No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Is, Ought, and All: In Defense of a Method
Abstract
A sufficiently distinct kind of challenge to the methodological validity of attempts in contemporary African philosophy to ground moral-political obligations on a given metaphysics of the self and of nature has been recently put forward by Thaddeus Metz. It is quite unlike the usual focus on the philosophical status of ethnophilosophical inquiry. Instead, it relies heavily on some established philosophical principle, typically attributed to David Hume, and according to which characteristically is-statements may not be derived straightforwardly from ought-statements. More clearly, Metz argues that attempts in African philosophy to ground a set of moral-political obligations on some metaphysics of the self and of nature flouts Hume’s Law and so should be abandoned. In this chapter, I defend the relevant argumentative strategy in African philosophy against the charge that Metz mounts by both contesting his assessment of the sort of derivation African philosophers characteristically undertake and expressing doubt as to whether he is applying a plausible interpretation of Hume’s Law. Moreover, drawing on ideas from John Searle, Frank Hindriks, and Margaret Gilbert, in the field of social ontology, I argue that Metz is unsuccessful in his attempt to drive a wedge between “is” and “ought” claims in the work of contemporary African philosophers—or, at least, the one he refers to.
A Relational Moral Theory draws on neglected resources from the Global South and especially the African philosophical tradition to provide a new answer to a perennial philosophical question: what do all morally right actions have in common as distinct from wrong ones? Metz points out that the principles of utility and of respect for autonomy, the two rivals that have dominated western moral theory for the last two centuries, share an individualist premise. Once that common assumption is replaced by a relational perspective given prominence in African ethical thought, a different comprehensive principle, one focused on harmony or friendliness, emerges. Metz argues that this principle corrects the blind spots of the western moral principles, and has implications for a wide array of controversies in applied ethics that an international audience of moral philosophers, professional ethicists, and similar thinkers will find compelling.
There are three major reasons why ideas associated with ubuntu are often deemed to be an inappropriate basis for a public morality in today's South Africa. One is that they are too vague; a second is that they fail to acknowledge the value of individual freedom; and a third is that they fit traditional, small-scale culture more than a modern, industrial society. In this article, I provide a philosophical interpretation of ubuntu that is not vulnerable to these three objections. Specifically, I construct a moral theory grounded on Southern African world views, one that suggests a promising new conception of human dignity. According to this conception, typical human beings have a dignity by virtue of their capacity for community, understood as the combination of identifying with others and exhibiting solidarity with them, where human rights violations are egregious degradations of this capacity. I argue that this account of human rights violations straightforwardly entails and explains many different elements of South Africa's Bill of Rights and naturally suggests certain ways of resolving contemporary moral dilemmas in South Africa and elsewhere relating to land reform, political power and deadly force. If I am correct that this jurisprudential interpretation of ubuntu both accounts for a wide array of intuitive human rights and provides guidance to resolve present-day disputes about justice, then the three worries about vagueness, collectivism and anachronism should not stop one from thinking that something fairly called 'ubuntu' can ground a public morality.
Hindriks argued that Searle’s theory of institutions suffers from a number of problems pertaining to the notions of constitutive rule, status function, Status Function Declaration, deontic power, and human right. Lobo argues that these criticisms are not sufficiently charitable. In response, it is argued here that the problems that were identified earlier are sufficiently severe to call for substantial revisions of the theory.
According to John Searle’s well-known Is-Ought Argument, it is possible to derive an ought-statement from is-statements only. This argument concerns obligations involved in institutions such as promising, and it relies on the idea that institutions can be conceptualized in terms of constitutive rules. In this paper, I argue that the structure of this argument has never been fully appreciated. Starting from my status account of constitutive rules, I reconstruct the argument and establish that it is valid. This reconstruction reveals that the soundness of the argument depends on whether collective acceptance as such can generate obligations. Margaret Gilbert has argued that it can, and thus far some of her central arguments have not been addressed. The upshot is that the Is-Ought Argument deserves to be taken seriously once again.
This article explores the question: what is it for two or more people to intend to do something in the future? In a technical
phrase, what is it for people to share an intention? Extending and refining earlier work of the author’s, it argues for three criteria of adequacy for an account of shared intention
(the disjunction, concurrence, and obligation criteria) and offers an account that satisfies them. According to this account,
in technical terms explained in the paper, people share an intention when and only when they are jointly committed to intend as a body to do such-and-such in the future. This account is compared and contrasted with the common approach that treats shared intention
as a matter of personal intentions, with particular reference to the work of Michael Bratman.
In this paper, I explore the African normative idea of personhood as a philosophical theme in Things Fall Apart.^ I do this in the context of communalism, which involves the mutual dependence between individuals and community. This dependence, which provides the foundation for people's actions, characters, and identities, is founded on the view that people have complex normative and spiritual relationships with others and with their ancestors in a community. The community and the relationships provide norms that indicate people's obligations, on the basis of which their achievements are evaluated and socially recognized. The recognition of one's achievements and demonstration of what I term "psychological wholesomeness" indicate that one has acquired a normative sense of personhood. I discuss some philosophical accounts of the African idea of personhood as a backdrop for exploring how this theme is utilized by Chinua Achebe. I explore how the ideas of achieving and not achieving personhood based on communal norms, obligations, achievements, and recognition are illustrated in the characters of Unoka and Okonkwo, who did not achieve personhood, and Obierika and Ezeudu, who did. Philosophical Views of Personhood There are two philosophical conceptions of personhood in African thought: the descriptive metaphysical and the normative.^ A metaphysical account of personhood may seek to analyze the essential ontological make-up of a person, examining, for instance, whether he or she is essentially material or immaterial, or whether he or she has one or two essential natures. Analyses of the nature of the mind and body, and the relationship between them, are efforts to give metaphysical accounts of personhood.^ However, it is the normative and not the metaphysical idea of personhood that is germane to African communal traditions, as personhood is a status earned by meeting certain community standards, including the ability to take on prescribed responsibilities that are believed to define personhood. Such responsibilities may be defined in terms of personal achievements that are worthy of social recognition.
This book offers philosophical interpretation and critical analysis of the African cultural experience in modern times. In their attempt to evolve ways of life appropriate to our modern world culture, African people and their society face a number of challenges; some stem from the values and practices of their traditions, while others rise from the legacy of European colonialism. Defending the cross-cultural applicability of philosophical concepts developed in Western culture, the book attempts to show the usefulness of such concepts in addressing a wide range of African problems. Among the issues are as follows: economic development, nation-building, evolution of viable and appropriate democratic political institutions, growth of appropriate and credible ideologies, political corruption, and crumbling of traditional moral standards in the wake of rapid social change. Throughout, the notion that modernity must be equated with Western values and institutions is challenged, arguing that modernity must be forged creatively within the furnace of Africa's multifaceted cultural experience.
In a dense and fascinating article of some ten years ago, Toomas Karmo adds his voice to the chorus of philosophers who deny the possibility of soundly deriving ‘ought’ from ‘is.’ According to Karmo, no derivation containing an ethical conclusion and only non-ethical premises can possibly be sound, where ‘sound’ describes a deductively valid derivation all of whose premises are true. He also suggests that the only valid derivations of ‘ought’ from ‘is’ will be trivial ones. His argument has, to my knowledge, gone unrebutted; on the contrary, it has won recent endorsements, some philosophers evidently believing that he has finally put to rest the issue of the logical autonomy of ethics. Against that trend, I intend to rebut his argument, both by falsifying the taxonomy on which his argument relies and by offering a nontrivial and potentially sound ‘is’-‘ought’ derivation of my own.
The ???No Ought From Is??? principle (or ???NOFI???) states that a valid argument cannot have both an ethical conclusion and non-ethical premises. Arthur Prior proposed several well-known counterexamples, including the following: Tea-drinking is common in England; therefore, either tea-drinking is common in England or all New Zealanders ought to be shot. My aim in this paper is to defend NOFI against Prior???s counterexamples. I propose two novel interpretations of NOFI and prove that both are true.
It is often said that one cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. This thesis, which comes from a famous passage in Hume’s Treatise, while not as clear as it might be, is at least clear in broad outline: there is a class of statements of fact which is logically distinct from a class of statements of value. No set of statements of fact by themselves entails any statement of value. Put in more contemporary terminology, no set of descriptive statements can entail an evaluative statement without the addition of at least one evaluative premise. To believe otherwise is to commit what has been called the naturalistic fallacy.
1. Introduction: planning agents in a social world Part I. Acceptance and Stability: 2. Practical reasoning and acceptance in a context 3. Planning and temptation 4. Toxin, temptation, and the stability of intention Part II. Shared Agency: 5. Shared cooperative activity 6. Shared intention 7. Shared intention and mutual obligation 8. I intend that we J Part III. Responsibility and Identification: 9. Responsibility and planning 10. Identification, decision, and treating as a reason Part IV. Critical Studies: 11. Davidson's theory of intention 12. Castaneda's theory of thought and action 13. Cognitivism about practical reason 14. Critical study of Korsgaard's The Sources of Normativity.
Democracy as a political system entailing multi-party competition for power is only one form of democracy. Given that democracy is government by consent, the question is whether a less adversarial system than the party system, which is bound up with majoritarian decision-making, cannot be devised. This paper contends that a system based on consensus as a decision procedure would be a democracy of just such a description. It is important to note that the kind of consensus envisaged here is not agreement regarding questions of truth and morality; it is concerned only with the question of what is to be done. And it is an important fact that reasonable human beings can come to an agreement about what is to be done by virtue of compromise without agreeing on issues of truth or morality. A consensual system will naturally be a non-party arrangement. However, as I explain, such a polity need not be one without parties.
Philosophy in Africa has for more than a decade now been dominated by the discussion of one compound question, namely, is there an African philosophy, and if there is, what is it? The first part of the question has generally been unhesitatingly answered in the affirmative. Dispute has been primarily over the second part of the question as various specimens of African philosophy presented do not seem to pass muster. Those of us who refuse to accept certain specimens as philosophy have generally been rather illogically said also to deny an affirmative answer to the first part of the question. In a paper presented at the International Symposium in Memory of Dr William Amo, the Ghanaian philosopher who taught in German universities in the early part of the eighteenth century, Professor Odera Oruka identified four trends, perhaps more appropriately approaches, in current African philosophy.
I argue that the analytic method has been circularly used to analyze the concept of “philosophy,” and that the result of this analysis has also been used to criticize African ethnophilosophy as nonphilosophical. I critically examine the criticism that ethnophilosophy implies cognitive relativism and the criticism that it implies authoritarianism. I defend ethnophilosophy against these criticisms, arguing that they are rooted in logical positivism, the view that philosophy essentially involves the use of the methods of science and logical analysis. I argue that such analysis and criticisms, given their pedigree, do not provide an adequate or accurate picture of the nature of philosophy.
Of Identity and Diversity
- John Locke
- GEM Anscombe
Ethnophilosophy and Its Critics
- Kwame Appiah
- Anthony
- KA Appiah
Person and Community in African Traditional Thought
- Ifeanyi Menkiti
- I Menkiti
African Philosophy: Myth and Reality
- Paulin Hountondji
- P Hountondji
African Philosophy: A Historico-Hermeneutical Investigation of the Conditions of Its Possibility
- Theophilus Okere
- T Okere