Motsamai Molefe

This article draws our attention to the centrality of the normative idea of personhood in elucidating a robust Afro-communitarianism. To do so, it visits the debate between the so-called moderate and radical communitarians to argue that the assertion that a community takes priority over an individual is not an implausible position. It argues that this assertion, given a nuanced moral interpretation, can offer a promising African perspective on how to secure a life of dignity withoutnecessarily appealing to rights but to the normative idea of personhood. It submits that the idea of personhood entails a morality of duties that prioritizes the well-being of all. It is this prioritization of the well-being of all as the proper moral-political goal of Afro-communitarianism that moral-theoretically captures the essence of the assertion that a community takes priority over an individual.

This book focuses on the domains of moral philosophy, political philosophy, and political theory within African philosophy. At the heart of the volume is a call to imagine African political philosophy as embodying a needs-based political vision. While discourses in African political philosophy have fixated on the normative framework of human rights law to articulate demands for social and global justice, this book charts a new frontier in African political thought by turning from ‘rights’ to ‘needs.’ The authors aim to re-orient discourses in African philosophy beyond the impasse of rights-based confrontations to shift the conversation toward needs as a cornerstone of African political theory.

This chapter explores the place of agent-centred duties in African philosophy. To do so, I investigate influential moral theories in the literature, namely: Kwasi Wiredu’s ‘sympathetic impartiality’, Kwame Gyekye’s ‘moderate communitarianism’ and Thad Metz’s ‘friendship’ principle. This chapter ultimately demonstrates that these moral theories fail to imagine a place for agent-centred duties in their moral frame. The problem, I suggest, is the tendency to construe morality entirely in other-regarding terms, which is not surprising in a moral culture that tends to prize the community over the individual. This chapter is one way to challenge the literature to re-think the importance of collective goods in light of imagining some place for agent-centred duties.

In this article, I motivate for the view that the best account of the foundations of morality in the African tradition should be grounded on some relevant spiritual property—a view that I call ‘ethical supernaturalism’. In contrast to this position, the literature has been dominated by humanism as the best interpretation of African ethics, which typically is accompanied by a direct rejection of ‘ethical supernaturalism’ and a veiled rejection of non-naturalism. Here primarily, by appeal to methods of analytic philosophy, which privileges analysis and argumentation, I set out to challenge and repudiate humanism as the best interpretation of African ethics; I leave it for a future project to develop a fully-fledged African spiritual meta-ethical theory.

This article is a response to Bernard Matolino’s criticisms against Ifeanyi Menkiti’s elucidations on the normative notion of personhood in African philosophy. This article argues that Menkiti’s article is best understood to be ultimately focused on articulating the normative notion of personhood; so understood, Menkiti’s analysis eschews many of the objections made against it by Matolino. We show that the confusion lies in a general failure in African philosophy to distinguish three distinct senses of the notion of a person. We further show how the referent ‘it’ as used to pick out infants by Menkiti, contrary to Matolino’s analysis that suggests that it is an instance of ‘mal-function’ may be charitably construed to be capturing the idea that infants have moral status and/or that they are morally neutral. A defense of Menkiti’s idea of personhood is crucial in a search for a robust African perfectionist ethics.

This chapter considers the status of metaphysical capacities in the debates on personhood and value theory in African philosophy. Specifically, it considers whether metaphysical capacities are morally neutral, instrumentally good or intrinsically good. The inquiry into the status of metaphysical capacities arises because it is important for the concept of human dignity in African thought. This question emerges because there are scholars that reject capacity-based theories of value and personhood (the minimalist view of personhood) for the performance/merit-based theories of value and personhood (the maximalist view of personhood), which debate has implications for the concept of human dignity in African philosophy. This chapter presents Ikuenobe’s personhood/merit-based theory of human dignity, and it further provides three reasons why we should prefer the metaphysical capacity-based theory of human dignity. The capacity-based theory of value has the theoretical advantages of being more useful in bioethical debates, animal ethics and political theory. The chapter argues that there are good moral-political reasons to attach intrinsic value to the metaphysical capacities of our nature, where intrinsic dignity (minimalist personhood) is primary and achievement dignity (maximalist personhood) is secondary in African moral thought.

This paper reflects on Bernard Matolino’s contribution to philosophy. For heuristic purposes, I stipulate a distinction between what we may call the negative and positive projects when considering a philosopher’s body of work. The ‘negative project’ of a philosopher’s work involves his critical engagement with the extant literature in his discipline. There will be leading thinkers, theories or even schools of thought at any given time and in any discipline. One of the ways the voice and perspectives of a thinker emerges is through critical interaction with these thinkers, theories and schools of thought. I describe this part of the researcher’s work as ‘negative’ largely because it involves criticism, revision or even outright rejection of certain ideas/views/arguments in the literature. The positive project of the philosopher’s work focuses on his own distinctive and novel contribution to the field. Beyond criticism, revisions and repudiation of others’ ideas/views, a philosopher might also want to posit their own ideas or theories in the discipline. A careful reading of Matolino’s work will reveal both dimensions, the negative and positive projects. The aim of this paper is to throw a spotlight on Matolino’s work by focusing on the negative project as his contribution to African philosophy (without suggesting that there is no positive project in his corpus in philosophy).

This introductory chapter explains the rationale for the publication of this collected volume and provides an overview of the general philosophical problems which these contributions confront. We characterise two distinct approaches to political philosophy which distinguish different chapters. While the first set of authors may be said to take an objective view of needs, most often grounded, in necessary features of personhood, the second set of accounts leave needs politically contested. We argue that these two distinct approaches are, if not consistent, certainly complementary, while outlining and situating the major themes of the distinctively African political theories in this volume.

This article explores the debate between partiality and impartiality from an African perspective. I take one influential instance of a defence of impartiality in the African tradition, ‘sympathetic impartiality’, by Kwasi Wiredu, as a foil to represent African ethics. I argue that impartiality fails to cohere with three centrally defining features of African moral thought: the high regard attributed to the family, the veneration of ancestors and the notion of personhood. I merely highlight the first two aspects of African thought; I base my argument largely on the latter feature.

The chapter provides the reader with one way to approach and understand African moral philosophy. It pivots African moral philosophy on the concepts of personhood. It identifies these concepts of personhood in the salient axiological concept of Ubuntu, which is typically explained in terms of the saying “a person is a person through other persons.” In relation to the first two instances of the concepts of personhood in the saying, it identifies three crucial themes of African moral philosophy. First, it identifies foundational issues relating the source and the nature of moral value as secular and construes morality to be derived from human nature. In relation to foundations, it further clarifies that African ethics is a dignity-based ethics. Second, it identifies and elucidates the final good to revolve around the pursuit and acquisition of virtue or excellence. Finally, it considers the robustness of African moral philosophy by considering how it can account for right action, the debate on partiality and impartiality and the status and place of animals in African moral philosophy.

This book is a contribution to African philosophy, by philosophers focusing specifically on the concept of human dignity in ethical theory. The concept of ‘human dignity’ denotes the intrinsic and superlative worth associated with human beings in virtue of which we owe them utmost moral regard. Although dignity is a foundational concept for African philosophy, there remains scant literature in African philosophy dedicated to critical and systematic reflection on the concept of human dignity. This volume responds to this lacuna by bringing together chapters that offer philosophical exposition, defense (or even rejection) and application of the concept of human dignity in light of intellectual resources in African cultures, such as ubuntu, personhood, and serithi.

The introductory chapter gives the reader an overall sense of the book. The book focuses on human dignity in an African context. The chapter aims to convey a sense of the scope of African conceptions of human dignity, their contested nature, and their importance for the broader literature on human dignity. It also motivates and justifies our focus in the book on perspectives and voices from an African context in relation to the subject of human dignity. Finally, it gives the reader a sense of the contributions made by various theorists in this volume on African conceptions of human dignity.

This chapter evaluates Kwame Gyekye's argument for rejecting ethical supernaturalism in the African moral tradition (Gyekye, 2010). In this chapter, I reject Gyekye's argument for two major reasons. Firstly, I observe that Gyekye's argument is incompatible with much of African thought which is holistic, where the spiritual and physical are part of the same reality. Secondly, I criticise Gyekye for rejecting an African spiritual meta-ethics. I observe that his treatment of African meta-ethics leans heavily on Western moral theory of the divine command theory, and overlooks many promising moral-theoretical resources that could ground a promising African religious ethics. I conclude by sketching such a life-based moral theory.

This book focuses on the domains of moral philosophy, political philosophy, and political theory within African philosophy. At the heart of the volume is a call to imagine African political philosophy as embodying a needs-based political vision. While discourses in African political philosophy have fixated on the normative framework of human rights law to articulate demands for social and global justice, this book charts a new frontier in African political thought by turning from ‘rights’ to ‘needs.’ The authors aim to re-orient discourses in African philosophy beyond the impasse of rights-based confrontations to shift the conversation toward needs as a cornerstone of African political theory.

Leonhard Praeg’s book 'A report on Ubuntu' treats the question of “What is Ubuntu?” in a unique and illuminating fashion. The book begins with an approach that repositions Ubuntu by drawing a crucial distinction between what we mean when we ask the question “What is Ubuntu?”, and what we are doing when we ask this question. Praeg shifts his focus to the latter question. This crucial distinction escapes the gaze of many scholars of Ubuntu, and this book makes this gaze the basis of the entire discussion. This gaze (as an approach or method of doing Ubuntu) emphasises the political nature of asking this question over the primacy of meanings and argumentation for various understandings of Ubuntu, without in any way shying away from engaging the latter. It is not that the meaning of Ubuntu is unimportant, but the significance of this concept must be understood with reference to the political context. In other words, as a pre-condition for any meaningful conversation about Ubuntu, the political context must be brought to the fore and investigated. This book presents, in a fresh and fruitful way, this political nature (the blind spot of Ubuntu discourse) and reality that eludes many a discourse on Ubuntu.