An African Conception of Individual Moral Obligation

This paper proposes a novel conceptualisation of individual moral obligation from an underexplored African perspective. I employ the concept of non-collective fundamental duty to characterise and obligate individual responsibility to act in morally relevant ways, away from the dominant monolithic Afro-Communitarian conceptions of moral duties. I begin by considering some dominant accounts of moral duties from the African philosophical place. I then establish how these conceptions of moral duties are mostly focused on collective/joint moral duties with little attention given to the place of individual moral obligations. I then argue that this paucity of attention to the principle of individual obligation demonstrates an inadequate mapping of the moral landscape in African ethics. Finally, I propose and defend the idea of non-collective fundamental duty as presenting a viable conception of moral obligation that, although African-inspired, has been overwhelmingly ignored in extant literature on African moral philosophy.