Popper’s Negative Utilitarianism and the Ethics of African Humanism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.61841/mrqgkw20Keywords:
Negative Utilitarianism, Ethics of African Humanism, Pain, Suffering and HappinessAbstract
This paper deals on Karl Popper’s Negative Utilitarianism and the Ethics of African Humanism. It
examines Popper’s concept of Negative Utilitarianism with a view to using Popper’s Negative Utilitarianism as
a tool for the analysis of an Ethics of African Humanism. Popper’s Negative Utilitarianism asserts that the
principal business of politics is to reduce suffering rather than to increase happiness. The function of ethics
African humanism, in this regard, is to drive social and political reform that should work for the elimination of
concrete evils. The objective is to elucidate Popper’s negative utilitarian with a view to directing Ethics of
African Humanism to proffer values proper to Africa, which can drive governance to focus not on establishing
happiness through massive utopian planning, rather to aim at the elimination of immediate concrete miseries of
the African people by means of piecemeal tinkering. This paper adopts hermeneutical, expository and textual
analysis methods. This paper shows that adopting the method of elimination of false theories will help ethics of
African Humanism to cast light on governance to concentrate on gradual elimination of social situation that
increase suffering of the greatest number, rather than concentrate on Policies that increase the happiness or
serve the interest of only a section of a nation.
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