⁂ Concepts · Ethics · No. 130
Ubuntu

Makwanyane, 1995: an oral tradition's concept doing work in constitutional reasoning.

Ubuntu

Personhood realised through other persons - a claim about what a human being is, not advice about being sociable.

Theme
Ethics and character
Tradition
African
Term
ubuntu
Term fixed
1969

In plain terms

The Nguni maxim is usually rendered as a person is a person through other persons. It is not a recommendation to be friendly.

It is a claim about what a person is. On the individualist picture, you are a self-contained thing that then enters relationships. On this one, being a person is an achievement produced in and by a community - and someone raised in complete isolation would not be a diminished person but not yet one.

The practical consequences run in both directions. It grounds strong obligations: what is owed to others is not a limit on your interests but constitutive of your being. And it makes exclusion a very serious matter, because to be cut off from the community is not merely to be lonely but to be prevented from becoming what a human being is.

As a philosopher would put it

Ubuntu is standardly presented as a relational ontology of the person - umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu - combined with a normative claim: becoming fully human is a task achieved through right relationship, and the virtues that constitute it are communal ones.

Its philosophical status is genuinely contested inside African philosophy. Hountondji and Wiredu criticised the earlier ethnophilosophy tradition for presenting a collective worldview rather than argued positions, and some regard ubuntu discourse as continuing that pattern. Metz has responded with an explicitly analytic formulation - roughly, that an act is right insofar as it honours relationships of identity and solidarity - which makes it assessable as a moral theory rather than as a cultural description.

The political deployment is separate again. The postamble to South Africa's 1993 interim constitution states that there is a need for understanding but not for vengeance, for reparation but not for retaliation, for ubuntu but not for victimisation - and the Constitutional Court has cited it substantively.

Where you meet it

In S v Makwanyane, decided in June 1995, the South African Constitutional Court abolished the death penalty in its first judgment.

Several judgments in the case turned on ubuntu. Justice Langa wrote that it recognises a person's status as a human being entitled to unconditional respect, and that the value of life cannot be measured against another life. Justice Mokgoro treated it as a source of constitutional value alongside dignity, connecting group solidarity to the survival of communities. The interim constitution's postamble had named it directly.

The court was doing something unusual: importing a concept from an oral philosophical tradition into constitutional reasoning, in a judgment abolishing a punishment the majority of the population supported. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission then built its whole framework on the same term. Whether ubuntu can bear that weight - whether a communal ethic scales to a state and to strangers - is the question the South African experience actually tests.

What is actually disputed

Whether ubuntu is a philosophy or a description.

The critique from within African philosophy is that presenting a shared worldview as a position obscures the arguments, and that no tradition is unanimous. Wiredu's insistence on distinguishing what a culture believes from what can be defended is the standard statement of it. Metz's analytic reconstruction is an answer, and some regard it as translating ubuntu into a foreign idiom in order to make it respectable.

The substantive worry is about the individual. If personhood is conferred through community, a person who dissents from the community is in a weak position, and the concept has been used politically to discourage exactly that. Defenders reply that the tradition includes obligations of the community to the person and that the maxim runs in both directions - but the resources for protecting a dissenter are thinner than in rights-based frameworks, which is a real cost rather than a misunderstanding.

Commonly confused with

  • community spirit A sentiment about getting along. Ubuntu is a claim about what makes something a person at all.
  • the Linux distribution Named after the concept and unrelated to it, which is nonetheless the commonest search collision.
  • African philosophy in general Ubuntu is one position from one language family. Treating it as the African view is exactly the error the ethnophilosophy critique names.

Defined against

  • Autonomy A person constituted through community and a person defined by self-legislation are incompatible accounts of what a human being fundamentally is

Philosophers

Works

Schools

Related concepts

Relationality c. 150 · Moral personhood 1694 · Care 1982 · Ren c. 480 BC · Dignity 1785

The maxim is old and proverbial across Nguni and Sotho-Tswana languages; its articulation as a philosophical position is twentieth-century, and its formulation as a national political principle is South African and dates from the 1990s.