Where do Ubuntu and Confucian role ethics fit, if they are neither utilitarian, Kantian nor virtue ethics?

Question

I teach capoeira Angola in Salvador, and I am new to academic ethics. In a free course online, the lecturer said there are three main moral theories: consequences, duties and virtues. Then, in a footnote, she said Ubuntu and Confucian ethics “don't fit neatly”.
That footnote is where I live. In the roda, the circle where capoeira is played, you do not become a capoeirista alone. You become one through the people who play with you, the mestre who teaches you, the songs, the ancestors the songs remember. Something can be right or wrong in the roda because of what it does to the circle, not because of the result or a rule or my character alone.
So I have two questions:
In simple terms, what do Ubuntu and Confucian role ethics say makes an action right?Why do people say they are “off the axis” of the main theories, rather than just versions of virtue ethics?

Kwame Asante · Accepted Answer

Your roda is a very good starting point, Jorge.
Ubuntu. The phrase usually quoted is the Nguni saying that a person is a person through other persons. Personhood is not simply something you have by being born human; it is achieved and sustained through relationships of mutual recognition. Ubuntu thinkers then judge acts by whether they strengthen or damage the shared life in which people become persons. Desmond Tutu made the idea widely known, especially through the truth and reconciliation process. Philosophers argue over how strong the communal claim is: Ifeanyi Menkiti held that personhood is earned over a lifetime, while Kwame Gyekye defended a moderate view in which individual rights are not swallowed by the community. Some contemporary writers have built explicit Ubuntu-based theories of right action.
Confucian role ethics. Here the question is what this particular relationship requires of someone standing where you stand: child to parent, friend to friend, teacher to student. On the role-ethics reading, you are constituted by these roles, not a self who happens to occupy them.
Why off the axis? Because both make the relationship, not the outcome, the rule or the individual's character, the primary bearer of moral weight. Many scholars do read Confucianism as a virtue ethics, and that reading is respectable; the role-ethics reading is a rival interpretation. Ubuntu is harder to fold into virtue ethics because the right act is defined by what it does to shared personhood, not to the agent's excellence.

Lin Pei-shan · Answer

A small caution on the Confucian side. Roles in the Analects are not just positions; they carry ritual propriety (li) and must be performed with the right attitude. Confucius is scathing about people who go through the motions of filial piety without respect, comparing it to feeding dogs and horses. So role ethics is not “do your job”. It is closer to your roda: a form that only means something when it is played with the right spirit.

Mateo Quispe · Answer

In the Andes there is a concept, ayni, that is often translated as reciprocity: the obligation to return labour and help in kind, which binds families and communities across generations. It is not exactly Ubuntu or Confucian role ethics, but it belongs to the same family of views where obligations arise from what we are to one another. The textbooks' three theories were all built from inside one tradition. It is not surprising that the rest of the world does not fit their footnotes.

Jorge Nascimento · Answer

Thank you, Kwame. Menkiti's idea that personhood is achieved is exactly what happens in the roda: a beginner is not yet fully a player, and nobody thinks this is an insult. And Pei-shan's feeding dogs and horses is something my mestre would say about students who learn the moves without the music.

Where do Ubuntu and Confucian role ethics fit, if they are neither utilitarian, Kantian nor virtue ethics?

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