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, Gods 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 Gods 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 doesnt 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 peoples 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 beingswhat makes us human. Normatively, it refers to what makes us humane.

A human being is utu

Descriptively: tautologya 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.