Oche Onazi

This chapter considers how the African legal philosophy of disability justice can be translated into practice in contributing to the improvement of the community experience for people with disabilities. It does so by providing the outlines of a new public moral culture of stringent ethical and moral horizontal obligations owed to people with disabilities by people without disabilities. It argues that a new public moral culture of obligations is contingent on a moral and political educational agenda capable of nurturing special obligations owed to people with disabilities and other vulnerable citizens. An essential part of this reform agenda is predicated on moral and political citizenship education supported by a hypothecated tax scheme, both of which would provide a vehicle to concretise the kind of ethical and moral obligations foundational to African legal philosophy. It is argued that this would underscore the obligations incumbent on people without disabilities to treat others with compassion, especially people with disabilities, as a basic requirement of morality and justice that binds members of any political community.

Disability justice chapter develops the central argument of the book. It proposes an African legal philosophy from a relational community ideal as a plausible and attractive way of defining disability justice. It argues that, although Africa’s rich customary and pluralist legal and intellectual heritage provides the most obvious foundation on which to define African legal philosophy, they are too heterogeneous and inherently descriptive to ground disability justice in necessary, sufficient, normative, general and universal terms. After demonstrating the difficulty with defining disability justice through Africa’s customary and pluralist heritage, the chapter outlines and defends a relational community conception of the ideal. Conceived as an African legal philosophy of disability justice, the proposal is offered as an alternative criterion for evaluating, criticising and modifying existing legal and political institutions, as well as for creating new ones to include and respond to the needs and dependencies of people with disabilities within the diverse communities across Africa.

This chapter discusses the human rights-based approach to disability justice through the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities 2006 (the Convention or CRPD) and the emerging African regional disability human rights framework. Through anecdotes from Tanzania, South Africa, Mozambique, Ghana, Uganda, Malawi and Kenya, the chapter argues that it is not the absence of laws and policies that has been the obstacle to disability justice in Africa, but rather the inability of existing human rights laws and policies to challenge negative cultural beliefs and social perceptions of disability. The recently established Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Africa 2018 (the Protocol) presents a unique opportunity to address this gap. However, the chapter will raise doubts about whether the Protocol can make a meaningful impact on the lives of people with disabilities in Africa without a substantial revision to the order in which duties are presented and articulated in the regional instrument.

This chapter reflects on the implications of the argument of this book. It commences by identifying the prospects and limitations of human rights and capability approaches to disability justice, which have made it necessary to explore an alternative approach through African philosophy and African African philosophy. Although presented as an alternative to the leading approaches, the legal philosophy of disability justice is presented as an internal critique of the literature on African philosophy. The main contribution of this book is best understood as an attempt to remedy the absence of the figure of the disabled person in the literature on African philosophy. After providing further reasons why the book has relied upon the relational conception of community to develop its proposed legal philosophy of disability justice, the chapter discusses some of the salient features of the argument. It concludes by discussing issues that the book has tried to avoid and responds to some objections to the argument of the book, as well as considering its implications for practice.

This chapter introduces the argument of the book. After distinguishing between African group-based and relational conceptions of community, the chapter argues that the latter, with certain modifications, offers a more attractive basis to develop a novel African legal philosophy of disability justice. Building on this foundation, the chapter outlines an African legal philosophy of disability justice comprised of ethical ideals of community, relationships and obligations. Although the scope of this book is limited to setting out as clearly as possible what the proposed African legal philosophy of disability justice would look like, the chapter introduces a civic and citizenship education agenda and a hypothecated tax scheme to concretely nurture and institutionalise a new public moral culture of obligations of people without disabilities to people with disabilities. The chapter concludes by outlining the structure of the book.

Disability justice isolated and unrelated antecedents, disability now features in the literature on justice in the leading tradition of legal and political philosophy. This chapter focuses on Martha Nussbaum’s Capabilities approach, which is arguably the most important contribution to disability justice today. In discussing Nussbaum’s approach, the chapter focuses on whether it pays sufficient attention to the concept of community in the light of its centrality to the argument of this book. Although Nussbaum’s emphasis on the Aristotelian conception of person and the capability of Affiliation implies an appreciation of the Relational nature of human beings and the value of community, these features stand in tension with the political liberal and individualistic underpinnings of the capabilities approach. In contrast to scholars who have sought to expand the capabilities approach along robust Group-based, collective or relational inclinations, the chapter argues that the reasons that have made it necessary to modify the approach point to the absence of and the need for a compelling and coherent alternative framework that systematically explains the advantages, as well as the law and policy implications of considering disability justice from a distinctly relational community ideal.

This chapter outlines the central research question, justifications and main argument of the book. It introduces and defines the concept of disability justice and highlights how it is a neglected subject in the literature on African philosophy and African legal philosophy. After introducing the conventional lines along which the debate on disability justice proceeds in the literature on human rights and legal and political philosophy, the chapter outlines the problems that have given rise to the argument of this book resulting from African philosophy: the omission of people with disabilities from the literature on persons and community. This not only clarifies why African philosophy provides an appropriate context in which to explore these issues, but also justifies why the question of disability justice should be addressed through an African legal philosophy, even though questions about its meaning and existence remain unsettled. The chapter concludes by outlining the argument of the book.

The volume comprises a selection of papers delivered at the 24th IVR World Congress. All papers address the challenge of the construction of a Global Ethics in the context of fragmented and pluralist societies, in which the idea of an Ethical Space seems to be an unachievable project, but also an indispensable device for cooperation between individuals, communities and states.The idea of a Global Ethics is to be constructed from within different traditions and environments with a mutual understanding and exchange of opinions. In this volume, we combine the ideas of Harmony (typical of the traditional Chinese legal philosophy) and of the Rule of Law (as it is understood in Western societies) to new ideals. By acknowledging the potential that these ideals have on a global scale, the papers of the first section, Ethical Dimensions of the Rule of Law address some of the key ethical problems in today's world. In a second section, some of the leading legal philosophers in China propose a way to incorporate the values of Harmony and of the Rule of Law into the Chinese Law and Society.

How should disability justice be conceptualised, not by orthodox human rights or capabilities approaches, but by a legal philosophy that mirrors an African relational community ideal? This book develops the first comprehensive answer to this question through the contemporary literature on African philosophy, which is relied upon to construct a legal philosophy of disability justice comprising of ethical ideals of community, human relationships and obligations. From these ideals, an African legal philosophy of disability justice is offered as a criterion for critically evaluating existing laws, legal and political institutions, as well as providing an ethical basis for creating new ones to ensure that they are inclusive to people with disabilities. In taking an alternative perspective on the subject, the book outlines and emphasises the need for a new public culture of obligations owed to people with disabilities, highlighting both the prospects and difficulties of achieving the ideal of disability justice that continues to elude the lived experiences of millions of Africans today.

How is Nigeria’s failure to fulfil its obligations as a signatory of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to be appreciated or even resolved? Answers to this are sought through a seminal criticism of human rights, namely, Simone Weil’s 1942 essay Human Personality. Weil questioned the ability of human rights concepts to cause the powerful to develop the emotional dispositions of empathy for those who suffer. Weil’s insights provide a convincing explanation that the indifference of Nigerian authorities towards the Convention may be accounted for by the weakness of human rights discourse to foster human capacity for empathy and care for those who suffer. Weil’s criticisms will serve as a point of departure for a particular way to circumvent this inadequacy of human rights discourse to achieve disability justice in Nigeria through other means. I argue that Weil, through her concept of attention, grappled with and offers a consciousness of suffering and vulnerability that is not only uncommon to existing juridical human rights approaches, but is achievable through the active participation in the very forms of suffering and vulnerability in which amelioration is sought. To provide empirical content to this argument, I turn to a short-lived initiative of the Nigerian disability movement, which if ethico-politically refined and widely applied, can supply an action-theoretical grounding for and be combined with Weil’s work to elevate agitations for disability justice above human rights to the realm of human obligations.

The first part of this paper provides a general theory of moral climates, which incorporates the following three elements: first, the values and limitations of that picture of moral behaviour focused on rules, rule-following and rationality; second, that picture of moral behaviour focused on institutionally-embedded activity; and third, that picture of moral behaviour that urges us to come face to face with our own limitations, i.e., our own ways of orienting ourselves to objects of value, such that we do not neglect the vigilance required in order to see and recognise the great variety and depth of suffering and vulnerability. The moral climate of any particular social environment can be evaluated from the perspective of these three elements. The second part of the paper applies this general theory of moral climates to that of international economic institutions. It is argued that, despite their importance, both human rights discourse and institutional features designed to increase participation from developing countries in decision- and policy-making, are of limited use, partly because of their inherent limitations, and partly because of the emergence of international economic institutions in the context of an already heavily de-politicised and autonomous economic sphere. The necessary transformation of international economic institutions ought not to neglect the continuing domination of the orientation of those institutions towards the value of efficiency, to which all other values tend to be made subordinate. The paper proposes not only vigilance about the limitations of current and proposed normative languages and institutional features, but also urges the consideration of a Community Forum scheme, which is designed to bring to light and thereafter communicate, via the participation of international experts and artists, some of the particularities of suffering and vulnerability within specific communities. Finally, the paper illustrates the need for greater awareness of the particularities of suffering and vulnerability by considering the continuing problem of access to public goods and services amongst the poor in Nigeria.

The book is a collection of essays, which aim to situate African legal theory in the context of the myriad of contemporary global challenges; from the prevalence of war to the misery of poverty and disease to the crises of the environment. Apart from being problems that have an indelible African mark on them, a common theme that runs throughout the essays in this book is that African legal theory has been excluded, under-explored or under-theorised in the search for solutions to such contemporary problems. The essays make a modest attempt to reverse this trend. The contributors investigate and introduce readers to the key issues, questions, concepts, impulses and problems that underpin the idea of African legal theory. They outline the potential offered by African legal theory and open up its key concepts and impulses for critical scrutiny. This is done in order to develop a better understanding of the extent to which African legal theory can contribute to discourses seeking to address some of the challenges that confront African and non-African societies alike.