“I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am”, generally regarded as the guiding principle of African humanism, expresses the view that a person is a person through other persons and is closely associated but not identical with African communitarianism, or communalism. Against Ifeanyi Menkiti’s “unrestricted or radical or excessive communitarianism” Kwame Gyekye has proposed a “restricted or moderate communitarianism”. Whereas personhood, for Menkiti, is acquired over time, with increasing moral maturation, seniority (...) and agency, Gyekye considers it to arise automatically with being born human. The problem with Menkiti’s account of personhood is that it is at once too wide and too narrow. On the other hand, it remains unclear to what extent Gyekye’s is a communitarian view – and to what extent it is distinctly ‘African’. I conclude with a critical reflection on the implications of African communalism and personhood for non-human animals. Keywords: Ifeanyi Menkiti, Kwame Gyekye, African Communitarianism, Non-Human Animals, Personhood. (shrink)

I argue that individual autonomy and rights can be defended but only in African or qualified version of communitarianism. I posit that there are two possible versions of communitarianism: the qualified or the African and the unqualified or the version discussed mostly by Western scholars. I show that Ifeanyi Menkiti, Kwame Gyekye, Michael Eze and Bernard Matolino have formulated communitarian theories of right in African philosophy. I explain that while Menkiti and Gyekye erroneously employed the (...) unqualified version in their proposals, Eze and Matolino who employed the qualified version failed to ground it in a non-Western or African logic. I argue that while the Western or Aristotelian logic grounds the unqualified version making it difficult to defend autonomy and rights within it, an African logic can be used to ground a qualified version of communitarianism in order to bring out an important African cultural value such as complementarity which affirms the identity of the individual first, so as to justify other communal values such as solidarity and common good, etc. I therefore contend that the qualified version is the correct specimen for analysing the individual-community relationship in African philosophy in which autonomy and rights can be defended. Keywords: individual autonomy, rights, African philosophy, Afro-communitarianism, Menkiti, Gyekye, Eze, Matolino. (shrink)

This essay provides an exposition and a plausible interpretation of Ifeanyi Menkiti’s conception of personhood vis-a-vis this community. I do this, partly, to rebut some specific criticisms by Kwame Gyekye and Bernard Matolino. They construe Menkiti’s account, primarily, as a metaphysical thesis about the community that provides the essential ontological basis for the nature of personhood. They argue that this view of communitarianism is radical or extreme because the community diminishes individuality and prioritizes community’s interests over (...) individuals’ interests, freedom, and rights. I argue that Gyekye’s and Matolino’s interpretations of Menkiti’s view are mistaken, and that Menkiti’s account of the connection between the community and personhood is a social-moral thesis. This thesis argues that the community provides the norms and material conditions for individuals to live a meaningful life and achieve personhood, and achieving personhood involves being integrated into, and contributing positively to the harmony of, the community. Keywords: Menkiti, Gyekye, Matolino, Personhood, Community, Moderate Communitarianism, Radical Communitarianism. (shrink)

Ifeanyi Menkiti’s “Person and Community in African Traditional Thought” is criticized from the standpoint that the author assumes a dichotomous framework taken over in his decision to articulate the African view of the person in the idiom of modern philosophy. Kwame Gyekye’s critique of Menkiti in “Person and Community in Akan Thought” is also scrutinized to see if it manages to break free from this framework. I conclude by calling for a departure from quasi-scientific approaches to (...) human nature and experience that attempt to apprehend culture from a position without culture. (shrink)

It is generally accepted that the normative idea of personhood is central to African moral thought, but what has not been done in the literature is to explicate its relationship to the Western idea of rights. In this article, I investigate this relationship between rights and an African normative conception of personhood. My aim, ultimately, is to give us a cursory sense why duties engendered by rights and those by the idea of personhood will tend (...) to clash. To facilitate a meaningful philosophical discussion, I locate this engagement in the context of a debate between Ifeanyi Menkiti and Kwame Gyekye about the nature of Afro-communitarianism, whether it will ground rights as primary or secondary. I endorse Menkiti’s stance that duties are primary and rights secondary; and, I also problematize moderate communitarianism for taking a Western stance by employing a naturalist approach to rights. (shrink)

The ongoing debate among African philosophers on the relation of the individual and the community has spawned radical, moderate, and limited communitarian views. In this paper we will insert the question of interpersonal communication into the individual-community conundrum and raise the discourse to the level of cross-cultural engagement. We will highlight the dominant perspectives in Afro-communitarianism with particular emphasis on the Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye and the Nigerian philosopher Ifeanyi Menkiti. Expanding the discourse into the domain of (...) intercultural/comparative philosophy, this paper will engage Gyekye and Menkiti’s Afro-communitarianism and Jean-Paul Sartre’s radical individualism and the resulting conflictual presentation of interpersonal relation. The paper adopts the conversational method. Keywords: Ifeanyi Menkiti, Kwame Gyekye, Afro-communitarianism, community, individual, Jean-Paul Sartre. (shrink)

For four decades Ifeanyi Menkiti has addressed the question of which sort of community constitutes personhood from a characteristically African perspective. In this chapter, I critically discuss the conceptions of how one acquires personhood through community that Menkiti has advanced, in search of the one that would most enable him to avoid prominent moral objections made to his views over the years. In particular, his account of personhood has been criticized for insufficiently accommodating individual difference, (...) most recently in respect of gender and sexuality. I draw on the resources in Menkiti’s work for rebutting this line of criticism, but contend that, even if he can avoid that one, another, new objection looms large: because of Menkiti’s claim that reciprocity is central to community, he is committed to the view that human infants and mentally incapacitated adults lack moral standing, in the way he explicitly believes animals lack it. After showing that, according to Menkiti’s strongest conception of personhood, one counterintuitively cannot acquire it in the course of interacting with any non-persons, I articulate an alternative conception of how to understand the role of community in acquiring personhood that avoids this problem as well as the other ones discussed. (shrink)

There has been a debate, popularized by Ifenyi Menkiti and Kwame Gyekye, regarding philosophical understandings of the human person in Africa. The debate revolves around the saying "So and so is not a person." Gyekye convincingly argues that the saying is a manner of speech, intended to be a moral evaluation of a person's actions. Menkiti, however, goes further and suggests that many of the African conceptions of a person are based on a dynamic understanding of the (...) self. Similar findings were made of Maasai concepts of personhood in the study done by Patrick Dikirr. The "potential self" is not given but is always being constructed by one's deeds and one's relations. While it is certainly a romanticization to imagine Africans as harmoniously communal in contrast to the "isolated individuals" who supposedly inhabit the West, nevertheless, for a Maasai one gains self-identity and status to a large extent through one's relations to other persons and to animals. However, the paper illustrates the many ways in which Maasais still emphasize individual achievement and thought, debunking notions of African "group-think" and conformity. The paper then draws on Axel Honneth's insights into "recognition" to note the extent to which Maasai recognition of each other prevents the community's capitulation to the value system of other ethnic groups in Kenya or Western influence. (shrink)

This essay provides an exposition and a plausible interpretation of Ifeanyi Menkiti’s conception of personhood vis-a-vis this community. I do this, partly, to rebut some specific criticisms by Kwame Gyekye and Bernard Matolino. They construe Menkiti’s account, primarily, as a metaphysical thesis about the community that provides the essential ontological basis for the nature of personhood. They argue that this view of communitarianism is radical or extreme because the community diminishes individuality and prioritizes community’s interests over (...) individuals’ interests, freedom, and rights. I argue that Gyekye’s and Matolino’s interpretations of Menkiti’s view are mistaken, and that Menkiti’s account of the connection between the community and personhood is a social-moral thesis. This thesis argues that the community provides the norms and material conditions for individuals to live a meaningful life and achieve personhood, and achievingpersonhood involves being integrated into, and contributing positively to the harmony of, the community. (shrink)

This paper explores how moderate communitarianism could bring about a greater sense of political morality in the practice of democracy in contemporary Africa. Moderate communitarianism is a thesis traceable to Kwame Gyekye, the Akan philosopher. This thesis is a moderation of the infl uence of the community in the Akan, an African social structure. In ensuring good political morality in the Akan, and therefore the African community, Gyekye proposes moral revolution over the enforcement of the law. I (...) perform two main tasks in this article: I reinforce the view that in a democratic framework, moderate communitarianism offers lessons on political morality, and I challenge the notion that moral revolution has greater prospects for bringing about political morality than law enforcement. (shrink)

Over the past four decades, I have been asked many questions regarding the substance and methodology of my essay “Person and Community in African Thought”. I cannot in the space of these pages retrieve or reframe the content and implications of these several questions and it would be fool-hardy to attempt an answer to all of them here. But that is no reason not to try to say a few things, by way of additional commentary, on the occasion of (...) this retrospective on the essay. It would be helpful to proceed by concentrating on a few issues which have been of some concern, or interest, to readers over the years, adding a response, however brief, as I go along. Keywords: Community, Personhood, Descriptive Metaphysics Africa Philosophy Human Person. (shrink)

The communitarian conception of person is a widely accepted view in African thought. Kwame Gyekye thinks there is a distinction between what he calls radical communitarianism and his own version of moderate communitarianism. He is of the view that radical communitarianism is faced with insurmountable problems and ought to be jettisoned in favour of his moderate communitarianism. Gyekye’s strategy is twofold; he firstly seeks to show the shortcomings of radical communitarianism – particularly by attacking Ifeanyi Menkiti’s position. (...) Secondly, he seeks to show the authenticity of his version as well as its serious regard for individual rights as representing a triumph over radical communitarianism. In this paper, I seek to contest both of Gyekye’s strategies. (shrink)

This article attempts to defend Kwame Gyekye’s moderate communitarianism (MC) from the trenchant criticism that it is as defective as radical communitarianism (RC) since they both fail to take rights seriously. As part of my response, I raise two critical questions. Firstly, I question the supposition in the literature that there is such a thing as radical communitarianism. I point out that talk of radical communitarianism is tantamount to attacking a “straw-man.” Secondly, I question the efficacy of the criticism (...) that MC does not take rights seriously, given that there is no account of what it means to take rights seriously in the African tradition. This criticism, insofar as it does not specify a criterion of what it means to take rights seriously, remains defective. The central contribution of this article is to call our attention to the fact that the intellectual culture of rights will surely be affected by Afro-communitarianism, which emphasises our duties to all. (shrink)

If contemporary African political philosophy is going to develop substantially in fresh directions, it probably will not be enough, say, to rehash the old personhood debate between Kwame Gyekye and Ifeanyi Menkiti, or to nit-pick at Gyekye’s system, as much of the literature in the field has done. Instead, major advances are likely to emerge on the basis of new, principled interpretations of sub-Saharan moral thought. In recent work, I have fleshed out two types of moral (...) theories that have a clearly sub-Saharan basis, that differ from Gyekye’s moral perspective, and that also happen to constitute genuine rivals to dominant Western theories such as utilitarianism, Kantianism and contractualism. In catchwords, these African moral theories are constituted by ideals regarding community or friendliness, on the one hand, and vitality or liveliness, on the other. In this article I sketch these two under-explored ethical perspectives and then suggest several respects in which their implications for salient political controversies are novel and revealing. Sometimes the new African moral theories—and the community-based one in particular--entail different conclusions from Gyekye's position, while other times their conclusions are the same as Gyekye’s, but they provide different rationales for them that are more compelling than his. (shrink)

An avowed communitarian, Gyekye follows the lead of such African communitarians as Menkiti who believe that the community is ontologically prior to the individual. However, unlike Menkiti and other...

This essay deals with the ideas of Ifeanyi Menkiti and Kwame Gyekye on the individual-community relationship. I begin with a provocative statement: most African intellectuals struggle with abandoning Westernity and consequently remain at the Eshuean crossroads seeking to please both sides of the abyss. It is my argument that both Menkiti and Gyekye understood that teasing out our philosophical problems might lead us to an intellectual clarity about the concepts of community and individual in African cultures. (...) I am making no attempt to solve this problem of Eshuean crossroads in this essay; I simply want to establish the grounds upon which the combatants of philosophical ideas like Menkiti and Gyekye are fighting. Keywords: Westernity, Ifeanyi Menkiti, Kwame Gyekye, Eshuean Crossroads, Africa. (shrink)

Theories regarding the nature and achievement of personhood in a communitarian context appear to differ in significant respects in the writings of several contemporary African philosophers. Ifeanyi Menkiti seems to regard ethnic differences as sufficient to warrant a national accommodation of multiculturalism with respect to moralities and attendant beliefs. Kwasi Wiredu argues that there is a substantive universal moral principle that undercuts such apparent and relatively superficial diversity. Communitarianism also seems to provide a better framework for explaining (...) how a human being becomes a person than classical liberal theory as enunciated by someone like John Rawls. (shrink)

The ongoing debate among African philosophers on the relation of the individual and the community has spawned radical, moderate, and limited communitarian views. In this paper we will insert the question of interpersonal communication into the individual-community conundrum and raise the discourse to the level of cross-cultural engagement. We will highlight the dominant perspectives in Afro-communitarianism with particular emphasis on the Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye and the Nigerian philosopher Ifeanyi Menkiti. Expanding the discourse into the domain of (...) intercultural/comparative philosophy, this paper will engage Gyekye and Menkiti’s Afro-communitarianism and Jean-Paul Sartre’s radical individualism and the resulting conflictual presentation of interpersonal relation. The paper adopts the conversational method. (shrink)

The historical debate, in African philosophy, on personhood has been characterised by radical and moderate communitarianism seen through the scholarship of Menkiti and Gyekye and continues contemporarily with scholars considering its implications on contemporary conceptions of rights.Responding to Chemhuru’s compatibilist view that, he maintains, safeguards and guarantees individual rights, I showcase how his conception of the community as prior to the individual betrays his project. Using the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights to contextualise rights (...) discourse in Afro-communitarianism, Chemhuru avers that once collective rights have been gained, individuals can claim their rights. I critique this position to suggest that Chemhuru undermines his own project of compatibilism through placing the community prior to the individual. Using the Civil Union Act as a legislative framework that safeguards and guarantees individual human rights, I test Chemhuru’s compatibilist view. I conclude by highlighting the divergences between constitutionalism and Afro-communitarianism. (shrink)

Limited communitarianism is presented as an alternative to classical communitarianism in African philosophy. Bernard Matolino, the proponent of this view, argues that personhood can be attained with the constitutive features of the self leading the process, as against the historical, classical communitarian view that prioritises the sociality of the self. He posits that it is a personhood conceived through such view as limited communitarianism that can guarantee individual rights and prioritises the claims of the individual in (...) class='Hi'>African philosophy. Matolino’s claim is grounded on the view that Afro-communitarianism, as presented in the classical account such as the radical and moderate communitarianism of Menkiti and Gyekye, respectively, emphasises community essence in African philosophy and hinders the expression of rights. The claim of the classical view informs the nudge to question the relevance and compatibility of Afro- communitarianism with the complex, multicultural modern African societies. As a result, limited communitarianism rejects the mechanism of Afrocommunitarianism – essentialism. While limited communitarianism appears a rejection of what is known as Afro- communitarianism, which has earned it noncommunitarian labels such as being liberal and individualist, I argue that it is simply a well- argued form of moderate communitarianism that avoids the conundrum of community. (shrink)

In this article, I consider the implications arising from the commonplace premise that the nature of being admits in ontological kinds. That is, there are actual, fundamentally different genera of being in the world, namely human and non-human beings. That for entities to be considered suitable for valuation under the same ethical rubric, it must be assumed that the general character of their mental states is commensurate. However, if we accent that it is indeterminable what kind of being (...) an entity is without access to the phenomenological character of its experiences, then it may be argued that the ethical standards for non-human animals which follow from our inductive descriptions will always remain a matter of opinion, expressed from a particular point of view delimited within the metaphysical commitments derived from a human ontology of being. (shrink)

In this paper I explore some ways in which Africa can contribute to the discourse on global justice. I first note the wide range in the circumstances in which judgements of justice continue to be made—from the domestic to the local and national, and from the national to the international. I conclude the paper with a look at the international human rights situation, suggesting areas where African wisdom and criteriology can be brought to bear on discussions of global (...) justice. In doing this, I call attention to John Rawls’s important distinction between a people and the state which the people call their own. The state does not constitute the people, but the people may constitute a state. (shrink)

Kwame Gyekye has been called a dualist to the extent that he accepts the ontological distinction between mind and matter, with both phenomena interacting with each other. I argue in this article that Gyekye’s presentation of the sunsum as a universal animating principle that is itself nonmaterial and irreducible to a material base warrants a second look at his philosophy of mind to determine whether he can be considered a pan-psychist and whether a pan-psychist reading can resolve the Gyekyean (...) problem of interaction. I assert that, while Gyekye’s interpretation of the Akan notion of sunsum invites a pan-psychist scrutiny, the interpretive difficulties surrounding the concept, as highlighted by Kwasi Wiredu and Safro Kwame, render a pan-psychist conclusion problematic even if persuasive. I recommend that the notion of sunsum as a nonmaterial principle that underlies material entities is significant enough to warrant further interrogation by African philosophers of mind. (shrink)

Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been an increase in religious conspiracy theories in Africa, ranging from outright denial, partial acceptance to spreading misinformation about the Coronavirus. This essay will argue that RCTs pose serious challenges to Covid-19 prevention by encouraging non-compliance to Covid-19 preventive measures and refusal to take Covid-19 vaccination. It will then formulate a personhood-based theory of right action. This new theory will be teased out of Ifeanyi Menkiti's account of the normative (...) conception of personhood and deployed here as a veritable tool for overcoming the challenges posed by RCTs in the fight against the COVID-19 Pandemic in Africa. (shrink)

The debate on the communitarian notion of personhood as initiated by Gyekye, in response to Menkiti, is both exhaustive and exhausted. Its exhaustiveness and exhaustion lies in the fact that, in all probability whatever can be said around it has been said, with truly nothing new likely ever being added. What is possibly left, is the potential for further additions to be more strident in their picking of sides or repeating that Gyekye and Menkiti are not sufficiently different or (...) insisting on the authenticity of either approach to African thought. What is needed is to transcend the constraints of this debate by opening up new vistas of interpreting communitarian thought in personhood. Whatever merit there is in showing whether radical or moderate communitarianism is real, or in showing which of these two is better than the other, this discussion can be furthered by looking at implications of communitarianism to other facets of philosophy. The most plausible avenue that could be implicated in communitarian considerations is the sphere of politics. Theorising about the communitarian notion of persons, I suggest, is partly to theorise about the political. If the commitments on which the doctrine of communitarianism is founded, are used to capture the sort of relations that exist between individuals, and between individuals and the community, then this relationship has an effect on how we conceive of the political theory we think appropriate. It is suggested here that contemplating on the communitarian polity will show the shortcomings of communitarianism as conceived by Gyekye and Menkiti. Keywords: Menkiti, Gyekye, Communitarianism, Limited Communitarianism, Personhood, Classical Communitarianism. (shrink)

This chapter, contrary to moderate, radical and limited communitarians’ attempts to include and defend human rights in African political thought, shifts our attention to the primacy of needs in African political thought. It does so by appeal primarily to the ethical concept of personhood in African philosophy. It offers an interpretation of the relationship between ethics and politics inherent in the normative concept of personhood, which has tended to be construed to entail the politics (...) of human rights. To unfold a novel interpretation of politics in relation to the ethical notion of personhood, it relies on Menkiti’s philosophical writings that points us to the politics of duties. It proceeds to explain the importance of duties in the political thought associated with Afro-communitarianism in terms of the primacy of needs. The basic insight that emerges in this chapter is that the provision of basic needs is indispensable for the kind of agency required for the achievement of personhood. (shrink)

This article undertakes a critical examination of Kwame Gyekye’s main arguments for moderate communitarianism. Contrary to the general belief among African scholars, it contends that Gyekye’s moderate communitarianism, as he presents it in Tradition and Modernity (1997), is not as moderate as he believes it to be. The article also seeks to show that the gap which Gyekye claims exists between moderate or restricted and unrestricted communitarianism is not as wide as he suggests.

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. Keywords: ‘It’, Moral agency, Moral Perfectionism, Moral status, Personhood. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

I investigate the extent to which there might be, now or in the future, non-human animals that partake in the kind of fully human-style consciousness that has been taken by many philosophers to be the basis of normative personhood. I first sketch a conceptual framework for considering the question, based on a range of philosophical literature on relationships between consciousness, language and personhood. I then review the standard basis for largely a priori skepticism about the possibility (...) that any non-human animal could experience FHSC and be a person to any extent, and indicate empirically motivated grounds for rejecting such skepticism, at least with respect to a select group of hypersocial candidate species with communication systems we do not currently know are not languages: corvids, parrots, elephants, and toothed whales. Relevant facts about elephants are reviewed in some detail, as a mini case study. While it is suggested that elephants might partake in the sort of consciousness characteristic of personhood to some extent, grounds are given for expecting that this extent is sharply limited by comparison with normal humans. As these grounds are mainly aspects of elephants’ external niche, however, rather than known limitations in their inboard cognitive or representational capacities, the surprising conclusion emerges that elephants might acquire FHSC, and thereby become persons, if they can be brought into conversation with humans, a possibility opened by considerations canvassed in the paper. (shrink)

In the literature on African moral philosophy, it is common to find normative conclusions about the way we ought to act directly drawn from purported metaphysical facts about the nature of ourselves and the world. For example, Kwame Gyekye, the most influential sub-Saharan political philosopher, attempts to defend moderate communitarianism, roughly the view that agents have strong duties to support others in ways that do not violate human rights, by contending that it follows from the dual nature (...) of the self as both social and individual. In this article, I critically analyze this sort of rationale, and contend that it is unsound. I propose several reconstructions, but conclude that they cannot plausibly bridge the ‘is-ought gap’, and that similar arguments found in the field of African ethics, such as the frequent claim we must treat nature with respect since everything in the universe is interdependent, also fail to do so. (shrink)

This collection is about composing thought at the level of modernism and decomposing it at the postmodern level where many cocks might crow with African philosophy as a focal point. It has two parts: part one is titled 'The journey of reason in African philosophy', and part two is titled 'African philosophy and postmodern thinking'. There are seven chapters in both parts. Five of the essays are reprinted here as important selections while nine are completely new essays (...) commissioned for this book. As their titles suggest, in part one, African philosophy is unfolded in the manifestation of reason as embedded in modern thought while in part two, it draws the effect of reason as implicated in the postmodern orientation. The idea of the book is to open new vistas for the discipline of African philosophy. African philosophy is thus presented as a disagreement discourse. Without rivalry of thoughts, Africa will settle for far less. This gives postmodernism an important place, perhaps deservedly more important than history of philosophy allocates to it. It is that philosophical moment that says 'philosophers must cease speaking like gods in their hegemonic cultural shrines and begin to converse across borders with one another'. In this conversation, the goal for African philosophers must not be to find final answers but to sustain the conversation which alone can extend human reason to its furthermost reaches. (shrink)

In the literature on African moral philosophy, it is common to find normative conclusions about the way we ought to act directly drawn from purported metaphysical facts about the nature of ourselves and the world. For example, Kwame Gyekye, the most influential sub-Saharan political philosopher, attempts to defend moderate communitarianism, roughly the view that agents have strong duties to support others in ways that do not violate human rights, by contending that it follows from the dual nature (...) of the self as both social and individual. In this article, I critically analyze this sort of rationale, and contend that it is unsound. I propose several reconstructions, but conclude that they cannot plausibly bridge the ‘is-ought gap’, and that similar arguments found in the field of African ethics, such as the frequent claim we must treat nature with respect since everything in the universe is interdependent, also fail to do so. (shrink)

Bernard Matolino argues that the communal foundation of classical African communitarianism should be discarded if communitarian theories would be of any use to modern African political theory. He sets out to propose a theory of communitarianism that not only suits modern African realities but would also be useful to any people including non-Africans. I argue that what he ends up doing is proposing cosmopolitanism, calling into question the “Afro” designation of the title of his theory. I also (...) argue that his position on the relationship between the individual and the community is technically not communitarianism of any sort, calling into question the “communitarian” appellation in his theory. His attempt to divorce communitarianism from communalism is unsuccessful, making communitarianism as unsuitable as a theory of world relations as Matolino claims it is unsuitable for contemporary multiethnic African societies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Menkiti's Moral Man by Oritsegbubemi Anthony OyowePolycarp IkuenobeOYOWE, Oritsegbubemi Anthony. Menkiti's Moral Man. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2022. xii + 221 pp. Cloth, $100.00Oyowe critically examines the various threads in, issues raised by, and implications of Menkiti's maximal conception of personhood, against the backdrop of various criticisms, including his own. He indicates that, as "a repentant critic," he does "not deny the merits of these criticisms," but (...) he is "convinced that there are resources in Menkiti's general account for tackling them."In chapter 1, Oyowe examines how Menkiti uses the idea of community to foreground his normative view of personhood, in order to illuminate the African idea that one is a person because of, and through relationships with, other persons in a community. This indicates that one's existence or [End Page 356] identity has necessary external elements of cultural belonging, in addition to internal intrinsic elements. These cultural elements require ontological progression that involves a process of social-moral incorporation into communal practices and norms. Oyowe argues that while this conception is plausible, it raises questions regarding oppressive cultures and their effects on individuals. He indicates that the kind of person that emerges from this conception is a "soft" social entity.Chapter 2 examines the issue of the nature of the relationship between persons (as soft social entities) and community, and the implications for individual autonomy, practical reasoning, and moral agency. Oyowe argues that the pertinent issue is not whether the individual should have moral or ontological priority over the community or vice versa, but the aspect of individuality that is conducive to what we cherish about the community. This is because Menkiti presupposes that in order to be a maximal person, one must have intrinsic capacities for moral agency to take on communal functions and duties. But the community creates the conditions for individuals to express individuality and autonomy, engage in practical reasoning, and make the choice to conform with communal norms in order to be recognized as persons.So, the maximal conception of personhood raises issues about the nature of entities that deserve a moral status. Chapter 3 examines the moral status of infants, people with cognitive impairment, the senile, nonhuman animals, and the moral duties that people have toward these entities. If we understand personhood as failing to extend moral status to these entities, such a view might be charged with speciesism and anthropocentrism. Oyowe argues that a plausible interpretation of personhood, in the context of the communal priority of duties, suggests that people have certain responsibilities toward human and nonhuman nonpersons. This interpretation is grounded in Menkiti's distinction between "deserving justice"—which is not based on having certain intrinsic properties, moral capacities, or cognitive abilities—and "being a person." Because Menkiti insists that persons ought to be able to use their capacities to perform requisite communal duties, personhood must involve an obligation to consider the interests of nonpersons and a community of respect for those who deserve justice.Chapter 4 examines the dilemma created by the social architecture of a community's cultural traditions, institutions, expectations, norms, and practices that are necessary for personhood and social identity. While such architecture is capable of supporting the achievement of personhood, it could also be restrictive. He uses Chinua Achebe's novel, Things Fall Apart, to illuminate how the structures for recognizing persons that are oppressive of and biased against women could be disguised. Although Menkiti does not address this issue, his conception of personhood highlights the problem of social justice for women because relevant social architecture may exclude women from equal and full communal recognition and participation. An appreciation of this problem [End Page 357] introduces an alternative way of understanding social justice in terms of communal recognition or lack thereof.In chapter 5, Oyowe uses the intuitions underlying Locke's distinction between "person" and "human being" to illuminate Menkiti's account of personhood. Person and human being are not identical because they have different persistent conditions. Persons persist by virtue of mental capacities and practical relevance that are developed after one is identified as a human organism. This raises the issues of (a) whether being a... (shrink)

This article introduces a non-human version of the non-identity problem and suggests that such a variation exposes weaknesses in several proposed person-focused solutions to the classic version of the problem. It suggests first that person-affecting solutions fail when applied to non-human animals and, second, that many common moral arguments against climate change should be called into question. We argue that a more inclusive version of the person-affecting principle, which we call the ‘patient-affecting principle’, captures more accurately the moral (...) challenge posed by the non-identity problem. We argue further that the failure of person-affecting solutions to solve non-human versions of the problem lend support to impersonal solutions to the problem which avoid issues of personhood or species identity. Finally, we conclude that some environmental arguments against climate change that rely on the notion of personal harm should be recast in impersonal terms. (shrink)

We notice a number of interesting overlaps between the views on personhood of Ifeanyi Menkiti and Marya Schechtman. Both philosophers distance their views from the individualistic ones standard in western thought and foreground the importance of extrinsic or relational features to personhood. For Menkiti, it is ‘the community which defines the person as person’; for Schechtman, being a person is to have a place in person-space, which involves being seen as a person by others. But there are (...) also striking differences. Schechtman sees this aspect as expanding the scope of personhood to infants and those who are severely mentally disabled. Menkiti thinks that there is a line to be drawn at some point between those humans that are persons and those who are not. We consider the cases offered in questioning how the dispute between the two views should be resolved. (shrink)

Regular reference is made, within the discourse around the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to the fact that ubuntu, an indigenous world view, played a role in the process. This paper tries to show that despite these references, important analysts of the TRC had insufficiently accounted for this worldview in their critical readings of the Commission's work and therefore found aspects of the process incoherent and/or morally and legally confused. I am not arguing that the TRC was not (...) a deeply flawed process, but want to establish how powerfully this indigenous world view brought a coherency that not only enabled the TRC to do its work without incidences of revenge, but imbued politically and legally trapped concepts with new possibilities. The pervasiveness of this world view within eg. the second round of TRC testimonies is noticeable and show how often the critique on the TRC fails to take this dominant role into account and how many, seemingly contradictory or confusing, positions become coherent when regarded within this worldview. This view of interconnectedness, consistently expressed throughout the life of the commission, has wide implications for the interpretation of healing, the asking of amnesty, the rehabilitation of perpetrators, the interdependence of forgiveness and reconciliation in the process of achieving full personhood within a healed society. In the footsteps of Richard Bell, this paper locates this world view within a particular framework formulated as ubuntu by Desmond Tutu, as communitarianism by Kwame Gyekye, as ethnophilosophy by Paulin Hountondji etc. The paper also tries to understand how this interconnected moral self is formed and who the community could or should be that influences this moral self. South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 27 2008: pp. 353-366. (shrink)

In the philosophy of love, the possibility of loving a non-human animal is rarely acknowledged and often explicitly denied. And yet, loving a non-human animal is very common. Evidently, then, there is something wrong with both “human-focused” accounts (e.g. Niko Kolodny, Troy Jollimore), which assume we can only love human beings, and “person-focused” accounts (e.g. David Velleman, Bennett Helm), which understand the nature of love in terms of its being essentially directed toward those with a capacity (...) for normative self-reflection (i.e. “persons”). Even aside from the experiences of those who love a non-human animal, on which I draw, we already have reason to be worried about these latter, “person-focused,” views, insofar as they deny the possibility of loving the various human beings who do not meet their criteria for “personhood,” including at least some human beings with “severe” or “profound” cognitive disabilities. With this in mind, I argue that what we need is the (broader) notion of a “somebody” as a distinctive kind of love-object. This is the notion of a kind of presence of which we are acutely aware when, for example, we look into another’s eyes and see that there is “somebody home.” With this presence, there is a possibility of “togetherness,” and I suggest that it is precisely in the realm of togetherness that the possibility of love arises; the kind of love we speak of when we speak of loving our friends, family and romantic partners, and also, I argue, our animal companions. (shrink)

Some communitarians about personhood hold that human communities are metaphysically antecedent to individual persons, and that personhood comes in degrees, and that one becomes a person through ethical maturation within a community. I offer a new communitarianism that also endorses those claims. It is based partly on certain African accounts of the person—primarily Menkiti’s account—and partly on Mark Johnston’s extraordinary argument that extremely good persons are literally at one with the human community itself. The theory’s (...) concept of the person is a novel understanding of the social self. I argue that the account helps to solve three puzzles to do with communitarian conceptions of personhood. One puzzle is about understanding the individual person as an individual. Another relates to the alleged metaphysical priority of communities over persons. And a third is a problem for the view that personhood is graded. (shrink)

I examine the conflict and dialogue perspectives to social change. Distinguishing between conflict and aggression, I argue that although conflict of interest is inevitable, it is also inevitable that we use aggression to cleal with our conflicting interests. The conflicting nature of human interests makes at least verbal conflict to be unavoidable, but I distinguish between verbal conflict and verbal aggression. With the help of Aristotle's components of persuasion, I further distinguish benueen verbal conflict approaches such as rational nonaggressive, (...) rational aggressive, and character- or emotion targeted verbal aggression. With insightsfrom the Akan of Ghana, I argue that effective constraints against aggressive behaviour can be built into social policy and, ultimately, culture. Incidentally, a critical but non-aggressive approach to verbal conflict rhymes with an agonistic mode of dialogue that redeems traditionally congenial dialogue from much of its weaknesses. (shrink)

Communitarianism has been the dominant disposition of many African scholars towards ubuntu. The nature of the concept somewhat limits how one can theorise about ubuntu. However, I argue that there is still a lot more that can be harnessed from the ubuntu concept, especially as it pertains to the ontology of radical escape. I use radical escape as an ontological character of every human being whereby to exist is to escape. In this paper, I argue that ubuntu does (...) not provide the possibility for radical escape. The nature of escape that ubuntu provides is limited to the confines of its communitarian outlook. In this paper, I bring on board the works of Mogobe Ramose, Thaddeus Metz, Kwame Gyekye, Emmanuel Levinas, and Thomas Lear, among others, to substantiate my position. I hope to demonstrate the need to accommodate the concept of radical escape in theorising about ubuntu. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

What is the status and nature of the “it” and the ontological progression from an “it” to an “it” in Ifeanyi Menkiti’s normative conception of a person? In this article, I attempt to preliminarily give some nuance content to the “it” of childhood and the “it” of the nameless dead. My motivation is straightforwardly simple: to defend Menkiti’s claim that both “its” have some depersonalised moral standing or existence. However, in doing so, I argue that a better account of (...) the ontological progression of personhood is from an “it” to an “it-it” 1 rather than from an “it” to an “it.” On this modified version of the double hyphenated “its”, which is underpinned by the idea of moral force, the prior moral worth of the nameless dead is taken into account as valuable members of our collective immortality, notwithstanding the fact that their names have been forgotten. Keywords: African Philosophy, Collective Immortality, Menkiti, It, It-it, Moral Force, Nameless Dead, Personhood. (shrink)

ExtractThe idea that all the entities in the world may be, for legal and moral purposes, divided into the two categories of ‘persons’ and ‘things’ comes down to us from the tradition of Roman law. In the law, a ‘person’ is essentially the subject of rights and obligations, while a thing may be owned as property. In ethics, a person is an object of respect, to be valued for her own sake, and never to be used as a mere means (...) to an end, while a thing has only a derivative value, and may be used as a means to some person's ends. This bifurcation is unfortunate because it seems to leave us with no alternative but to categorize everything as either a person or a thing. Yet some of the entities that give rise to the most vexing ethical problems are exactly the ones that do not seem to fit comfortably into either category. For various, different, kinds of reasons, it seems inappropriate to categorize a fetus, a non-human animal, the environment, or an object of great beauty, as a person, but neither does it seem right to say of such things that they are to be valued only as means.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.PERSONHOOD, ANIMALS, AND THE LAWVolume 12, Issue 34Christine M. KorsgaardDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175613000018Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. PERSONHOOD, ANIMALS, AND THE LAWVolume 12, Issue 34Christine M. KorsgaardDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175613000018Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. PERSONHOOD, ANIMALS, AND THE LAWVolume 12, Issue 34Christine M. KorsgaardDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175613000018Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation. (shrink)

In his proposal for a democracy by consensus, Wiredu argued that deliberation is an activity that depends solely on the logical persuasiveness of ideas. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze and I had objected to this view of deliberation. Bernard Matolino has responded separately to Eze and me by sticking to Wiredu’s position that deliberation is a purely rational activity. In this article, I support my earlier claim that persuasion (and hence deliberation) is not an entirely logical activity, and our concern as (...) class='Hi'>human beings is to recognize the influence of non-rational factors, for the purpose of minimizing the role of these non-rational factors. My general aim here is to explore the implications of a counterfactual situation in which we assume that deliberation is a purely rational activity, and these implications are unpalatable even to proponents of deliberation as a purely rational activity. My conclusion is that it is only by recognizing the role of non-rational factors in deliberation that we are driven to institute mechanisms to ensure that logic dominates over non-rational factors as much as practicable in either persuading or in being persuaded. Assuming that deliberation is a purely rational activity, on the other hand, forestalls any measures and allows non-rational influences to fester undeterred. (shrink)

This book articulates an African conception of dignity in light of the salient axiological category of personhood in African cultures. The idea of personhood embodies a moral system for evaluating human lives exuding with virtue or ones that are morally excellent. This book argues that this idea of personhood embodies an under-explored conception of dignity, which accounts for it in terms of our capacity for the virtue of sympathy. It then proceeds to apply this (...) personhood-based conception of dignity to bioethical questions, specifically, those of abortion and euthanasia. Regarding abortion, it concludes that it is impermissible since foetuses possess partial moral status. Regarding euthanasia, it argues that it is permissible for reasons revolving around avoiding the reversing of personhood. It also, though, minimally, touches on the questions regarding the mentally disabled and animals, to which it assigns lower moral status. (shrink)

In this paper, we identify the way in which various forms of legal personhood can be differentiated from one another by comparing these entities with a—not too farfetched—hypothetical situation in which intelligence spontaneously evolves within the internet: spontaneous intelligence. In these terms, we consider the challenges that may arise where SI as an entity: has no owner, no designer, and no controller; has evolved into existence as a non-human created intelligence; is autonomous; has no physical form; and, although (...) it exists around the world, exists in no particular jurisdiction. Based on this refined notion of SI, we consider issues related to the recognition of such an entity’s legal personhood. By briefly exploring the attribution of legal personality to various entities—including, humans, corporations, artificial intelligence and higher forms of animal life—we differentiate SI from these other forms of intelligence whilst illustrating it shares most characteristics with human intelligence and not, as may intuitively be thought, with various forms of AI. After critically evaluating the classification of these various forms of intelligence, we briefly suggest some ramifications of these differences and suggest that the approach adopted may assist in drawing more effective boundaries between the entities that are already recognised as legal persons, as well as between sub-categories of entities, such as various forms of AI. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that Menkiti’s normative personhood is exclusionary, and logically inadequate, especially regarding mentally disabled persons. My argument is that Menkiti’s account of personhood as a moral-political theory does not possess the resources to accommodate and account for mentally disabled persons because of its rigid process of transformation, which requires moral excellence. An inclusive moral theory, I argue, should be able to accommodate all members of the moral community irrespective of their ability, but rather, their (...) capacity for relationships. Tapping into the intellectual resources of conversational thinking, I propose another conception of personhood predicated on moral status as the basis for personhood. With this method, I query the inclusiveness of Menkiti’s conception and demonstrate that a relational alternative option that bases moral status on the human capacity for relationships might be more inclusive. Here, personhood is anchored on the capacity for relationships, not the ability to exude moral excellence. I then contend that this moral status conception of personhood possesses the needed resources to account for all because it is inclusive and egalitarian, riding on the crest of Ezumezu logic, which is also both egalitarian and inclusive. (shrink)