Munamato Chemhuru

This book focuses on under-explored and often neglected issues in contemporary African environmental philosophy and ethics. Critical issues such as the moral status of nature, African conceptions of animal moral status and rights, African conceptions of environmental justice, African relational Environmentalism, ubuntu, African theocentric and teleological environmentalism are addressed in this book. It is unique in so far as it goes beyond the generalized focus on African metaphysics and African ethics by exploring how these views might be understood differently in order to conceptualize African environmental ethics. Against the background where environmental problems such as pollution, climate change, extinction of flora and fauna, and global warming are plain to see, it becomes useful to examine how African conceptions of environmental ethics could be understood in order to confront some of these problems facing the whole world. This book will be of value to undergraduate students, graduate students and academics working in the area of African Philosophy, African Environmental Ethics and Global Ethics in general.

After the discovery of the origins of the new coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) to be possibly wet markets in Wuhan, China, the normative questions of what ought to be the ethical relations between human beings and non-human animals have started to attract renewed interest among environmentalists. Although these are not new questions in environmental philosophy, the impact of COVID-19 across the world is challenging human beings to seriously reconsider some of these often-neglected questions. In this article, I examine COVID-19 as essentially an environmental ethical challenge. Specifically, I consider the extent to which the relationships between human and non-human animals can effectively impact the health and lives of humanity and the environment at large. I then provide some alternative ways by which human beings ought to re-think their relationships with non-human animals to avoid future catastrophes like COVID-19. I argue that the African view of animal ethics could at least provide a valuable lens through which to view correct relations between human beings and non-human animals. Ultimately, I set forth and defend an African environmental ethic for the right relations between human beings and animals and to show how such an ethic better places humanity in confronting future zoonoses.

In this chapter, we revisit some of these central and unresolved practical problems facing contemporary African philosophy. We have identified racism, poverty, religion, gender, Afrophobia, sexuality, democracy and environment as some of the topical and contentious issues in post-colonial sub-Saharan Africa. Although these issues have been extensively dealt with in the literature in philosophy in general, they have largely been understood from different Western philosophical persuasions. Even though some African philosophers have considered these issues, there is still a lack of robust conversations on the possible directions that humanity, especially from the African perspective ought to take on each of these important issues prompting the need for further interrogation into these. We, therefore, seek to consider how these issues might be conceptualised in sub-Saharan Africa without necessarily reproducing Western philosophical paradigms. For each of these topics, we show how it constitutes a problem to contemporary Africa by drawing the reader’s attention to the reality of each of the problems in contemporary Africa such as colour prejudice, discrimination, poverty, religious extremism and violent conflicts, human rights violations, gender inequality and violence, intolerance, xenophobia and Afrophobia, bad governance, state capture and the ecological crisis. We then analyse how each of the problems has so far been articulated, understood and circumscribed within the African philosophical traditions. In the end, we seek to propose how to ground new philosophical perspectives by which to understand these issues beyond the existing contemporary philosophical perspectives.

Sub-Saharan Africa is characteristically confronted with poverty, hunger, disease, drought, war, climate change and inequality among other problems. However, the advent of the fourth industrial revolution presents an opportunity for Africa to solve some of these problems through technological innovations offered by information technology, internet of things, networks, robotics, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and superintelligence. These have been absorbed and engrained into human lives and completely changing the way humans live. It is therefore clear that the 4IR is an inescapable reality. Yet the ethical reflection on the relations that ought to exist between human beings and technology seems to be philosophically absurd. One might not expect ethical considerability to be extended beyond humans to include things that cannot directly be harmed such as technologies, although use of technologies has ethical implications on humans and the environment. I argue for the need for introspection on relations between humans and technology. By reflecting from the perspective of African ethics, I consider the positive impact of the fourth industrial revolution in Africa and seek to critically analyse the ethical issues, dilemmas and controversies associated with it.

The idea of moral status has been examined in various applied ethical discourses such as medical ethics and environmental ethics. However, little has so far been done in terms of appraising these fundamental disciplines from an African philosophical perspective. I venture into this fairly novel area of African environmental ethics as I seek to examine an African understanding of the moral status of nature. As I take a pluralist approach to the idea of moral status of nature in African environmental philosophy, I seek to argue that both living and non-living beings in the environment ought to be granted moral status. I make use of the teleological view of existence to provide various reasons why nature should be considered as having moral or ethical standing such that human beings should have ethical obligations that are independent of their duties and obligations towards fellow human beings. Overall, I seek to espouse a uniquely African view of the moral status on nature, one that fundamentally differs from other views dominant much of Western philosophical thinking.

This critical reader addresses African environmental ethics in a unique way by drawing from a variety of authors with diverse perspectives on underexplored and often neglected issues in African philosophy and ethics. Central issues in contemporary African environmental ethics are addressed such as: The moral status of nature, Ubuntu and the Environment, African conceptions of animal moral status and rights, African conceptions of environmental justice, African relationalism, theocentric and teleological environmentalism. The book goes beyond the generalised focus on African metaphysics and African ethics by exploring further how these views might be understood differently in order to conceptualise plausible African environmental ethical perspectives.

While a relativist view of environmental ethics could be quite difficult to justify, it is also difficult to be so strict about the quest for global environmental justice. At the same time, even though the reality of environmental degradation is plain to see, most African traditional communities, and even their respective states at large, still wallow in poverty such that they remain in need of developing themselves if they are to reach the level of development of the countries in the global North. More so, the majority of indigenous and mostly poor and underrepresented African people in the global South are faced with disproportionate amounts of environmental benefits and burdens compared to their counterparts in the global North. In this article, I therefore seek to examine a normative framework for conceptualising global environmental justice within different environmental, social, political and economic contexts. I consider how best environmental benefits and burdens could be fairly distributed across communities with different environmental, social, political and economic advantages. In the end, I appeal to John Rawls’s conception of distributive justice as a framework for arriving at an acceptable view of global environmental justice that takes into account the circumstances of the global South.