Thaddeus Metz

According to a normative-theoretic interpretation of the African moral-political tradition that I have advanced, an agent is at bottom obligated to respect individuals in virtue of their ability to be party to communal (or harmonious) relationships. In practice that means that a moral agent is typically obligated to relate communally with innocents, that is, to share a way of life with them and to care for their quality of life. I have argued that this relational principle of right action provides pro tanto reason to doubt the justifiability of adopting biotechnological enhancements, roughly on the ground that they would tend to put distance between people, as opposed to bring them closer together. Recently several scholars have argued that this point does not tell against enhancements; they maintain that my ethic in fact likely justifies them, at least moral ones. In this essay, I critically discuss their reasoning, providing a more thorough and careful discussion than I have in the past of why I suspect that enhancements risk flouting a communal morality. Composed for the ETH Zürich project on “Relational Ethics in Technological Societies".

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.

Karl Marx's normative views have routinely been contrasted with moral-political theories such as utilitarianism and Rawlsian justice. They have not been systematically contrasted with characteristically African, and specifically communal, values, with post-independence African leaders such as Nyerere and Nkrumah instead having emphasized the similarities. In this article, a work of analytic philosophy, I sketch the essentials of Marx’s approach to the human good, especially his early writings on alienation from 1843-1845, and weigh them up against a theoretical interpretation of the under-explored African moral-political tradition. According to the latter perspective, a person displays human excellence insofar as she prizes communal relationships, ones of sharing a way of life and caring for others’ quality of life. My aims are to identify key differences between this Afro-communalism and the young Marx’s views, and, where they diverge, to provide some reasons for favouring one approach over the other. I conclude that insofar as the two ethics differ, the African ideal is the better candidate for capturing a moral point view, one that includes human rights, whereas Marx’s is preferable, and even compelling to a wide contemporary audience, as a broader account of how to live well.

I draw on ideas salient in contemporary literate African philosophy to construct two new theoretical ways of capturing the essence of duties to oneself. According to one theory, a person has a foundational duty to “relate” to herself in ways similar to how the African field has often thought that a person should relate with others, viz., harmoniously. According to the second, one has a foundational duty to produce liveliness in oneself. In addition to articulating these novel attempts to capture what all duties to oneself might have in common and showing that each one captures several intuitions about them, I offer some reasons to think that the harmony theory is more attractive than the vitality one. I conclude that there are values prominent in the African tradition that, upon some reformulation, ground comprehensive accounts of what one owes oneself that merit consideration by a global audience as rivals to, say, Kantian-rationalist approaches common in the West.

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.

In Menkiti’s Moral Man, Oritsegbubemi Oyowe aims to provide a sympathetic interpretation of the works of Ifeanyi Menkiti as they address personhood, community, and other facets of morality. In my contribution I maintain that, while Oyowe’s Menkiti is more plausible than the way Menkiti has often been read, there are still respects in which the account of personhood advanced invites criticism. One criticism is that it is implausible to think that personhood is constituted by others recognizing one as a person. Instead, insofar as community constitutes one’s personhood, it is insofar as one lived up to norms of interpersonal morality. A second criticism is that there are intuitively some dimensions of personhood that are not constituted by the community or other-regard at all. In particular, I argue that there are moral duties to oneself that exist and that are not well captured by any sensible understanding of the view that community alone constitutes personhood, such that part of what it is to be a full person is to treat oneself in certain ways. In sum, personhood, while admittedly social, is not as social as Oyowe’s Menkiti believes.

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.

The core idea of A Relational Theory of Justice is that normative political and legal philosophy should be grounded on people’s relational features, in particular their ability to commune with others and be communed with by them. Usually, philosophers of justice in the West have based their views on people’s intrinsic features, ones that make no essential reference to others, such as their autonomy, self-ownership, or well-being. In addition, often critics of basing politics and law on justice, whether in the African, feminist/care, Marxian, or Confucian traditions, have appealed to non-intrinsic values as leverage, roughly contending that relationships are more important than justice. In contrast to both major camps, this book articulates and defends accounts of justice based on the dignity of people’s relational nature. A proper valuation of people’s capacity to be party to communal relationships does not transcend categories of justice, but instead calls for certain sorts that differ in plausible ways from those grounded on intrinsic properties. Applications are discussed in the contexts of political, economic, compensatory, criminal, transitional, and global justice. Available for download is the Table of Contents.

One aim of this chapter is to acquaint a reader unfamiliar with African philosophy with some of its more prominent ethical perspectives, especially those pertaining to ubuntu, as they bear on work. However, I undertake this discussion with some sympathy towards these implications, such that another aim is to point out that the prescriptions for the workplace that moral philosophers working in the African tradition have made (or would sensibly make given their more basic commitments) are worth taking seriously regardless of the reader’s background. The vitalist and communalist strains of ethical thought prominent amongst African philosophers are relatively unknown in globally influential discourses, but are revealing in the context of work. Central topics include: what the point of work is; how to distribute jobs; why there might be a right to work; and how to organize the production process. For each question, I emphasize respects in which African ethical thought offers answers that are both different from and plausible relative to what is dominant in English-speaking theory or practice.

In this article I expound and evaluate key ideas from monographs devoted to African political philosophy and published since 2020. The featured titles are __Ubuntu for Warriors__, Justice and Human Rights in the African Imagination, Capitalism and Freedom in African Political Philosophy, African Politics and Ethics, Ludic Ubuntu Ethics: Decolonizing Justice, Deliberative Agency: A Study in Modern African Political Philosophy, and Ubuntu Beyond Identities. Major topics from these works that I take up include: individual rights to civil liberties; the proper way to undertake socio-economic development; the just allocation of political power; the justification of state coercion in the contexts of punishment and war; and restorative justice. I work to contextualize central claims about these topics, provide a critical perspective on them, and note some gaps that need to be filled going forward.

There are two ways that philosophy could transform a life to make it substantially more meaningful: on the one hand, philosophical enquiry might reveal other activities that would make life meaningful, enabling a philosopher (or others) to live meaningfully as a result of the enquiry, while, on the other hand, it might be that doing philosophy is in itself one way to make the philosopher's life notably meaningful. I explore the latter path. I argue against views of meaning in life entailing that philosophy could not itself be particularly meaningful or only rarely could be, after which I critically reflect on a variety of respects in which philosophical reflection, either by its own nature or if undertaken in some familiar ways, would plausibly enhance the meaning in the philosopher's life. In particular, I critically discuss views of Bertrand Russell, Joe Mintoff, and Neil Levy that purport to explain how philosophy itself confers meaningfulness, contending that their explanations are not as comprehensive as my own.

An idea salient in the African and East Asian philosophical traditions is that the right sort of socio-political interaction would be similar to the intuitive ways that family members ought to relate to each other. Applying this perspective to economic and ecological inequalities, I articulate some principles implicit in healthy familial relationships, show what they entail for certain aspects of distributive justice at the national level, and contend that the implications are plausible relative to competing theories such as utilitarianism, Rawlsianism, and the Capabilities Approach. Specifically, I maintain that reflection on familial norms suggests that an array of objective goods, particularly ones pertaining to relationality, the development of talents, and life, should be central to what the state distributes, an account that rivals subjective well-being, primary goods, or democratically chosen capabilities. When it comes to how much the state should ideally ensure each citizen has, reflection on familial norms supports a new, balancing approach, according to which all have a comparable share of resources needed for objective goodness, but more go to those with great ability or great disability, an approach that differs, and plausibly so, from maximizing, prioritizing the worst off, equalizing, or providing a sufficient minimum.

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.