Thaddeus Metz

It was 2021, at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.

The university was holding a series of expert lectures, with twenty-seven scholars. One of them was an American-born philosopher. His name was Thaddeus Metz.

His topic fit on one line: what ubuntu can bring to philosophical ethics.

The word ubuntu means "humanness" in the Nguni languages of Southern Africa. It is often used to sum up the essentials: how to live, and how to treat one another.

Metz asked a question. What do all wrong actions have in common?

Western philosophers often answer: causing harm, or degrading someone's autonomy. Metz proposed listening to ubuntu's answer as well. In his view, it was more appealing.

He put it this way:

That path had begun far from Pretoria.

Thaddeus Metz was born in 1968. In 1997, he earned his doctorate in philosophy at Cornell University, in the United States.

Then he settled in South Africa. His research question was this: how could indigenous African thought help build a defensible moral theory?

He felt that Western theorists had paid too little attention to non-Western cultures, especially African ones.

In 2007, he published an article titled "Toward an African Moral Theory."

He did not seek to represent how others understand ubuntu. He drew, from African thought, the aspects that seemed appealing to him, to build a moral theory.

In 2011, in an African human rights journal, he went further. He proposed a new idea of human dignity.

For him, a human being has dignity because they are capable of community.

And community is two things together. Identifying with others. And showing solidarity with them.

To gravely violate someone's rights is to degrade that capacity. According to Metz, this idea explains much of South Africa's Bill of Rights.

In that article, he quoted Desmond Tutu: harmony comes from close and sympathetic relations within the group.

The years went by. From 2015 to 2019, he was a Distinguished Professor at the University of Johannesburg. In 2020, he became a Research Professor at the University of Pretoria.

He also worked on another great question: the meaning of life. Along with the philosopher Susan Wolf, he is credited with helping make it a field of study in its own right.

He supervised doctoral students. Among them was Mpho Tshivhase, the first African woman from South Africa to earn a doctorate in philosophy. And Doreen Sesiro, the first from Botswana.

In 2020, Prospect magazine named him among the world's top fifty thinkers.

In 2022, Oxford published his book A Relational Moral Theory: African ethics, on the continent and beyond. Philosophers around the world debate it.

Ubuntu speaks of humanness, and that humanness is lived in our ties to others. Metz took this idea seriously, the way one takes a great theory seriously.

A man from elsewhere had listened to a tradition that was not his own.

Then he carried it to the tables where the whole world debates what is right. There, he made room for African thought.