Meaning of Justice in African Philosophy

The book examines the meaning of justice in African political philosophy, building on the use-theoretical approach. Currently, most of the philosophical works in this context advocate for a communal interpretation of the meaning of justice, such as the 'relational theory of justice' and 'Ubuntu justice as fairness.' The author argues that this foundation of justice in the community undermines the self, which is a major problem with these theories. As an attempt to go beyond communitarianism in African thought, the book recognizes other philosophical frameworks for elaborating the meaning of justice in ordinary people's experience, such as vitalism, theism, ubuntuism, and semantic framework. The author opts for a reconstructed ubuntu-based theory of the meaning of justice that reflects the traditional African experience and recuperates 'valuing self-existence' and 'valuing other-existence' as its foundations. The book further identifies the centrality of rights in defining justice in traditional African communities.



?Grivas Muchineripi Kayange is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Malawi. He graduated in philosophy at the Gregorian Pontifical University in Rome in 2007. His expertise includes: Theories/logic and practice, African philosophy, Analytic philosophy, and Ethics. He has done research and published in different areas since 2008; some of his most recent books include; Meaning and Truth in African Philosophy (2018), Capitalism and Freedom in African Philosophy (2020), Co-editor Addiction in East and Southern Africa (2020), The Question of Being in Western and African Analytic Metaphysics (2021), and Ethics in Malawi (2021). Some of his commonly read articles include 'Restoration of Ubuntu as an Autocentric Virtue-Phronesis Theory' (2020), 'Rethinking African Analytic Philosophy: A Perspectival Approach' (2019), and 'An Alternative to Giere's Perspectival Realism' (2019). The author is on a broad philosophical project that aims at the theoretical reconstruction of African philosophy so that it reflects the various perspectives and the experience of the ordinary people.