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A Relational Moral Theory: African Ethics in and beyond the Continent
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 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.
280 pages, Hardcover
Published March 23, 2022
11 people want to read
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October 10, 2025
Well structured and competently written. The author is able to convey his methodology, assumptions, and theory well, and positioned his work in relation to relevant interlocutors and debates. I find relational ethics to be a compelling framework and appreciate this highly structured consideration of one possible relational moral theory.
However, I don't think this particular articulation of relational ethics is a very natural formulation, owing largely to the author's social position and methodology. While the author aims to present an African ethics, and in some ways addresses this area, he is ultimately an anglophone analytic philosopher originally from the United States, and this makes him largely unwilling or unable to engage with the kinds of lifeways and worldviews which naturally incubate and make proper sense of relational ethics. In particular his unwillingness to address animist ontologies or the social context of tribal lifeways neuters his theory and forces it into a number of rather unnatural contortions and failure modes. A proper understanding of these indigenous perspectives wouldve saved a lot of headache and resulted in a more sound theory.
Overall, this text is on the right track, but is insufficiently decolonized to really grok the root of its subject.
Future work in this area should consider more carefully the way that peoples who live by relational ethics view personhood (or spirit) in both humans and nonhumans (spanning animals, plants, places, ancestors, spirits, communities, etc.), and how they understand their natural and necessary interdependence with other persons in their communities and ecosystems. I believe this holds the key to a more natural ane complete metaethical justification for relational ethics, as well as more cleanly and simply resolving questions of moral status and its magnitude in different cases. One need not even adopt a nonsecular metaphysics to achieve this firmer foundation.
Graham Harvey's work on animism may be a starting point to better understand the metaphysical and relational context in which relational ethics properly sits.
However, I don't think this particular articulation of relational ethics is a very natural formulation, owing largely to the author's social position and methodology. While the author aims to present an African ethics, and in some ways addresses this area, he is ultimately an anglophone analytic philosopher originally from the United States, and this makes him largely unwilling or unable to engage with the kinds of lifeways and worldviews which naturally incubate and make proper sense of relational ethics. In particular his unwillingness to address animist ontologies or the social context of tribal lifeways neuters his theory and forces it into a number of rather unnatural contortions and failure modes. A proper understanding of these indigenous perspectives wouldve saved a lot of headache and resulted in a more sound theory.
Overall, this text is on the right track, but is insufficiently decolonized to really grok the root of its subject.
Future work in this area should consider more carefully the way that peoples who live by relational ethics view personhood (or spirit) in both humans and nonhumans (spanning animals, plants, places, ancestors, spirits, communities, etc.), and how they understand their natural and necessary interdependence with other persons in their communities and ecosystems. I believe this holds the key to a more natural ane complete metaethical justification for relational ethics, as well as more cleanly and simply resolving questions of moral status and its magnitude in different cases. One need not even adopt a nonsecular metaphysics to achieve this firmer foundation.
Graham Harvey's work on animism may be a starting point to better understand the metaphysical and relational context in which relational ethics properly sits.
Displaying 1 of 1 review