A person through other persons: is ubuntu an ethics of care?

In my work I hear the word ubuntu in two kinds of place. One is the courtroom, where South African judges have drawn on it in cases about dignity, punishment and eviction. The other is the meeting room of a care organisation, where it appears on a poster beside a line about compassion. In the second setting people often assume that ubuntu is simply an African name for the ethics of care that feminist philosophers have developed since the 1980s. I think the two are genuinely close, and I also think the assumption is mistaken in ways that matter. This essay tries to say why.

Ubuntu

The idea is often summed up in the Nguni saying umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu: a person is a person through other persons. John Mbiti, writing on African religious thought, expressed a similar idea in the formula "I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am". Desmond Tutu, especially through his work on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, made ubuntu known around the world as a way of thinking about forgiveness and restoration. A person with ubuntu, as he described it, is diminished when others are humiliated or oppressed.

Philosophers have tried to state the idea more precisely, and they disagree. Ifeanyi Menkiti argued in 1984 that in African traditional thought personhood is not simply given at birth. It is achieved over time, through participation in community and the fulfilment of obligations; one can be more or less of a person, and it is possible to fail at it. Kwame Gyekye objected that this goes too far. On his moderate communitarianism, a human being has dignity and rights from the start; the community shapes the person, but individuals keep the capacity to question and revise its values. More recently Thaddeus Metz has argued, in a series of papers, that the best theoretical statement of ubuntu makes right action a matter of honouring relationships in which people share a way of life and care for one another's good, which he calls harmonious or communal relationships.

Care ethics

The ethics of care began from a different place. Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice (1982) argued that standard models of moral development, built around abstract justice and rules, overlooked a way of reasoning attentive to relationships and responsibility. Nel Noddings, in Caring (1984), made the caring relation itself the foundation of ethics: the one who cares attends to the one cared for, is moved by their needs, and acts. Eva Kittay put dependency at the centre. All of us are dependent at the beginning and end of life and often in between, and someone must do the work of care, frequently without recognition. Virginia Held argued that care is not a supplement to theories of justice but a full moral theory in its own right.

Where they meet

The overlap is real. Both reject the picture of the moral agent as an isolated, self-sufficient chooser applying impartial rules to strangers. Both start from the fact that we become who we are through others. Both treat relationships as morally basic, not as complications to be fitted into a theory designed for strangers. And both have been used to criticise legal and political systems for ignoring what people owe one another beyond contract.

Where they part

But there are at least three differences.

The unit. Care ethics typically begins with a pair: the one caring and the one cared for, the parent and child, the nurse and patient. Ubuntu begins with a community. The relation that constitutes personhood is not primarily between two people but between a person and the many, and in many African traditions that community includes the ancestors and those not yet born. That changes what counts as a wrong. On ubuntu an act can harm by damaging the community's fabric even when no particular relationship of care is broken.

Personhood. Care ethics does not, as a rule, make personhood something achieved. The one cared for has a claim on us because of their need, not because of their standing in a community. On Menkiti's version of ubuntu, by contrast, personhood is a moral achievement. This is where Gyekye's objection bites hardest, and it is where I think care ethics can help ubuntu. A view on which some human beings are less fully persons can be turned against the very people, the very young, the disabled, the very old, whose dependency care ethics insists we take seriously.

Repair. Ubuntu has a more developed concern than care ethics with restoring relationships after wrongdoing. Tutu's emphasis was not only on care for victims but on bringing those who had done harm back into the community, through truth-telling and acknowledgement. Care ethics has had less to say about how a broken relationship is mended, or about what is owed to, and by, the one who caused the harm.

Why the difference matters in practice

In South Africa, ubuntu entered public law through the interim Constitution, whose closing provisions spoke of a need for ubuntu but not for victimisation. In S v Makwanyane (1995), when the Constitutional Court struck down the death penalty, several judges appealed to it. In later cases about evictions, judges have used it to insist that even a lawful eviction must be carried out with attention to the people affected, including whether they will have anywhere to go.

What I have seen in that work is that ubuntu does its best work when it borrows something from care ethics: attention to the particular vulnerable person in front of the court, not only to communal harmony. Harmony, left to itself, can be invoked to silence an inconvenient individual. And care ethics does its best public work when it borrows from ubuntu: the recognition that care is not only a private relation but a shared condition of social life, and that repair after harm is part of what we owe each other.

Conclusion

So, is ubuntu an ethics of care? My answer is no, but it is the closest ally care ethics has. They share the conviction that persons are made in relationship. They differ on whom the relationship is with, on whether personhood is given or achieved, and on what to do when relationships break. A careful thinker should resist translating one into the other, because each keeps alive a question the other is inclined to forget. If I had to put my own position in one line, it would be this: dignity belongs to everyone from the start, as Gyekye insisted, and what we make of it, we make together.