African Ethics
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Transcript of African Ethics
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African Ethics
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The Ethiopian Enlightenment
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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
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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
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Dispositions
• Rules that restrain our natural dispositions may be acceptable
• But those that contradict them cannot be
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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
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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
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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?
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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
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Communitarian Consequentialism
• Kwame Gyekye, of the Akan tribe, has written about the Akan view of causality, metaphysics, religion, and ethics
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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
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Communitarian Consequentialism
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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
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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
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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
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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
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East African Islamic Ethics
• Islam + traditional African beliefs
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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
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“A Human Being is Utu”
• Descriptively: tautology—“a human being is human.”
• Normatively: we are essentially moral beings
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“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
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“A Human Being is Not a Thing.”
• Utu contrasts with kitu (thing)
• People must not be used, but must be respected as moral agents