Menkiti’s Moral Man: Engaging with Critics

In this article, Oritsegbubemi Oyowe responds to seven critics of Menkiti’s Moral Man on a range of issues and questions and, along the way, clarifies further some of the ideas and proposals in the book. Some of these issues and questions concern what it means to interrogate other cultures, what social recognition really entails, whether persons are social kinds, and, by extension, whether Oyowe’s appeal to a special social ontology is superfluous, whether Oyowe’s account of the existence and persistence of ancestral persons is plausible, and finally, whether and to what extent the terms of these engagements exemplify exogenous discourse.