African Ethics

The Ethiopian Enlightenment

Zera Yacob • Zera Yacob (1599-1692) argues that reason, applied to the available evidence, supports the conclusion that the world, God ’s creation, is essentially good • Because creation is essentially good, enjoying it is also good

Dispositions • Zera Yacob calls reason the “light of the heart.” • He uses it to criticize the ethical prescriptions of various religions, which imply that the order of nature itself is wrong

Dispositions • Rules that restrain our natural dispositions may be acceptable • But those that contradict them cannot be

Ethical Test • Reason thus serves as a foundation for morality and as a test for religious beliefs • Any view that teaches that some part of the natural order, or some natural disposition, is wrong cannot be correct

Ethics and Religion • Divine command theorists take God’s will as itself making some acts right and others wrong • Many other religious thinkers have believed that God reveals moral truth and that we can know that truth only because God reveals it to us

Religion • Defenders of each religion claim that they know the only true way • Obviously, not all can be right • How can we decide who is right? • How can we judge which alleged revelations really come from God?

Criterion • The only way to tell true revelations from pretenders is – using reason to discover moral truth and – judging the claims of those religions by the light of reason • Ethics must precede religion • It doesn’t depend on it

Communitarian Consequentialism • Kwame Gyekye, of the Akan tribe, has written about the Akan view of causality, metaphysics, religion, and ethics

Communitarian Consequentialism • Consequentialism: the view that all moral value depends solely on the consequences of actions • Good acts are those that bring about the well-being of society; bad actions work against it

Communitarian Consequentialism

Individualism • Western consequentialists, who treat the good of a community as the sum of the goods of its members • The Akan maintain that the good of the community cannot be reduced to individual goods

Communitarianism • According to communitarian consequentialism: • Good acts promote the well-being of society • Social well-being: social welfare, solidarity, harmony, and other features of the social order itself

Communitarianism • People are essentially social • • One can speak of the good of an individual only in terms of the good of the society he or she inhabits

It Takes a

Village: People cannot achieve the good on their own; they must rely upon others • Consequently, individual good depends on the good of the community

Ordinary and Extraordinary Evils • Extraordinary evils bring suffering to the whole community, not just to individual members of it • Theft, adultery, lying, and backbiting are ordinary evils; they harm specific people, but do little to affect people not immediately connected to the act • Murder, rape, incest, cursing the chief, etc., affect the entire community, undermining a people ’s sense of community

East African Islamic Ethics • Islam + traditional African beliefs

East African Islamic Ethics • The key concept is

utu

, humanity or goodness • Like the English word

humanity

,

utu

has descriptive and normative dimensions – Descriptively, it refers to the essence of human beings —what makes us human – Normatively, it refers to what makes us humane

“A Human Being is

Utu

” • Descriptively: tautology—“a human being is human.” • Normatively: we are essentially moral beings

“

Utu

is Action ” • Humanity and morality are expressed in what we do • That we are essentially rational and therefore moral beings implies that we deserve moral respect, equally

“A Human Being is Not a Thing.” •

Utu

contrasts with

kitu

(thing) • People must not be used, but must be respected as moral agents