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