Thaddeus Metz

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. For many animals to have a moral status would have important implications for the practice of agriculture, for instance farming animals for food and expanding crops.

I critically discuss respects in which conceptions of community have featured in African moral-political philosophy over the past 40 years or so. Some of the discussion is in the vein of intellectual history, recounting key theoretical moves for those unfamiliar with the field. However, my discussion is also opinionated, noting prima facie weaknesses with certain positions and presenting others as more promising, particularly relative to prominent Western competitors. There are a variety of forms that African communitarianism has taken and could take in respect of moral status, good character, and just policy, and my aims include arguing that some are more plausible than others and should give more individualist thinkers in Euro-American traditions pause.

In this article I draw on resources from the African philosophical tradition to construct a theory of human rights grounded on dignity that presents a challenge to the globally dominant, autonomy-based approach. Whereas the latter conceives of human rights violations as degradations of our rational nature, the former does so in terms of degradations of our relational nature, specifically, our capacity to be party to harmonious or friendly relationships. Although I have in the past presented the basics of the Afro-relational approach, in this article I defend it from objections and also go on the offensive by arguing that understanding the human rights violations of torture and rape to be (roughly) behavior that treats innocent parties in an extremely discordant or unfriendly way is, if not more plausible than standard Kantian understandings, then at least a promising alternative to them.

Scholars have compared the transitional justice processes of Colombia and South Africa in some respects, but there has yet to be a systematic moral-philosophical evaluation of them regarding how they have sought to allocate economic goods. Here I appraise the ways that South Africa and Colombia have responded to their respective historical conflicts in respect of the distribution of property and opportunities. I do so in the light of a conception of reconciliation informed by a relational ethic of harmony, a value salient in the worldviews of many indigenous peoples in both Africa and South America. I argue that, given such an account of reconciliation, one of Colombia’s major proposed ways of allocating property and opportunities, whereby offenders would labour for the sake of improving victims’ socio-economic conditions, would be much better than what South Africa has done, even if Colombia has yet to put such a policy systematically into practice.

A guest edited volume of the Journal of Applied Philosophy devoted to topics regarding the ethics of nudges, particularly those that have received little or no treatment up to now. Since the publication of Nudge in 2008, nudges have become widely used tools in policymakers' toolbox. Concurrently, ethicists have discussed which conditions, if any, ensure the fair and ethically legitimate implementation of such untraditional policy techniques. The debates have focused primarily on the alleged intrusiveness of nudges and their lack of factual transparency. The special issue is intended to enrich the debate in the conviction that the clarity of the terms adopted within the debate could be improved and that some relevant ethical perspectives have been left out in assessing the morality of nudges. Specifically, the aims of this special issue are twofold, normative and conceptual. On the one side, we delve into the concepts on which the evaluation of nudging hinges, such as "preferences", "resistibility", and "libertarianism". Since the meanings assigned to such concepts drive our evaluation of nudging, their comprehension is critical. On the other side, the acceptability of nudges has been extensively assessed in the light of ethical theories developed within Western philosophy, and not with alternative but promising ethical frameworks from the Global South. Relatedly, some values implicated in nudging, such as the ethics of nudging vulnerable populations, have been overshadowed by scholars' attention to decisional autonomy. The special issue gives these themes the attention they deserve.

Hypothetical social contract theory is the predominant framework that political philosophers use to argue for conceptions of social justice. A hypothetical social contract theory consists of an initial situation, in which parties are imagined to make a rational agreement about the way to design their politico-economic institutions, and a conception of justice to which these parties would agree. My goals in the dissertation are to determine the most warranted initial situation and the conception of justice that follows from it. ;To gain focus, I look just at initial situations that have "uncontested conditions." The uncontested conditions include, e.g., the lack of coercion or deception among the parties, and most hypothetical social contract theorists accept them. All together, the uncontroversial conditions add up to the stipulation that the parties resolve conflicts of interest solely by means of fully rational argumentation. The "controversial conditions" concern the way the parties argue, i.e., the values and norms they use to deliberate about justice. The values could be either subjectivist or objectivist, while the way the parties respond to values could be self-interested, benevolent, or reasonable. ;I argue for the best initial situation dialectically, by contending that the uncontroversial conditions underwrite a particular construal of the controversial conditions. Specifically, I claim that the uncontroversial conditions give us reason to believe that Kant's Formula of Humanity is central to institutional choice, so that a Kantian construal of the way the parties deliberate is uniquely plausible. I then identify Kant's rule as an instance of reasonableness about norms and objectivism about values. ;As for deriving a conception of justice from the favored initial situation, I gain focus by looking at what Kant's Formula of Humanity entails solely for economic justice. My thesis is that Kant's rule entails substantial positive duties, so that libertarianism is ruled out. I defend this thesis by showing that there are two plausible ways to derive concrete judgments from the abstract norm of treating humanity as an end-in-itself, and that both methods entail disputatious rights to positive freedom for the same reasons they entail widely accepted rights to negative freedom

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.

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.