Ubuntu (or “botho” in Sotho-Tswana, or “hunhu” in Shona) is a central moral principle in sub-Saharan African ethical systems. You may be familiar with the term from its use by Canonical as a name for an Open Source Linux operating system—a reference to the community-centered moral underpinning of open source development.
Ubuntu means “humanness” or “humanity” in Nguni languages, and ubuntu ethics holds that moral goodness consists in becoming more human or realizing your humanity. Humanity in the sense of ubuntu is usually defined by the saying that “a person is a person through other persons” (umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu). This understanding of humanity recognizes our interdependence—that our survival is granted through our community.
But ubuntu ethics doesn’t refer only to our mere physical survival when it claims that “a person is a person through other persons.” After all, any pack animal survives through its membership in a group! Being human is a richer thing than mere survival. The claim of ubuntu is that our distinct humanness also emerges from our interdependence and our membership in a community—that the source of our rights and our individuality and our rights is in our community.
This communitarian view of rights and liberties is sharply contrasted with the liberal individualist view that’s been dominant in Euro-American cultures for the last several centuries. On the liberal individualist view, we each have individual rights granted by our individual humanity or given by God, and those rights provide freedom by maintaining autonomy from society and from other individuals. Rights, on this view, exist separately from the community, and freedom consists of disconnection from other people. Ubuntu, by contrast, holds that it is only through community that we can have rights at all, and that rights and individuality only make sense with reference to a community of shared projects and shared commitments. Ubuntu also holds that freedom comes from our connection in the community. Our freedoms are not opposed to one another in a zero-sum game, but, since my freedom follows from my being recognized within my community, the more we recognize one another, the freer we all are—and the freer we all are, the better we are able to recognize one another as members of our community. It is this view that leads to one of the best-known elements of African moral theory: the view that none of us are free so long as even one of us is enslaved.
It’s easy to mistake ubuntu ethics for making the claim that the group is more important than the individual, but this is an inaccurate oversimplification. For example, that view would justify sacrificing an individual for the greater good, but, as we just saw, ubuntu holds that the denial of freedom/humanity within any one person is a denial of freedom/humanity within us all. Instead, ubuntu claims that we gain our identity and individuality through first being part of a group and that we gain our rights and freedoms through first being part of a shared community of mutual interdependence and mutual recognition. This is what it means to say that “a person is a person through other persons,” and ubuntu ethics holds that morality consists in recognizing and realizing this basis of our individuality within a community.