Macpherson and Ruth Macklin critically engaged with an article of mine, where I articulated a moral theory grounded on indigenous values salient in the sub-Saharan region, and then applied it to four major issues in bioethics, comparing and contrasting its implications with those of the dominant Western moral theories, utilitarianism and Kantianism. In response to my essay, Macpherson and Macklin have posed questions about: whether philosophical justifications are something with which bioethicists ought to be concerned; why something counts as ‘African’; how medicine is a moral enterprise; whether an individual right to informed consent is consistent with sub-Saharan values; and when thought experiments help to establish firm conclusions about moral status. These are important issues for the field, and I use this reply to take discussion of them a step or two farther, defending my initial article from Macpherson's and Macklin's critical questions and objections.

In one of the most widely read texts on what makes a life meaningful, composed more than 50 years ago, Kurt Baier presents an intriguing argument against the view that meaning in life would come by fulfilling a purpose God has assigned us. Baier contends that God could not avoid degrading us were He to assign us a purpose, which would mean that God, as a morally ideal being by definition, would not do so. Defenders of God-centred accounts of meaning in life, and even many of its detractors such as myself, have by and large argued that Baier is incorrect on this point. However, using my reply to Baier as a foil, Sagid Salles has recently breathed new life into Baier’s old rationale, providing fresh grounds to believe that God could not avoid degrading us if He gave us a purpose to fulfil. Specifically, Salles argues that God would face a dilemma: either He could give us all the same purpose, which would be unfair since some of us would be in a better position to achieve it than others, or He could give us each a different purpose that we would be equally able to fulfil, which would also be disrespectful since God would have limited our lives so as to make other ends out of reach. In this article, I argue that God could avoid the dilemma Salles poses and hence could assign us a purpose without treating us disrespectfully.

This chapter supposes that certain bads are necessary for substantial goods, and poses the question of how one ought to react emotionally to such bads. In recent work, Robert Adams is naturally read as contending that one ought to exhibit positive emotions such as gladness towards certain ‘necessary evils’. A rationale he suggests for this view is that love for a person, which involves viewing the beloved as good, requires being glad about what is necessary for her to exist, even if it is something bad such as a war that should be hated considered apart from being required for her existence. I critically discuss this argument, aiming to enrich understanding of the implications of the normativity of love for proper emotions towards necessary evil.

This essay first analyzes the concept of survivor’s guilt, distinguishing various manifestations of it and considering whether any truly counts as a form of guilt. Then, it addresses arguments for thinking that survivor’s guilt is unreasonable to exhibit, after which it takes up arguments for thinking that it is reasonable. The aim is not to come to some firm conclusion about these conceptual and evaluative matters, but instead to acquaint the reader with the debates about them among contemporary English-speaking philosophers.

In this article, I address some central issues in journalism ethics from a fresh perspective, namely, one that is theoretical and informed by values salient in sub-Saharan Africa. Drawing on a foundational moral theory with an African pedigree, which is intended to rival Western theories such as Kantianism and utilitarianism, I provide a unified account of an array of duties of various agents with respect to the news/opinion media. I maintain that the ability of the African moral theory to plausibly account for issues such as proper content, investigative ethics, and freedom of speech means that it should be taken seriously by media ethicists and merits being paired up against competing approaches in future work.