I view Jecker and Atuire’s What Is a Person?: Untapped Insights from Africa 1 to be yet another important contribution from the Global South on the topic of moral status, that is, what entitles a being to moral treatment for its own sake. In the past 15 years or so, notable works on this topic have appeared in English from those working in the indigenous East Asian,i South American,ii and Africaniii traditions, but they continue to be sorely neglected by mainstream and influential discussions. For some illustration of this point, consider that no non-Western view is cited, let alone critically discussed, in the two major entries on the topic in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.2 3 In their book, Jecker and Atuire mine particularly the sub-Saharan tradition for insights and put them into revealing debate–not merely comparison or dialogue–with salient views from the classical and contemporary Western traditions.

Indeed, Jecker and Atuire purport to demonstrate that ideas from sub-Saharan ethics and metaphysics plausibly account for a long-standing intuition that Western theories have not been able to capture after hundreds of years, viz., that all human beings have a full and hence equal moral status from (at least) birth to death (pp77, 113, 208). As is well known, Kantians (and social contract theorists) cannot easily accord full moral status to those lacking rationality to the requisite degree, while sophisticated utilitarians such as John Stuart Mill and Peter Singer cannot do so in respect of those lacking the …