Browsing by Author "Ani, E.I."

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Africa and the prospects of deliberative democracy
(South African Journal of Philosophy, 2013-09) Ani, E.I.
Preoccupation with multiparty aggregative democracy in Africa has produced superficial forms of political/electoral choice-making by subjects that deepen pre-existing ethnic and primordial cleavages. This is because the principles of the multiparty system presuppose that decision-making through voting should be the result of a mere aggregation of pre-existing, fixed preferences. To this kind of decision-making, I propose deliberative democracy as a supplementary approach. My reason is that deliberation, beyond mere voting, should be central to decision-making and that, for a decision to be legitimate, it must be preceded by deliberation, not merely the aggregation of pre-existing fixed preferences. I agree with arguments that when adequate justifications are made for claims/demands/conclusions, deliberation has the potential to have a salutary effect on people's opinions, transform/evolve preferences, better inform judgments/voting, lead to increasingly 'common good' decisions, have moral educative power, place more burden of account-giving on public officers, and furnish subjects/losers/outvoted with justifications for collectively binding decisions. I argue that a deliberative turn in politics in Africa will have a mitigating effect on tribal and money politics. Copyright © South African Journal of Philosophy.
Afro-communitarianism or Cosmopolitanism
(The Journal of Value Inquiry, 2020) Ani, E.I.
Combatting corruption with public deliberation
(South African Journal of Philosophy, 2015-04) Ani, E.I.
Building on Seumas Millers concept of corruption leads me to conclude that the question of disposition is central to the concept of corruption, which prompts me to consider punishment theories with regard to deterring dispositions to corruption. However, problems with punishment as a stand-alone approach lead me to consider institutional reform recommendations. Although institutional reforms have the weakness of merely engaging corrupt disposition in a hide-and-seek game, I seek to reconcile institutional approaches and moral individualism by suggesting that the former is intended to aid the latter, in the sense that resisting corruption is a question of cost, and the onus is to determine how to reduce this cost. In this regard, prevailing proposals are inept without an enabling environment: public deliberation (comprising publicity and deliberation) is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for combating corruption, because it (1) compels reason to function at its best, (2) demands rational accountability, and therefore account-giving, (3) increases common-good thinking, (4) facilitates the recruitment of responsible institutional role-occupants, and (5) is a self-correcting instrument. © South African Journal of Philosophy.
Conflict and dialogue perspectives to social change: Insights from an African culture
(Philosophia (Philippines), 2015-05) Ani, E.I.
I examine the conflict and dialogue perspectives to social change. Distinguishing between conflict and aggression, I argue that although conflict of interest is inevitable, it is also inevitable that we use aggression to deal with our conflicting interests. The conflicting nature of human interests makes at least verbal conflict to be unavoidable, but I distinguish between verbal conflict and verbal aggression. With the help of Aristotle's components of persuasion, I further distinguish between verbal conflict approaches such as rational nonaggressive, rational aggressive, and character-or emotiontargeted verbal aggression. With insights from the Akan of Ghana, I argue that effective constraints against aggressive behaviour can be built into social policy and, ultimately, culture. Incidentally, a critical but non-Aggressive approach to verbal conflict rhymes with an agonistic mode of dialogue that redeems traditionally congenial dialogue from much of its weaknesses.
Considering escaping hell
(Religious Studies, 2022) Ani, E.I.
Adams argues that the traditional doctrine of eternal hellish experience stretches the Problem of Evil beyond any reasonable solution, as hell is stubbornly incompatible with God’s omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect goodness. Buckareff and Plug argue that people could leave hell. Matheson responds that if people could leave hell, people could leave heaven. But Matheson provides reasons to think that this is not possible. Luck attempts to refute Matheson’s argument. I show that Luck’s attempt contains analogies that lack features that crucially depict the asymmetrical relationship between heaven and hell. I suggest some other analogies that I think contain such features.
Debating the Roots of Poor Academic Performance in the West African Subregion: The Perspective of a Philosopher
(SAGE Open, 2017) Ani, E.I.
Recent nationalistic arguments have tended to blame the use of foreign language as responsible for poor academic performance and even underdevelopment. Although I theoretically agree with the mother tongue (MT) proposal concerning early elementary education, I identify some narrowness in the meaning of MT that drives the nationalistic school. A correction of this connotative inaccuracy would mean that the importance of the MT proposal to education is not as all embracing as nationalists would love to see. Even presuming theoretical correctness, I also see a number of grave practical problems with the MT initiative, including the unwillingness to develop local languages in terms of equiping them with the lexical power to serve as medium for modern research, academics, science, and technology. I also see a potential of the MT idea to sustain ethnicity, a political problem that ultimately undermines the quality of education itself. I conclude that the most critically determining factor for academic performance in this region is not the use (or lack of use) of MT but the political handling of education. I discuss, and tentatively suggest solutions to (a) the monopoly of salary fixing by politicians and (2) the extremely low budget percentage allocated to the educational sector. © 2017, © The Author(s) 2017.
Debating the Roots of Poor Academic Performance in the West African Subregion: The Perspective of a Philosopher
(SAGE Publications Inc., 2017) Ani, E.I.
Recent nationalistic arguments have tended to blame the use of foreign language as responsible for poor academic performance and even underdevelopment. Although I theoretically agree with the mother tongue (MT) proposal concerning early elementary education, I identify some narrowness in the meaning of MT that drives the nationalistic school. A correction of this connotative inaccuracy would mean that the importance of the MT proposal to education is not as all embracing as nationalists would love to see. Even presuming theoretical correctness, I also see a number of grave practical problems with the MT initiative, including the unwillingness to develop local languages in terms of equiping them with the lexical power to serve as medium for modern research, academics, science, and technology. I also see a potential of the MT idea to sustain ethnicity, a political problem that ultimately undermines the quality of education itself. I conclude that the most critically determining factor for academic performance in this region is not the use (or lack of use) of MT but the political handling of education. I discuss, and tentatively suggest solutions to (a) the monopoly of salary fixing by politicians and (2) the extremely low budget percentage allocated to the educational sector. © 2017, © The Author(s) 2017.
Is Bargaining a Form of Deliberating?
(Philosophical Papers, 2020-05-12) Ani, E.I.
Prevailing literature argues that arguing is the only appropriate mode of deliberation. The literature acknowledges bargaining, storytelling, and other forms of communication, but is unwilling to describe these as deliberation, properly speaking. The claim is that describing them as such would amount to concept stretching. My first thesis is that arguing exhausts neither the legitimate modes of deliberation nor the modes for effective deliberation. To do this I further develop a two-type categorization of issues I have employed elsewhere to show that argument alone is sufficient for bringing closure to issues in the first category, but bargaining is needed to reach agreements on issues in the second category. I observe that the more agreeable variant of the second category of issues constitutes a great deal of issues deliberated outside the purely theoretical classroom. Progressing from these observations, my second thesis is that bargaining is in fact the preeminent way of reaching agreements in political deliberation. To illustrate this, I demonstrate that normative differences and distributive consequences are inherent features of political issues.
On agreed actions without agreed notions
(South African Journal of Philosophy, 2014-07) Ani, E.I.
In his plea for consensual democracy in Africa, Kwasi Wiredu recommends unanimity about what is to be done, not what ought to be done, or unanimity on action rather than unanimity of values, beliefs and opinion. I caution the use of this procedural instrument by showing that some issues are so value-laden that a group decision cannot be value-neutral. It may sometimes be more productive to entertain value differences to keep them from going underground and becoming dangerous. However, the ability to locate some common interest or ground seems to be crucial for such value confrontation. © 2014 South African Journal of Philosophy.
On the Non-worshipping Character of the Akan of Africa
(Sophia, 2019-06) Ani, E.I.
According to Wiredu, the Akan profess secular esteem rather than religious worship to supra-natural beings (including the Supreme Being), who they perceive in an empirical sense. He backs this up by re-reading what he sees as the Akan general ontology in a way that denies them of the concepts of the supernatural, the transcendental, the mental, the spiritual, and an ontologically distinct mind. At the end of denying the three criteria of worship as well as all of these other concepts which might otherwise be available to the Akan, one might struggle to find any evidence that the Akan even had a religion. I dispute this secular reading, and I more generally demonstrate that the characterizations of the Akan attitude to divinity as non-worshipping, non-supernatural, non-transcendent, and non-spiritual, are either conceptually flawed, factually incorrect, or both.
On traditional African consensual rationality
(Journal of Political Philosophy, 2014-09) Ani, E.I.
Wiredu’s call for democracy by consensus is illustrated by his description of traditional African consensual rationality. This description contains the attribution of immanence to African consensual rationality. This paper objects to this doctrine of immanence. More importantly, the doctrine of immanence has led to the attribution of pure rationality to traditional African consensual practices. With reference to Aristotle’s three components of persuasion, I object to deliberation as purely rational and impervious to extraneous factors. I further argue that it is because deliberation is not always perfectly rational that the process of consensus can suffer three forms of social conformity: conformity to dominant players, to numerical opinion majority, and to group-centrism. These forms of conformity mean that a consensus task order could lead to decisions of more inclusive value, but not necessarily decisions of more epistemic value. The concept of agonistic inquiry is employed to tackle what I see as the dangers of conformity and complacency in the project of inclusivity, and this is to strike a crucial balance between too-consensual and purely adversarial forms of deliberation.
The Question of Immanence in Kwasi Wiredu’s Consensual Democracy
(Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology, 2018-12) Ani, E.I.
Kwasi Wiredu, arguably the most influential African philosopher, has proposed a democracy by consensus as an alternative to the majoritarian democracy African countries inherited from their colonial masters. His proposal has generated a lot of debates, and these debates have spanned several aspects of his proposal. In this paper, I focus on the debate regarding his attribution of immanence to the practice of consensus in traditional African social relations. Bernard Matolino has recently written an article defending Wiredu?s employment of the word immanence in describing the traditional African attitude to social relations. In this article, I find Matolino?s defense to be unsustainable.
Theistic humanism and a critique of Wiredu's notion of supernaturalism
(Critical Research on Religion, 2017-09) Ani, E.I.
In decrying the evils of supernaturalism, African philosopher Kwasi Wiredu (1931–) proposes humanism, by making concern for human well-being the basis for morality. However, the presentation of humanism as a simple replacement of supernaturalism is objectionable. Wiredu’s notion of supernaturalism is too narrow, since it is only a variant of supernaturalism. His reference to humanism is too broad, since humanism is an umbrella of very conflicting worldviews, such as that between secular and theistic humanism. Although Wiredu does not specify which variant of humanism he means, and although he acknowledges that the Akan (the author’s tribe in West Africa) believe in a Supreme Being, his general ontology shows that he is closer to the secular than the theistic variant. This article explores the ideological extensions of the two and argues that theistic humanism provides the compatibility needed for being religious and at the same time basing morality on humanistic/naturalistic concerns. In doing so, it distinguishes supernaturalism per se from its ethical and cosmological variants. As a corrective to Wiredu, this article blames these two variants of supernaturalism, rather than supernaturalism per se, for the evils that Wiredu adduces. The conclusion is that in theistic humanism, humanism escapes the dangers of ethical and cosmological supernaturalism without necessarily adopting the antisupernaturalist connotations currently popular with modern secular humanism.
Theistic humanism and a critique of Wiredu’s notion of supernaturalism
(Critical Research on Religion, 2017) Ani, E.I.
In decrying the evils of supernaturalism, African philosopher Kwasi Wiredu (1931–) proposes humanism, by making concern for human well-being the basis for morality. However, the presentation of humanism as a simple replacement for supernaturalism is objectionable. Wiredu’s notion of supernaturalism is too narrow since it is only a variant of supernaturalism. His reference to humanism is too broad since humanism is an umbrella of very conflicting worldviews, such as that between secular and theistic humanism. Although Wiredu does not specify which variant of humanism he means, and although he acknowledges that the Akan (the author’s tribe in West Africa) believes in a Supreme Being, his general ontology shows that he is closer to the secular than the theistic variant. This article explores the ideological extensions of the two and argues that theistic humanism provides the compatibility needed for being religious and at the same time basing morality on humanistic/naturalistic concerns. In doing so, it distinguishes super naturalism per se from its ethical and cosmological variants. As a corrective to Wiredu, this article blames these two variants of supernaturalism, rather than supernaturalism per se, for the evils that Wiredu adduces. The conclusion is that in theistic humanism, humanism escapes the dangers of ethical and cosmological supernaturalism without necessarily adopting the anti-naturalist connotations currently popular with modern secular humanism.
A United States of Africa: Insights from antifragility
(Philosophia Africana, 2014-01) Ani, E.I.
I revisit in this article the question of the possibility of political integration of the Afri- can continent, something ﬁrst proposed by Kwame Nkrumah and then re-proposed by Muamar Gaddafﬁ. My focus here is not to examine the extent of African leaders’ willing- ness to bring about integration, nor will I concentrate on the political intrigues surround- ing it (though these will be brieﬂy acknowledged). Further, I will not contest Nkrumah’s economic argument (which is commonsensically correct and in line with mainstream eco- nomics) but will, instead, take up the more normative question of the possibility, and thus practicability, of political integration in light of cultural and ethnic heterogeneity on the continent. I argue that political integration is possible, and I support the gradualist view- point by drawing lessons from Nicholas Taleb’s concept of antifragility and pointing out that there is almost as much heterogeneity at individual and simpler society levels as there is in ethnically diverse societies.
What Exactly is Voting to Consensual Deliberation?
(Taylor & Francis Group, 2021) Ani, E.I.
There have been two parallel views regarding the role of voting in deliberation. The first is that deliberation before the fabrication of balloting was completely devoid of voting. The second is that voting is not just part of deliberation, but is standard to deliberation. I argue in this article that neither of these views is correct. Implicit voting has always existed across time and space but only as a last resort in the event of a failure of natural unanimity. What is relatively modern is the establishment of what I call explicit voting; namely, balloting, outside deliberation and often without deliberation. I also distinguish between natural and artificial unanimities, and clarify that artificial unanimities are products of implicit voting. I demonstrate these clarifications with some examples of deliberation. I deploy these clarifications to rid a certain debate of confusion regarding the precise role of voting in consensual deliberation.