Jessica Lerm

Kantianism has long been the enemy of African Philosophy. In this paper, I aim to motivate the surprising – possibly even offensive – thesis that Kantianism needs the African aphorism for its completion, and vice versa. The African aphorism is the basic precept of African ethics, that is, “A person is a person through other persons”. I begin by describing my favoured, constructivist reading of this African aphorism, after which I outline the problem Kant faces in his famous derivation of the categorical imperative from the hypothetical imperative. I examine the solutions to this problem previously proposed by Korsgaard and Darwall, and, finding both wanting, go on to explain how I think the African aphorism can do what these others could not. We can, as Kant intended, derive the categorical imperative from the hypothetical imperative – but only with the additional, African premise that a person is a person through other persons.

In his recent book, An African Ethics of Personhood and Bioethics: A Reflection on Abortion and Euthanasia (2020), South African philosopher Motsamai Molefe argues for the impermissibility of abortion on the grounds that a foetus possesses the potential for dignity, which he argues amounts to the potential to develop the African virtues. However, we argue, firstly, that his account of the supposed wrongfulness of abortion is inconsistent with his later account of the supposed permissibility of euthanasia; we argue that his account succumbs to the well-known objections to the potentiality principle from as long ago as the 1970s; and, finally, we argue that his account is indeterminate in so far as it does not conclusively entail the immorality of abortion in the first place. Altogether, this amounts to a decisive rejection of Molefe's anti-abortionism.

The agent-relative/agent-neutral distinction is very well established and widely employed in the metaethical literature. However, I argue that there are actually two different senses of the distinction at large: the hetero-/homogeneous sense and the dependence/independence sense. The traditional, unqualified distinction ought, therefore, to be amended, with each use of the distinction being stipulated as used in either the hetero-/homogeneous sense or the dependence/independence sense. Careful analysis of various metaethics supports that there are these two senses – analysis, in particular, of a neo-Kantian metaethic, according to which reasons are agent-relative in the dependence sense but agent-neutral in the homogeneous sense, and – perhaps surprisingly – of Utilitarianism, according to which reasons are agent-neutral in the independence sense but agent-relative in the heterogeneous sense

Stephen Darwall, in his book The Second -Person Standpoint, has argued for an account of morality grounded in what he calls second - personal reasons. My first aim in this paper is to demonstrate the value of an account like Darwall’s; as I read it, it responds to the need for an account of morality as ‘intrinsic’ to the person. However, I go on to argue, as my second aim in this paper, that Darwall’s account is ultimately unsuccessful. I hope to achieve these aims by contrasting Darwall’s second - personal account with two other accounts, Hobbes’ and the neo-Kantians’. In the first case, I aim to show that Darwall’s account meets a need that the other accounts don’t in virtue of its differences from the other accounts; and in the second case, I aim to show that Darwall’s account ultimately fails in virtue of its residual similarities to at least one of them