Ubuntu depends on what you had for breakfast

I STILL often cheekily quote, without acknowledgement, the definition of “public morality”, given by one of my undergraduate law lecturers, as stuff that “depends on what a judge had for breakfast”. I wonder whether my lecturer also had ubuntu in mind?

Our Constitutional Court, in particular, references ubuntu with gay abandon.

This invocation of a supposedly distinctive African moral principle reveals the court’s desire to add a touch of the African to an otherwise western jurisprudential brew.

The truth is that ubuntu is a terribly opaque notion not fit as a normative moral principle that can guide our actions, let alone be a transparent and substantive basis for legal adjudication. In fact, it reminds one of the “African renaissance” motif. African renaissance is a concept similarly devoid of conceptual precision.

It is interesting to try to make sense of ubuntu and to reflect on why many of us feel compelled to render it meaningful.

Rather shamefully, it has taken an American philosopher, Thaddeus Metz who is now based at the University of Johannesburg (UJ), to force the wider South African philosophical community to invest some brain power into making sense of African ethics.

His first attempt to cut through various possible definitions, led Metz with the help of writing by folks like one Desmond Tutu of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission fame, defines ubuntu roughly as follows: ubuntu means that an action performed by someone is morally right if that action constitutes a way of living harmoniously or places value on communal relationships.

These are actions, in other words, in which people identify with each other and exhibit solidarity with one another. Behaviour that lack these features are not consistent with the spirit of ubuntu.
This definition is certainly a good start. Even though it refers to actions, the emphasis is clearly on relationships. Relationships, with some exaggeration, are deemed more important than one’s selfish interests. This is also why ubuntu is often cashed out in the form of a maxim to the effect that “a person is a person through other people”.

Your identity is partly dependent on, and constituted by, relationships with others.
And, if you desire to be a moral person, your actions had better demonstrate an appreciation of the requirement that morality’s fundamental point is to value relationships.

The critical question is whether this philosophising succeeds in getting us closer to a doctrine that can be practically useful in both our personal lives and in the public space, including the tricky enterprise of legal adjudication? The most optimistic answer must be, “Not yet.”

For one thing, this definition of ubuntu does not give us a doctrine that is unique to sub-Saharan Africa. To his credit, Metz comes close to acknowledging this fact but does some fancy philosophical footwork in shifting his claim to saying that the general emphasis on relationships is more widespread in sub-Saharan Africa than it is in western societies.

But it is surely anthropologically false to imagine that notions of “love” or “friendship” are not at the core of actual relationships between folks living in London or Berlin just because a couple of western academic philosophers had written texts that prioritise detached moral principles over more complex, relationship-focused ethics.

Western doctrines such as communitarianism can reasonably be interpreted, surely, as emphasising community not only for the sake of benefiting the individual but because community bonds — that is, relationships — are intrinsically valuable.

Ubuntu still appears like some kind of synonym for at least some versions of communitarianism, despite claims to the contrary by ubuntu’s loyal friends. This means that ubuntu does not capture anything in ethics or law that does not exist elsewhere in the world.

Besides not being unique, it is also not clear that we had succeeded in stating the content of ubuntu clearly and comprehensively enough to be useful for practical purposes. As Metz argues in his most recent work, the Constitutional Court relied on at least eight different definitions of ubuntu in the case of The State vs Makwanya, in which it declared the death penalty to be unconstitutional. Each of these definitions seemed rather ad hoc. Each one, if used consistently in other areas of law, would lead to counterintuitive results.

Two examples from the list of eight will suffice to illustrate the point. One judge argued that the death penalty violates ubuntu because ubuntu requires that we respect someone else’s life at least as much as we respect our own. But this cannot be so. Presumably when we kill in self-defence, doing so is okay? It is probably also morally acceptable to intentionally kill someone to save the lives of others, in circumstances such as when the offending person is committing genocide and refusing to stop? This particular definition of ubuntu would render killing in these cases immoral.

Another judge argued that ubuntu requires that one always try to rehabilitate someone in order to restore their humanity. Again, this colourful invocation of ubuntu as an African foundation for restorative justice intuitions is laudable, but surely incorrect since it desperately marries ubuntu to rehabilitation simply to give rehabilitation a more powerful aura than it naturally might carry. This is not great legal analysis, just deceptive usage of ubuntu for ulterior (though certainly agreeable) hermeneutical purposes.

What these random and rather wide definitions of ubuntu from a landmark Constitutional Court judgment demonstrate is that the very notion of ubuntu is elusive. This does not, of course, imply that ubuntu cannot be stated clearly and more narrowly. Indeed, there seems to be admirable normative philosophical projects at both the University of SA and UJ that do just that.


So far, however, these project are still very much works in progress. Until they yield substantive results, our reference to the notion of ubuntu will continue to say more about our desire to be clearly African than about our commitment to only use words and concepts whose meaning we actually understand.

This last thought explains why some of us are desperate to render ubuntu meaningful. There is a yearning — not restricted to the Constitutional Court — to find values and principles that we can think of as “African”. This, in turn, stems from a deeper need to have an identity that is not wholly handed down from our colonial forbears.

While these motivations are understandable, it is equally important that our identity crises do not get in the way of designing laws and policies that are sensible, but which might get set aside on the spurious basis that they are w estern rather than African.

If a philosophical value is most common in Europe, and has been explained and justified as a great and useful moral principle by someone of European descent, so what? We are free to import concepts that can help improve our lot as Africans, surely? We should dismiss western concepts only if the logic for them is poor or if they will not benefit us.

It is important that we balance our yearning and search for an African identity and ethics with a prudential acceptance that many western concepts are benign and some are even useful.


http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=85698