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ABSTRACT
It is generally accepted that the normative idea of personhood is central to African moral thought, but what has not been done in the literature is to explicate its relationship to the Western idea of rights. In this article, I investigate this relationship between rights and an African normative conception of personhood. My aim, ultimately, is to give us a cursory sense why duties engendered by rights and those by the idea of personhood will tend to clash. To facilitate a meaningful philosophical discussion, I locate this engagement in the context of a debate between Ifeanyi Menkiti and Kwame Gyekye about the nature of Afro-communitarianism, whether it will ground rights as primary or secondary. I endorse Menkiti’s stance that duties are primary and rights secondary; and, I also problematise moderate communitarianism for taking a Western stance by employing a naturalist approach to rights.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 I am not aware of a defense of such a position in the literature.
2 MacIntyre (Citation2003) refers to rights as an invention of the enlightenment moral project. He likens them to the medieval belief in witchcraft or unicorns.
3 Darwall (Citation1977, 33) refers to it as ‘recognition respect’, where some entity usually human beings are respected merely because they are recognized to possess moral-ontological feature or even a capacity that marks them out as morally significant.
4 For a detailed comparison of these two normative notions of a ‘person’ (see Behrens Citation2013).
5 It is something like this naturalist approach to personhood that Menkiti contrasts his notion against. He observes that this idea is Western and it is a ‘minimalist’ understanding of a person as it relies on some psychological basis of a person (Menkiti Citation1984, 174).
6 I am not aware of any African scholar who makes a case for the ontology of rights and justifies them. They are taken to be self-evident.
7 The reader will see below I also draw quite heavily on Gyekye to elaborate on a morality of duties. I wish to allay the concerns this may raise. It is to be noted that that only in his earlier works does Gyekye (Citation1992, Citation1997) defend moderate communitarian, where rights are thought to be equal with duties. In his latter political philosophy, Gyekye (Citation2004, Citation2010) he defends a morality of duties that sees duties as taking priority over rights. It is in this latter political philosophy, I will be drawing. It is crucial to note that many African scholars are fixated with Gyekye’s earlier political ideas and they largely ignore his latter political ideas.
8 Here, Wiredu uses the idea of communalist and communitarian somewhat interchangeably to refer to how African organized society (see Wiredu Citation2008, 335).
9 To say one has ‘ubuntu’ is one and the same thing to say they are persons. To have Ubuntu means one has develop moral virtues befitting a human being (Shutte Citation2001, 14).
10 African scholars are not clear about what they have in mind when they use the idea of ‘well-being’. And, we need have a clear understanding of this term to understand the account developed here.
11 The objection that this (rejection of options) will render morality to be overly demanding does not quite appear to emerge here. African scholars think the fact that one has project and activities pertain to her is not a properly moral issue and one surely is naturally expected to pursue them. But, morality proper is concerned about social living (see Gyekye Citation2004, Citation2010).