ABSTRACT
African ethics is being parsed in formal and capacious terms that it can admit of practices that no Western, liberal, individualistic audience could object to. To cite just one example, Thaddeus Metz claims that ubuntu ‘means giving people forums in which to express themselves, viz. airtime on television and radio, and space in newspapers and on websites’. There is nothing overtly objectionable about the Metz method. It is admirably honest about the limits of its ambition: it does not set out to deliver an anthropologically accurate account of African ethics, but is boldly constructivist instead. Prima facie there is a strong disparity here between the African willingness to make value judgements in moral-cum-aesthetic terms, and the Western tendency to mark the moral and the aesthetic as categorically distinct. There is the value of spirituality. Metz’s work on African ethics is wholly in line with the secularising assumptions of the Western academy.
