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Journal of Moral Education Vol. 39, No. 3, September 2010, pp. 273–290

The African ethic of Ubuntu/Botho: implications for research on morality Thaddeus Metz*a and Joseph B.R. Gaieb aUniversity of Johannesburg, South Africa; bUniversity of Botswana, Botswana Taylor and FrancisCJME_A_497609.sgm10.1080/03057240.2010.497609Journal of Moral Education0305-7240 (print)/1465-3877 (online)Original Article2010Taylor & Francis393000000September [email protected]

In this article we provide a theoretical reconstruction of sub-Saharan ethics that we argue is a strong competitor to typical Western approaches to morality. According to our African moral theory, actions are right roughly insofar as they are a matter of living harmoniously with others or honouring communal relationships. After spelling out this ethic, we apply it to several issues in both normative and empirical research into morality. With regard to normative research, we compare and contrast this African moral theory with utilitarianism and Kantianism in the context of several practical issues. With regard to empirical research, we compare and contrast our sub-Saharan ethic with several of Lawrence Kohlberg’s views on the nature of morality. Our aim is to highlight respects in which the African approach provides a unitary foundation for a variety of normative and empirical conclusions that are serious alternatives to dominant Western views.

Introduction

How should children be morally educated? How should a society respond to moral infraction? Is there a universal logic to moral development? Is there a plausible alternative to the justice and care models of moral reasoning and action? In this arti- cle, we answer these and other important questions about morality by appealing to sub-Saharan values. Partly, our aim is to acquaint an international audience with African ideas, but we also maintain that, suitably refined, they provide perspectives that genuinely compete with those characteristic of the Western tradition.

We begin by sketching the basic elements of a major strain of sub-Saharan moral thought, which we call ‘Afro-communitarianism’. Then we apply this conception of morality to some central issues in normative research, highlighting respects in which its implications differ from those of influential Western perspectives, especially Kantian and utilitarian moral theories. Next, we apply our Afro-communitarian theory to key issues in empirical research, again highlighting respects in which its implications differ from those of important Western social science, using the work of Lawrence Kohlberg as a foil. Our purpose is not merely to compare, but also to

*Corresponding author. Department of Philosophy, B-603, University of Johannesburg, PO Box 524, Auckland Park, 2006, Republic of South Africa. Email: [email protected]

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advocate; we aim to show that sub-Saharan values are unjustly neglected in global debates among moral theorists.

Whenever writing on Africa, one is expected to note the diversity of the continent, with more than 50 countries and at least several hundred ethnic groups and languages. Because of the variety of sources available, we have had to obtain focus in this article, with two factors influencing our choice of materials. First, there is our basic aim, which is to indicate how an indigenous African perspective might reason- ably motivate a scholar anywhere in the world to change her understanding of how to conduct normative or empirical research on morality. There are ideas in traditional sub-Saharan Africa that overlap with ones common in contemporary Western moral thought (e.g. Prinsloo, 1998, p. 48) but we have downplayed these in order to highlight ways in which the international field of moral education might have something to learn from underrepresented ideas from below the Sahara desert. Furthermore, there are ideas in sub-Saharan Africa that are so far removed from non- African contexts as to be ‘beyond the pale’ for many scholars interested in moral research, a good example being widespread beliefs among Africans about the existence of ancestors in a spiritual realm who interact with us. These ideas, too, we sidestep, despite the fact that many Africans deem them essential to their worldview.

A second factor affecting our focus in this article is our backgrounds as moral philosophers living in southern Africa. Much of our discussion is a matter of bringing philosophical insights to bear on normative and empirical issues and, as we are most familiar with southern African worldviews and languages, we concentrate on them. We note, however, that most scholars of the sub-Saharan region maintain that, while there is substantial diversity among its traditional cultures, there are also threads that many share. So, while we discuss an (not the) African theory of morality, we are confident that many, if not most, other peoples below the Sahara would find it familiar and attractive.

Afro-Communitarianism1

A good starting point for understanding sub-Saharan morality, or the major strand of it that we explore, is the phrase, ‘A person is a person through other persons’ or ‘I am because we are’. In southern African languages, this would be, ‘Motho ke motho ka batho babang’ in Sotho-Tswana and ‘Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu’ in the Nguni languages of Zulu, Xhosa or Ndebele. Most people in Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe speak either one of these languages or a language related to them. However, the phrase is not restricted to these languages and many sub-Saharan societies have versions of it in their respective languages. The Kenyan John Mbiti (1969), in his classic survey of African worldviews, takes the phrase to be a ‘cardinal point in the African view of man’ (pp. 108–109) and a large majority of scholars agree with him on this score.

To most international readers, ‘A person is a person through other persons’ will bring to mind nothing prescriptive and, instead, will indicate merely some descriptive claims about the dependence of a human being, particularly a child, on other human

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beings for her survival or for the course her life takes. The phrase does connote empirical facts of this sort, as well as, for many Africans, metaphysical ideas about the interdependence of all beings in the universe. However, the phrase also carries an important normative connotation. Personhood, identity and humanness in charac- teristic sub-Saharan language and thought are value-laden concepts. That is, one can be more or less of a person, self or human being, where the more one is, the better (Wiredu, 1992a; Menkiti, 2004). One’s ultimate goal should be to become a full person, a real self or a genuine human being.

So construed, sub-Saharan morality is a ‘self-realisation’ or ‘perfectionist’ ethic, akin to Aristotelianism. However, there are two facets that arguably make an African approach distinctive. First, sub-Saharan morality is essentially relational in a way that other Western approaches usually are not. That is, in a typical African ethic, the only way to develop one’s humanness is to relate to others in a positive way. One becomes a person solely ‘through other persons’, which means that one cannot realise one’s true self in opposition to others or even in isolation from them. As Augustine Shutte (2001), one of the first professional philosophers to seriously engage with Ubuntu/ Botho, says, ‘Our deepest moral obligation is to become more fully human. And this means entering more and more deeply into community with others. So although the goal is personal fulfilment, selfishness is excluded’ (p. 30). Consequently, prudence is ruled out as a source of virtue, along with any purely self-regarding activity, such as rationally controlling one’s appetites or contemplating basic features of the universe for its own sake, characteristically Greek ideals (see Plato’s Republic [trans. Grube, 1974] or Aristotle’s Nicomachean ethics [trans. Irwin, 2000]). If one harms others, e.g. by being exploitive, deceptive or unfaithful, or even if one is merely indif- ferent to others and fails to share oneself with them, then one is said to be lacking ‘Botho’ (Sotho-Tswana) or ‘Ubuntu’ (Nguni), literally lacking in personhood or humanness.2 In the way that ‘an unjust law is no law at all’ (as per Augustine’s On free choice of the will [trans. Williams, 1993]) or just as we might say that a jalopy is ‘not a real car’ (Gaie, 2007, p. 33), so Africans would say of an individual who does not relate positively to others that ‘he is not a person’. Indeed, those without much Ubuntu/Botho are often described as animals (Pearce, 1990, p. 147; Bhengu, 1996, p. 27; Letseka, 2000, p. 186).

A second respect in which African morality characteristically differs from an Aristotelian or other Western moral philosophy concerns the way it defines a positive relationship with others, namely, in strictly communal terms. One is not to positively relate to others fundamentally by giving them what they deserve, respecting individ- ual rights grounded on consent, participating in a political sphere or maximising the general welfare, common themes in Western moral philosophy. Instead, the proper way to relate to others, for one large part of sub-Saharan thinking, is to seek out community or to live in harmony with them (for representative statements, see Biko, 1971/2004, p. 46; Silberbauer, 1991, p. 20; Verhoef & Michel, 1997, p. 397; Kasenene, 1998, p. 21; Tutu, 1999, p. 35; Mkhize, 2008, pp. 38–41).

To seek out community (harmony) with others is not merely the notion of doing whatever a majority of people in society want or of adhering to the norms of one’s

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group, which are influential forms of relativism and communitarianism in the West (e.g. Harman, 1975; Walzer, 1983). Instead, from our African viewpoint, developing or respecting community (harmony) is an objectively desirable kind of interaction that should instead guide what majorities want or which norms become dominant.

As one of us has argued elsewhere (Metz, 2007), there are two recurrent themes in typical African discussion of the nature of community or harmony. First, there is the idea that one has a moral obligation to be concerned for the good of others, in terms of both one’s sympathetic emotional reactions toward other people and one’s helpful behaviour toward them. In short, one has a duty to exhibit solidarity with others. Second, there is the idea that one has a moral obligation to think of oneself as bound up with others, that is, to define oneself as a member of a common group and to participate in its practices. One also has a duty to identify with others. Community or harmony is the combination of both solidarity and identity, so construed. One finds implicit references to both elements in the following illustra- tive statements about community (harmony): ‘Every member is expected to consider him/herself an integral part of the whole and to play an appropriate role towards achieving the good of all’ (Gbadegesin, 1991, p. 65); ‘Harmony is achieved through close and sympathetic social relations within the group’ (Mokgoro, 1998, p. 3); ‘The fundamental meaning of community is the sharing of an overall way of life, inspired by the notion of the common good’ (Gyekye, 2004, p. 16); ‘[T]he purpose of our life is community-service and community-belongingness’ (Iroegbu, 2005, p. 442).

The combination of exhibiting solidarity with others and of identifying with them is more or less what is meant by a broad sense of ‘friendliness’ or ‘love’, essential to an ideal sort of family. So, another way to understand African morality is in terms of esteeming familial relationships. As Shutte (2001) notes, ‘The extended family is probably the most common, and also the most fundamental, expression of the African idea of community. …The importance of this idea for ethics is that the family is something that is valued for its own sake’ (p. 29). Familial relationships of the right sort have good consequences for individuals, but the fascinating idea salient in sub- Saharan morality is the notion that they are to be morally valued in themselves, apart from their results. One is obligated to prize one’s existing familial relationships and also to promote them wherever one reasonably can, so that all human beings are seen as potential members of an ideal family, that is, as individuals to be loved.

Such a conception of ethics is reminiscent of a certain strain of Christian morality and a fair ‘armchair anthropology’ would suggest that Christianity spread so easily in sub-Saharan Africa because of its fit with a traditional moral outlook. Note, however, that most friends of a sub-Saharan ethic do not conceive of it strictly impartially, in the way that a Christian might of agape. Instead, one’s actual friendly relationships have a moral priority over relationships one could have in the future and over those of which one neither is nor would be a part. ‘Family first’ and ‘charity begins at home’ are recurrent maxims of African moral thinking, where, at a fundamental level, the agent’s own, existing communal relationships are given precedence over others (Appiah, 1998).

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We reiterate that this sketch of an Afro-communitarian moral perspective should not be taken to represent anthropologically the beliefs of Africans about the right way to live. It is, rather, a theoretical reconstruction of themes that are recurrent among many peoples below the Sahara desert and particularly in southern Africa. However, this Afro-communitarian principle, which prescribes prizing friendly relationships, should be attractive to a much wider audience—for it is plausible, even if underex- plored, to think of actions such as theft, deception, cruelty and the like as being wrong just to the extent that they are unfriendly.

Implications of Ubuntu/Botho for normative research

To make the Ubuntu/Botho viewpoint more concrete, and to indicate how it could affect research into morality, in this section we bring out some of Ubuntu/Botho’s unique implications for prescribing actions and policies as morally right (and then, in the following section, we discuss what Ubuntu/Botho entails for describing people’s moral behaviour). Specifically, we consider some of the normative implications of Ubuntu/Botho for the distribution of property, criminal justice, medical practice, family life and moral education. We have selected these topics because they cover a wide array of different situations, because they facilitate clear contrasts between Ubuntu/Botho and the Western ethical principles of utility and of respect and because other topics are covered elsewhere in this issue.3

The distribution of property

Western practice and philosophy grounds the distribution of property largely on an individualist model. Generally, a person is deemed rightful owner of land or other wealth if he acquired it without harming others, for example by having created it himself from un-owned materials or by having received it from another rightful owner who made a voluntary decision to bestow it upon him, say, in exchange for labour or as part of an inheritance. When taxation of property is permitted, it is usually done in order to meet the basic needs of the poor or to enable them to obtain the education or other qualifications needed to compete for work. Kantians often think that such a model of property distribution respects people’s autonomy, while utilitarians tend to think that this model produces wealth and hence satisfies interests better than other models.

In contrast to this distributive approach based largely on individual choices made in labour and consumer markets, Ubuntu/Botho prescribes distributing property in a way that expresses esteem for communal relationships. One implication of such a relational focus is much less of a tolerance for economic inequality than what is typi- cal in the West, for a sense of togetherness is difficult to foster when some have much greater wealth than others (Magesa, 1997, pp. 277–278). A second implication of Ubuntu/Botho’s focus on harmony is that membership in the community is, by and large, sufficient to be entrusted with an adequate portion of its land or other major kinds of wealth (traditionally cattle), supposing one continues to make good use of it

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and does not let it go to waste (Gyekye, 1997, pp. 146–152, 160–161; Magesa, 1997, pp. 279–282). A third implication is that every moral agent has particularly weighty duties to aid his family, which includes many extended members, such as in-laws, uncles and cousins (Gyekye, 1997, pp. 61–75; Masolo, 2004, p. 494). Indeed, in traditional Setswana society, for example, it would be considered theft if one slaughtered an animal and kept the meat for oneself or gave it only to one’s nuclear family. Note that it does not obviously follow from Ubuntu/Botho that markets are unjust, particularly if they would be most efficient at creating wealth for the commu- nity. However, it is clear that if markets are justified, they are to be constrained to a much greater degree than they usually are in the West.4

Criminal justice

In Western societies, there are two dominant rationales for state punishment of adult offenders: retribution and deterrence. The retributive rationale, often associated with a Kantian morality, is the view that punishment is justified simply as a fitting response to the nature of the crime that was committed, that is, merely because the offender deserves it for what he has done. The deterrence rationale, naturally at home in a utilitarian ethic, is the view that punishment is justified as a way to instil fear in the offender and others so that they will avoid committing other crimes in the future. Although one will find retributive and deterrence elements in the behaviour of traditional African societies, one finds an additional salient approach taken in them, and neither retribution nor deterrence is particularly what Ubuntu/Botho would prescribe.

Specifically, reconciliation, that is, the reparation of broken relationships, as the aim of criminal justice is a major theme among friends of Ubuntu/Botho (Magesa, 1997, pp. 234–240, 267–276; Tutu, 1999; Bell, 2002, 85–107; Louw, 2006; Krog, 2008). Sometimes punishment is eschewed altogether in favour of apology and compensa- tion, while at other times, when punishment is imposed, it is done with an eye to resolv- ing conflict between the offender and his victims or between his family and the families of those whom he has wronged. Rather than intentionally create a climate of fear (utilitarian deterrence) or impose harm merely for its own sake (Kantian retribution), Ubuntu/Botho in the first instance recommends seeking restorative justice, using punishment only when necessary to foster the good of harmonious relationships.

Medical practice

For one example in a healthcare context, consider the question of whether an indi- vidual patient has the right to expect that medical professionals will keep private information about her diagnosis and treatment. It is standard in the West to think that a patient has the right to confidentiality with regard to her healthcare, either because it would be degrading to reveal intimate details without her consent (Kantianism) or because such revelation would damage trust between her and healthcare workers and hence impair her health (utilitarianism).

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In contrast, the privacy of an individual patient probably will not be as weighty in an Afro-communitarian ethic. Because individuals are understood to have weighty duties to aid others, particularly family members, it is not merely up to the individual what she does with her body and mind. Since other members of the community have a stake in the individual’s health, many Africans would think that they ought to be aware of her illness and play a role in discussing how she ought to treat it (Kasenene, 2000, pp. 349–353, 356; Murove, 2005, pp. 170–171; Dube, 2009, pp. 192–199). It does not obviously follow that coercive or deceptive paternalism is justified by Ubuntu/Botho; but it does seem to follow from this ethic that an individual’s illness is a collective affair to some degree, that is, that considerations of confidentiality have less moral significance than in the typical Western approach.

Family life

It is common in the West to think that once one has married another person, one has a moral obligation not to break one’s vows. In addition, it is typical there to believe that, once one has had children, one has a moral obligation to ensure that they are cared for, even if one does not do the rearing oneself. These obligations are also entailed by an African ethic, but it goes beyond them in important ways.

In particular, an Afro-communitarian morality will likely prescribe both getting married and having children in the first place (Wiredu, 1992b, p. 205; Magesa, 1997, pp. 63, 89, 120–121, 167; Bujo, 2001, pp. 6–7, 34–54). While in the West marriage is often seen as an optional matter for an individual, Ubuntu/Botho as articulated here entails that one has a basic duty to wed, and many African societies believe in such a duty. After all, seeking out community with others would seem to mean creating the most intimate forms of interaction one can with someone, viz., romantic love, or at least a personal relationship formed in the course of living with others. Furthermore, many African societies believe that one has a basic duty to create children. Again, if communal relationships are to be prized, then one has some moral obligation to make ones in which there is a robust sharing of life and caring for it. These are stark contrasts with dominant Western moral perspectives, for remaining single and child- less would appear neither to disrespect anyone’s autonomy (Kantianism) nor to fail to maximise the average amount of well-being (utilitarianism).

Moral education

What is it that a moral educator ought to teach and how ought she to teach it? The default position among contemporary Western pedagogical theorists is that the morally correct approach to ethical teaching and learning involves appealing to the student’s rationality and raising a cosmopolitan awareness of different value systems. When dealing with morality in the classroom, Western values entail doing so in a way that engages the student’s capacity for critical deliberation and does not restrict the relevant perspectives to those of the student’s own culture, leaving it up to the student which values she will adopt. Such an approach is respectful of the

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student’s autonomy (Kantianism) and promises to maximise the happiness of the student and those with whom she interacts (utilitarianism).

Moral education in traditional African communities has typically been on the opposite pole. Moral education among indigenous sub-Saharan societies has usually been parochial, focused exclusively on imparting the norms of the student’s culture, and moral educators have often used fear and indoctrination to instil values, dissuad- ing students from questioning the (often gendered) roles being handed down (Pearce, 1990; Adeyemi & Adeyinka, 2003; Ikuenobe, 2006, pp. 135–255; also Matemba, this issue, pp. 329–343). The standard justification for these approaches is that they are effective at obtaining the desired behaviour, viz., preserving culture (in a non-literate society) and exhibiting virtue.

We maintain that Ubuntu/Botho, as theoretically construed above, prescribes an approach that differs from the characteristically Western and the traditionally African. Ubuntu/Botho in the first instance entails that the goal of moral education should be to develop the personhood of students, which means facilitating their capacity to prize community. Since that, in turn, means giving some moral weight to existing communal relationships, it would indeed be incumbent on a moral educator not only to inform students of their duty not to radically upset norms central to the community’s self-conception, but also to focus on transmitting these values.

However, it does not follow that moral education is simply a matter of ensuring students mimic the past, for three reasons. First, being concerned for the good of students entails not utterly restricting their knowledge to that of a fairly circum- scribed culture, particularly in a globalised world in which even rural communities have to engage with a wide array of foreign people, policies and institutions. It is implausible to think a given culture at a particular moment is optimal, or even adequate, for the welfare of all the people who participate in it. So, the injunction to exhibit solidarity with others gives a moral educator reason not to quash student doubt about the propriety of an existing way of life. Second, in order to genuinely share a way of life, a moral educator ought not to rely on threats and rote regurgita- tion. Truly sharing a way of life means voluntarily participating in it, for part of what is valuable about a loving or friendly relationship is the fact that people come together, and stay together, of their own accord. Third, since becoming a person includes caring about the quality of others’ lives, a moral educator needs to help develop students’ capacity for sympathy and encourage them to engage in mutual aid with themselves, their extended families and the broader society.

Implications of Ubuntu/Botho for empirical research

In the previous section, we noted several respects in which, upon taking Ubuntu/Botho seriously as a normative theory, one’s views of what moral agents may or may not do change substantially. Here, we shift from prescriptive issues to descriptive ones, indi- cating ways in which social scientific understanding of moral behaviour would differ, in light of an Afro-communitarian interpretation of right action. In order to bring out the implications of Ubuntu/Botho, which are often attractive, we contrast them with

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Kohlberg’s system. Although we are aware that much of Kohlberg’s framework has been seriously questioned,5 it plays such a dominant role in systematic empirical thinking about morality that it is useful to orient debate. In the following, we address four topics central to Kohlberg’s account of morality, namely, the nature of moral development, of moral reasoning and action, of moral motivation and of moral knowledge. With regard to Kohlberg’s views on these topics, we rely heavily on his last major statement of them (1986).

Moral development

The question, here, is how to characterise the process of moral maturation and, in particular, whether there is any kind of moral growth that occurs universally, viz., in all human societies. Famously, according to Kohlberg, human beings, as they mature from children to adults under normal circumstances, tend to develop their thinking about interpersonal moral considerations in a series of invariant stages, with later stages being improvements over earlier ones. Interpersonal morality has to do with conflicts of interest between two or more persons and so excludes the morality of duties to oneself or to non-persons. Kohlberg’s hypothesis with regard to such considerations is that human cognition can be expected to progress in six stages, and while Kohlberg did not empirically confirm the existence of a sixth stage (Kohlberg, 1984, p. 270), he clearly thinks of it as the highest form of moral awareness about justice that human beings could be expected to obtain and it has been very influential in the field. We therefore use it as a foil.

At Stage Six, people think about conflicts of interest in terms of the equal consideration of all persons. More specifically, resolving conflicts among people in the most defensible manner requires teasing out the implications of a procedural principle that even-handedly represents everyone as having a say about, or a stake in, the outcome. John Rawls’s (1971) hypothetical social contract theory is well-known for being a philosophical illustration of Stage Six moral reasoning for Kohlberg.

Now, Ubuntu/Botho fails to reach Stage Six, and by a long shot, as we shall demonstrate. In terms of laypeople’s understanding of morality in sub-Saharan Africa, there is evidence that they either have failed, or clearly would fail, to approach interpersonal conflict in the purely impartial or universalising manner that Kohlberg thinks is ideal (Edwards, 1975; Miller, 1992, pp. 20–41). Furthermore, beyond the lay understanding of Ubuntu/Botho, not even the philosophical reconstruction articu- lated here would reach Stage Six. Ubuntu/Botho does accord all human beings a moral status and considers everyone in principle to be potential members of an ideal family based on loving or friendly relationships. Call this Ubuntu/Botho’s ‘impartial’ element. Focusing for the moment on this impartial element alone, note that it would not be enough to achieve Stage Six, since it does not include a procedure by which conflicts of interest are to be resolved by the real or imagined participation of everyone.

More problematically, however, Ubuntu/Botho is not purely impartial and this is so in two glaring respects. First, as indicated above, an African ethic accords, at a

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fundamental level, a greater moral weight to persons related in some way to the agent. In traditional African morality, kinship is the key relation, whereas in our philosoph- ical construction, those communal relationships of which the agent is actually a part are deemed to have a higher moral importance than other relationships. Hence, Ubuntu/Botho implies that it would be inappropriate invariably to tackle interpersonal moral dilemmas in a purely impartial way. Instead, the fact that certain people are related to the agent in a communal way can provide some reason to resolve conflicts of interest in one way rather than another.

For example, in the famous Heinz case, Kohlberg clearly deems it merely Stage Three moral reflection for Heinz to appeal to the fact that he loves his wife as a moral reason to steal a drug that is necessary and sufficient for her to stay alive (Kohlberg, 1986, pp. 493, 501, 528). Stage Six reasoning would explicitly exclude the fact of an affectionate partial relationship as a reason to steal the drug and would instead appeal, for example, to the fact that the druggist could not reasonably reject, on grounds of an interest in taking advantage of superior bargaining power, a claim on behalf of another person to stay alive. Ubuntu/Botho might well include such impartial reasoning (e.g. Ramose, 1999, pp. 181–190), but it implies that it does not exhaust the relevant moral considerations. In fact, relying solely on such reasoning might be unjust, for Ubuntu/Botho, in that it fails to recognise the greater importance of one’s wife.

A second respect in which Ubuntu/Botho is not purely impartial is that it resolves conflicts of interest in part by appealing to existing configurations of relationships. Whereas in Kohlberg’s framework, a moral decision ideally is one that judges any existing relationship entirely in light of a procedure that gives everyone’s interests equal representation, in an African ethic the bare fact of tradition has some moral weight that needs to be balanced against other, more welfare-oriented concerns. Where a people’s identity is constituted by certain practices, it is a morally relevant consideration that their sense of themselves as a group would be upset by changing these practices. So, in the context of the Heinz dilemma, if one approach were inconsistent with a people’s sense of ‘who we are’, that would be some reason to reject it, by Ubuntu/Botho.

What does the difference between Kohlberg’s Stage Six and our conception of Ubuntu/Botho entail for moral development? One might suggest a pluralist account of moral maturation, according to which it differs depending on the nature of the society one is in. For example, some suggest that Kohlberg’s model is apt for a modern, urban society, whereas an ethic that prizes communal relationship is appropriate for a small-scale society in which there are few strangers (Edwards, 1975; Verhoef & Michel, 1997).

There is, however, another, bolder conclusion one could reasonably draw, namely, that there is a monistic, universal logic to moral maturation, where Kohlberg’s conception of Stage Six and Ubuntu/Botho are competing accounts of its ultimate end. Some reason for taking Ubuntu/Botho seriously as the telos of moral develop- ment is the massive upswing of interest among contemporary moral philosophers in the limitations of impartiality. In Kohlberg’s heyday, analytic ethicists were drawn to

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conceiving the ‘moral point of view’ in strictly impartial terms (e.g., Frankena, 1963; Baier, 1965) and he is well known for having drawn on their discussion to ground his conception of morality. These days, however, many philosophers acknowledge a need to incorporate norms of intimacy and tradition into fundamental moral thinking about how to resolve conflicts of interest (see, for just a few examples, Sandel, 1984; Scheffler, 2001; Jeske, 2008; Feltham & Cottingham, 2010).

Moral reasoning and action

Those in the field of moral education in recent years have tended to divide up conceptions of permissible other-regarding reflection and behaviour in terms of justice and care orientations. A justice approach is one that conceives of a moral agent’s obligations to others fundamentally in terms of individual rights, whereas, in a care model, they are constituted by relationships that include some kind of recipro- cal interaction, typically in which one cares for others and they respond in some positive way to one because of one’s caring. Kohlberg is typically thought to represent a justice perspective, thinking of moral action in terms of respect for the equal rights of individuals. An Afro-communitarian conception of moral reasoning and action, as we now demonstrate, can be reduced to neither one of these perspectives. It not only incorporates elements from both in an elegant way (a point others sometimes make e.g. Ikuenobe, 2006, p. 116), but also, we contend, includes elements that transcend both and that should be given serious consideration.

With regard to the justice orientation, Ubuntu/Botho is similar in that it does include an impartial element, part of which is a matter of individual rights. Traditional African societies have often thought of human life as having a dignity that implies recognition of certain universal human rights. For instance, despite the moral prominence given to their own community, indigenous sub-Saharan societies are well-known for having welcomed a stranger to their villages, giving him food and shelter for at least a short period. They hardly considered a foreigner outside the bounds of moral consideration and, instead, tended to view all humans as potential parts of an ideal family.

However, Ubuntu/Botho is far from exhausted by impartial, rights-based consider- ations. This is so in at least three respects. First, we have already noted the intimacy element of Afro-communitarianism. Conflicts of interest should not always be resolved purely by appeal to human rights, but also, in part, by considerations of whether a given person is communally related to the agent, in a way that need not be grounded in universal norms of promise-making. Second, we have also noted that Ubuntu/Botho accords some weight to historical factors that are not reducible to individual rights. An existing way of life that is salient in a group’s self-conception has some moral significance, for Afro-communitarianism. Third, an African conception of morality will likely include duties to aid others without correlative rights (see, especially, Gyekye, 1997, pp. 61–75). To see this, consider ideal family norms. Suppose that your family has divided up a pot of stew either equally or in accordance with some agreement, but that your brother turns out to be dissatisfied with his share.

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Imagine that he does not downright need another bowlful, but would greatly appreciate one. And suppose that the last amount is in your possession by the original division and that you do not particularly want it. On a pure individual rights model, you would be permitted to eat the remaining stew, or even to throw it away, but Ubuntu/Botho would probably entail that you would instead have an obligation to give it to your brother. Similar remarks apply to the way people not in one’s (nuclear) family ought to interact.

With regard to a care model, Ubuntu/Botho is similar in that it morally values relationships above all and, in particular, existing ones that include emotional and practical concern for others’ well-being. So far it sounds indistinguishable from the classic ethic of care of Nel Noddings (1984) and some theorists have suggested that African morality is not qualitatively different from such an ethic (e.g. Harding, 1987/ 1998). However, this ethic of care is strictly partial in a way that, as we have seen, Ubuntu/Botho is not. In the standard care ethic, one has a duty to aid others only if they can respond positively to the one aiding, that is, only if they can help to create a reciprocal relationship, something that distant, starving people cannot (Noddings, 1984, pp. 86, 89). An Afro-communitarian model does not restrict moral obligation in this way; again, all human beings are deemed part of a family who provide some reason to be responded to out of love.

Even if the ethic of care were interpreted more broadly, so as not to require mutuality between a care-giver and one who in some way appreciatively accepts this care (cf. Noddings, 1992, pp. 110–112; Donovan & Adams, 2007), there would still be a major difference between it and Ubuntu/Botho. According to Afro-communitar- ianism, the relevant relationship to prize is not merely one of caring for others’ quality of life but, in addition, sharing a way of life. A fundamental moral value for Ubuntu/ Botho is identification with others, that is, enjoying a sense of togetherness and coor- dinating behaviour to realise common goals. Care does not exhaust either the nature or value of a friendly or communal relationship.

If the reader finds Ubuntu/Botho prima facie attractive, then the typical dichotomy between justice and care needs to be viewed as much too restrictive. Not all plausible conceptions of moral reflection and behaviour can be reduced to either one of these or even to a combination of them.

Moral motivation

On any attractive view of what it is that moves an agent to perform right actions, or at least those that confer virtue on him, both self-regarding and other-regarding elements will play a role. This is true of Kohlberg’s account of moral motivation, which is less well known than other features of his system. According to him, there can be times when an agent performs a moral action for the self-regarding reason of wanting the self-respect associated with doing the right thing (Kohlberg, 1986, pp. 498–499). However, right behaviour, properly construed, is a matter of acting consequent to an awareness of the results of an impartial procedure for adjudicating competing claims; a moral action, most often and fundamentally, is the product of a

African ethic of Ubuntu/Botho 285

conscious apprehension of an other-regarding consideration. That is, moral motivation on Kohlberg’s model is characteristically a Kantian matter of doing right by the other because it is right.

Ubuntu/Botho cashes out the self- and other-regarding elements of moral motiva- tion differently. With regard to the self, one’s most basic obligation is to develop one’s humanness. This is an evaluative, rather than normative, ideal. That is, instead of wanting to perform an action merely for the sake of duty, as per Kohlberg, an African ethic would construe one’s basic motivation with regard to the self in terms of want- ing to be a real human being or to obtain complete personhood.

With regard to others, as we have seen, Ubuntu/Botho does not deem the moral worth of an action inherently to be a product of cognition about strictly impartial norms. Becoming a full person or real self is to prize communal relationships, partic- ularly existing ones of which the agent is a part. Moreover, this ethic would likely deem cognition not to be exhaustive of, or perhaps even sufficient for, the factors that move one to perform a right or virtuous action. Recall that communal relationships themselves include an emotional engagement with others’ well-being, often cashed out in terms of sympathy. Acting out of sympathy is part of what is called for when acting rightly or virtuously, for the Afro-communitarian moral theory we have spelled out. Such a view accords the emotions a constitutive role in moral motivation that is, notoriously, lacking in Kohlberg’s model, where the emotions are merely tools for facilitating cognitive awareness of the impartial ‘moral point of view’, which is what causes properly moral action (Kohlberg, 1986, p. 499).

Moral knowledge

What is it that one knows when one understands morality and how does one come to grasp it? Kohlberg’s answer is well known: to understand morality, in its highest sense, is to understand a certain procedural principle, perhaps as applied to a given context, and the way one comes to be aware of this principle and its practical implications is by conscious, rational deliberation. It follows from Kohlberg’s model that people in at least their 30s and 40s could exhibit a deep moral understanding, viz., some post-conventional morality, even if none of Kohlberg’s longitudinal participants ever reached Stage Six and few unambiguously achieved Stage Five (Kohlberg, 1984, Ch. 6).

To begin to draw a contrast with Ubuntu/Botho, consider that friends of this ethic hold that it is only elders who attain full personhood, implying that only they are capable of moral wisdom. One of the most influential African moral philosophers, the Nigerian Ifeanyi Menkiti (2004), makes these comments:

Hence the Igbo African proverb: ‘What an old man sees sitting down, a young man cannot see standing up.’…[A]lthough we would not have a great deal of difficulty talking about an 18-year-old mathematical giant, we would have a great deal of difficulty talking about an 18-year-old moral giant. (p. 325)

Which sort of moral epistemology would underwrite this recurrent judgement among Africans? What would moral knowledge have to be like in order for a robust degree

286 T. Metz and J.B.R. Gaie

of it to be possible only upon quite a long ‘lived experience’ (Setiloane, 1976, p. 40; Menkiti, 2004, pp. 325, 326)?

While, for Kohlberg, lived experience is indeed necessary for moral wisdom, this is so principally insofar as it is a matter of improving one’s reasoning, for example, considering others’ viewpoints in order to find a principled way to resolve moral problems (Kohlberg, 1976), something that one could achieve prior to one’s 50s or 60s.6 For Ubuntu/Botho, however, lived experience is necessary for moral wisdom for different reasons. An Afro-communitarian morality is naturally understood to involve two types of experience-dependent moral knowledge that go beyond the baldly abstract propositional model that Kohlberg advocates.

First, to have Ubuntu/Botho means prizing communal relationships, but this statement belies an enormous complexity that cannot be expressly captured in a simple principle. We have noted a variety of elements that constitute the relevant sort of communal relationship, including being sympathetic to others, acting in ways that are expected to benefit them, thinking of oneself as a member of a group, behaving in ways that do not upset traditional practices and so on, where these often must be traded off against one another. In addition, we have encountered, implicitly or explic- itly, distinctions between local and non-local relationships, relationships of which the agent is a part and of which she is not, actual and future relationships, and prizing harmonious relationships in the context of the actions one takes and in the context of their expected consequences. Appreciating the relevance of all these factors and learning how to balance them in a given situation plausibly requires judgement (and not merely reason), which, in turn, requires substantial engagement with a variety of real-life moral issues and rich narratives, available only to those of a certain age.

In addition to judgement, becoming a real person plausibly requires the adoption of certain attitudes, emotions and, more generally, ways of behaving that do not come easily. That is, in addition to knowing that, Ubuntu/Botho involves knowing how, certain social skills that typically take a long time to acquire. It can take a lot of work to learn how, for example, to overcome resentment toward others, to cultivate empa- thetic awareness of what it is like to be others, to be patient when listening to others, to be emotionally supportive of others, to be assertive in respectful ways, to forgo benefits to oneself when they would cost others and to be painfully honest with oneself about one’s own motivations. If marriages are not easy, it is sometimes all the more difficult to exhibit these traits, essential to communal/harmonious/friendly relationships, in the context of people one does not know nearly as well. Hence, it would be reasonable to expect to find them truly exhibited only in an elder.

Conclusion

In this article, we have provided a theoretical reconstruction of several ideas associ- ated with talk of ‘Ubuntu/Botho’, terms that designate an indigenous sub-Saharan approach to morality. Specifically, we first articulated the Afro-communitarian principle that an action is right insofar as it prizes harmonious relationships, where harmony is a matter of both exhibiting solidarity with others and identifying with

African ethic of Ubuntu/Botho 287

them. Then, we applied this principle to several normative issues in order to illustrate not only how it differs from salient Western theories of right action, but also how its prescriptions are often attractive. Key examples were that Ubuntu/Botho prescribes seeking restorative justice consequent to a wrong having been done, in contrast to deterrence and retributive models of criminal justice, and that it instructs a moral educator to develop her students’ virtue in non-dogmatic ways, in contrast to a focus on their happiness or autonomy. Then, we considered what the Afro-communitarian conception of morality entails for empirical research into people’s moral behaviour, contrasting its implications with those of Kohlberg’s influential framework. Highlights here included the suggestion that the final stage of moral development might not be purely impartial but rather might include giving consideration to issues of intimacy and tradition, as well as the idea that there are facets of moral action that cannot be reduced to considerations of justice and care. We recognise that many of these plausible alternatives to characteristic Western approaches to morality can already be found in the international literature. However, we submit that Ubuntu/ Botho, as analysed in this article, is worthy of attention from international moral theorists for going beyond piecemeal criticisms and instead presenting a unified foundation for them in the form of a single, comprehensive principle.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for written comments on an earlier draft received from Shar- lene Swartz, Monica Taylor and two anonymous referees for the Journal of Moral Education, one of whom provided unusually detailed and thoughtful reflections. We have also benefited from feedback received at the inaugural conference of the African Moral Education Network (AMEN), sponsored by the Journal of Moral Education and the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa, 9–11 September 2008.

Notes

1. The next two paragraphs borrow from Metz (2010, p. 83). 2. In the remainder of this article, we speak of ‘Ubuntu/Botho’, conjoining two terms to connote

a single concept. 3. For instance, political power, workplace organisation and environmental ethics are discussed

in the review article ‘Recent work in African ethics’ in this Special Issue (see Metz, pp. 381–391). 4. On which see Mogobe Ramose’s contribution in this Special Issue, pp. 291–303. 5. For an overview of critical work on Kohlberg, see the Special Issue of the Journal of Moral

Education edited by Don Collins Reed (2008). 6. After all, Kohlberg suspected that some graduate students in philosophy had exemplified

Stage Six reasoning (1984, pp. 272–273).

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