"A Moral Theory of Liveliness: A Secular Interpretation of African Life Force" - Kirk Lougheed (LCC International University)

Oxford University Press, 2025

By Kirk Lougheed

In my new book, A Moral Theory of Liveliness: A Secular Interpretation of African Life Force, I try to develop a novel moral theory inspired from the African moral tradition, but to do so in a way that is intelligible to those working in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition. Though my hope is that the book constitutes a significant contribution to the African philosophical literature in its own right, I also wanted it to be intelligible to philosophers without any familiarity with the African tradition.

African moral philosophy as a subfield is growing rapidly. Along with political philosophy, topics in moral philosophy continue to dominate discussions in contemporary African philosophy, which is primarily conducted in English by professional philosophers living and working on the African continent (though not exclusively). African moral philosophy tends to focus on topics in normative and applied ethics, with various moral theories being developed and applied to a wide array of moral questions. The normative theories are often starkly different than what one finds in the Anglo-American tradition because they are communitarian. For instance, what is known as normative personhood focuses on the idea that morality is all about developing other-regarding virtues. But of course, other-regarding virtues can only be developed in the context of community. This is a fundamentally relational account of morality. One influential interpretation of personhood says that the key underlying virtue, the one that subsumes all others, is sympathy. It is the capacity for sympathy that grounds human dignity (Molefe 2019, 2020). A different approach to normative theory says that communal harmony is the most important goal and ought to be the end of all moral decision-making. This is a clearly teleological approach but a variation of this idea about harmony exists in a deontological form. One such influential account says that in order to avoid worrisome trade-offs between innocent individuals and the good of the community, among other problems, it is respecting an individual’s capacity to love and be loved that is the basis of respectful treatment (Metz 2022). Notice that to love and be loved is inherently relational.

My book instead focuses on developing a secular normative theory based on important normative ideas found in what is known as African Traditional Religion (or ‘ATR’). This religion is perhaps best described as a synthesis of beliefs and practices that are common in millions of indigenous black Africans across the sub-Saharan region. ATR is monotheistic because it claims that there is one God who created the world out of pre-existing matter and has endowed everything that exists with life force or vital energy. God has the most force and all force flows from him. According to most accounts of ATR, there is a large invisible realm with ancestors, living dead, and other spirits who all possess significant life force. Humans have the most force of anything in the visible realm, followed by animals, flora and fauna, and minerals. Everything that exists is therefore metaphysically connected in virtue of possessing force.

On ATR, the goal of morality is to protect and preserve the life force in oneself and others. A strong force is indicated by health, energy, courage, creativity, curiosity, reproduction, among other intuitively plausible traits. A lack of life force is exhibited by disease, barrenness, decay, depression, anxiety, and ultimately death. The snuffing out of a person’s life force altogether (i.e., death) is to be avoided at all costs. Instead of developing a moral theory that relies on such a controversial metaphysical background, I develop an entirely secular ethic called liveliness (a term first used by Thaddeus Metz). Notice that much of the description of the items that are positively associated with life force and with its lack can be understood in entirely naturalistic terms. Liveliness can be understood as a force that increases and decreases, instead of as a substance. All else being equal, a person with more liveliness is better off (happier or flourishing) more than someone who is less lively.

Teleological accounts of a moral theory of liveliness suggest that the end goal of moral decision-making is to increase liveliness. Thaddeus Metz argues that this understanding of liveliness is susceptible to problems associated with welfarism, that it cannot explain why plural voting is wrong, that it cannot make clear why certain types of racial segregation are inappropriate, and that it does not show why lying is wrong in itself. I counter that while such worries might apply to teleological versions of liveliness as a moral theory, they do not apply with equal strength to deontological versions. Adding a deontological constraint which says that liveliness can only be increased provided it respects a person’s dignity in virtue of their capacity for liveliness helps to avoid these challenges. Likewise, a purely teleological account of liveliness has a difficult time dealing with standard objections to consequentialism. If it turns out I could sacrifice an innocent person in order to increase the liveliness of many others, in the long run, then I should do so. Again, adding a deontological constraint to the theory of liveliness helps to avoid this implication.

Liveliness also avoids certain problems associated with those African normative theories based on personhood or harmony. With respect to the former, if the community is the only context in which an individual can develop their personhood, it is difficult to deny that it is essential for morality. But then the individual’s relationship with the community is fraught; they are unable to act for self-interested reasons, even ones that seem widely intuitively permissible. The latter view that focuses on the capacity to love and be loved, might entail that what is loving will tend to avoid communal strife. But again, there are cases where causing at least some communal strife seems intuitively permissible. The moral theory of liveliness that says one ought to act in ways that increase the liveliness in oneself and others while not disrespecting any person in view of their capacity for liveliness avoids all of these problems. There is a clear place for the individual on the theory of liveliness, though it is admittedly less communitarian in nature than these other theories. In some important sense, then, the theory I develop is probably less African than them too.

Metaethics is rarely discussed in African moral philosophy and to conclude the book I attempt to break new ground by discussing some relevant issues in metaethics. I first examine metaethics from the perspective of ATR, suggesting it might be able to avoid the Euthyphro Dilemma better than Divine Command Theory. I then suggest that the best metaethical grounding on offer for the secular theory of liveliness is probably intuitionism. At the very least, liveliness does not appear to be worse off with respect to its metaethical grounding than other normative theories, but this is an area where admittedly much more work is needed.

The book also contains an extensive survey and synthesis of the literature on life force, which tends to be mostly descriptive in nature. It contains interaction with many key ideas in African normative philosophy, in addition to some comparison with Anglo-American theories like consequentialism. My hope is that all of this is enough to show that the moral theory of liveliness deserves to be considered as a contender for the best African normative theory on offer, and maybe as a potential rival candidate to the major Anglo-American normative theories. An important way to evaluate the strength of this theory in the future is by testing it against a wide array of topics in applied ethics to see whether it yields intuitive and consistent verdicts.