Thinker · TH-0123
Desmond Tutu
Desmond Tutu was a South African Anglican cleric, Archbishop of Cape Town and a leading opponent of apartheid, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in…
Also known as Desmond Mpilo Tutu
1931 – 2021 · Klerksdorp; Johannesburg; Cape Town
Traditions: African & Africana
Schools: Ubuntu philosophy
Desmond Tutu was a South African Anglican cleric, Archbishop of Cape Town and a leading opponent of apartheid, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984. He chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the end of apartheid. In his writing on forgiveness and restorative justice he articulated ubuntu, the idea that a person is a person through other persons, for a wide international audience.
Key ideas
- A person's humanity is bound up with the humanity of others (ubuntu).
- Justice after mass wrongdoing can be restorative, aiming to repair relationships rather than only to punish.
- Forgiveness is not forgetting or excusing; it requires truth about what was done.
- Dehumanising others diminishes the oppressor as well as the oppressed.
Major works
- No Future Without Forgiveness (1999)
- God Has a Dream (2004)
- The Book of Forgiving (2014, with Mpho Tutu)
In the conversation
- Question Where do Ubuntu and Confucian role ethics fit, if they are neither utilitarian, Kantian nor virtue ethics?
- Discussion Wiredu’s consensus politics and the epistemology of disagreement: is agreement evidence?
- Discussion Why “I’m sorry you feel that way” is not an apology
- Question Does ubuntu ground human rights, or quietly replace them with duties?