(Ebook) A Relational Moral Theory: African Ethics in and beyond the Continent by Thaddeus Metz ISBN 9780191065798, 019106579X

(Ebook) A Relational Moral Theory: African Ethics in and beyond the Continent by Thaddeus Metz ISBN 9780191065798, 019106579X

Although this book is about ethical theory of a sort that is intended to be of interest to a philosopher working in any major tradition, it owes much to my having come to live in an African country and becoming acquainted with indigenous sub-Saharan worldviews and ways of life. It unnerves me to think that I would have remained ignorant of them and not been in a position to compose this book had I stayed in the United States, which was my likely path in life. I might not have found my intellectual home, or at least one of them, had I not wandered away from where I grew up. It was upon first moving to South Africa in 1999, and especially upon starting to lecture there in 2004, that I began to study African ethics, the characteristic mores, and the philosophical interpretations of them that have been prominent amongst black peoples south of the Sahara desert and that did not come largely from, say, Europe or the Middle East (which have, of course, had important influences on the African continent). Lecturing to students at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, it seemed not merely apt, but also morally essential, to teach them something from the local intellectual tradition. So, I intensively read and spoke to philosophers, theologians, anthropologists, and sociologists about indigenous, precolonial, or ‘traditional’ Africa, and considered what sub-Saharan cultures could contribute to contemporary debates amongst those studying moral philosophy anywhere in the world.