African ethics and humility

As is becoming increasingly well known around the world, the key phrase used to sum up the moral aspects of ubuntu is ‘A person is a person through other persons’.This maxim is an overly literal translation of sayings prominent in South Africa and mirrored in much of at least southern and central Africa.

22.3.1 An ethical interpretation of ubuntu

To begin to understand what it means to say that a person is a person through other persons or has ubuntu, consider some remarks from Desmond Tutu, the influential Nobel Peace Prize winner from South Africa and former Chairperson of that country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission:

When we want to give high praise to someone we say, ‘ Yu, u nobuntu; ‘Hey, he or she has ubuntu’.This means they are generous, hospitable, friendly, caring and compassionate. They share what they have. It also means my humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in theirs.We belong in a bundle of life.We say, ‘a person is a person through other people’. It is not ’I think therefore I am’. It says rather: ‘I am human because I belong’.

(1999: 34—35)

By ‘we’Tutu means indigenous African peoples, and the view he is ascribing to them is that one ought to develop one’s humanity or personhood, which is constituted by the way one treats other people. One realizes humanness or lives a genuinely human way of life insofar as one exemplifies a variety of other-regarding virtues, some of which Tutu mentions.

Similar remarks appear from Yvonne Mokgoro, a former justice of South Africa’s Constitutional Court who is known for having appealed to ubuntu in some of her judgements:

[T]hus the notion umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu/motho ke motho ka batho ba bangwe [a person is a person through other persons—ed.] which also implies that during one’s life-time, one is constantly challenged by others, practically, to achieve self-fulfilment through a set of collective social ideals....

(1998: 17)

Here, too, the eudaemonist approach to morality is patent: one is to realize oneself by relating to others in certain supportive ways.

Philosophers are characteristically curious as to whether all the relevant ubuntu-constitutive virtues can be reduced to a single one. What might generosity, hospitality, friendliness, care, compassion, solidarity, respect, and unity all have in common, beyond being relational? The sug­gestion from Tutu, Mokgoro, and several others based in South Africa who have theoretically addressed ubuntu (e.g., Mkhize 2008; Metz 2014; Murove 2016)² is a harmonious relationship.A certain conception of harmony is plausibly foundational when it comes to the other-regarding moral virtues of ubuntu.

To begin to spell out what harmony involves, let us return to Tutu and Mokgoro:

I participate, I share.... Harmony, friendliness, community are great goods. Social harmony is for us the summum bonum — the greatest good. Anything that subverts or undermines this sought-after good is to be avoided like the plague. Anger, resentment, lust for revenge, even success through aggressive competitiveness, are corrosive of this good.

(Tutu 1999: 35)

(H)armony is achieved through close and sympathetic social relations within the group.

(Mokgoro 1998: 17)

Tutu and Mokgoro both mention two distinct ways of relating as constitutive of harmony, as do others in the literature (on which see Metz 2013 for a fuller reconstruction). One is partici­pating or being close, which is usefully understood not merely as refraining from isolation, but also something like sustaining a common sense of self with others. So, for example, it means liking being together, taking pride in others' accomplishments, avoiding coercive, deceptive, or exploitive interaction, and realizing others' ends.

The second element of harmony could be summed up as ‘caring for others' quality of life'. It centrally includes doing what is at least likely to make others' lives go objectively better, i.e., in terms of their needs, and not so much their feelings or wants.These needs include the socio-moral imperative to develop one's humanness, meaning that one way to realize oneself by relating harmoniously with others is to help them realize themselves—by in turn relating harmoniously. In addition to giving to others in ways expected to improve their lives, caring for them means characteristically doing so consequent to certain positive attitudes, such out of sympathy and for their own sake.

Roughly speaking, sharing a way of life with others captures the virtues of respect, solidar­ity, and unity, while caring for them is what generosity, hospitality, care, and compassion have in common. And although there are still two distinct properties here, of sharing and caring, they are naturally viewed as a pair, for together they constitute what many English-speakers would call ‘friendliness' or even a broad sense of ‘love'.To relate in a friendly manner is more or less to enjoy a sense of togetherness, to engage in cooperative projects, to help one another, and to do so for reasons beyond self-interest.

In sum, a powerful way to understand one major strain of African thought about morality is in terms of a prescription to live in a way that prizes harmony or friendliness, or, more care­fully, treats individuals with respect insofar as they are, in principle, capable of being party to such ways of relating. By this latter phrasing, a person who can by her nature be friendly and be befriended has a dignity that demands honoring, with one key way to do so being to cultivate or sustain friendly relationships with her. Although neither Tutu nor Mokgoro mentions dignity in the above quotations, a number of African philosophers have maintained that sub-Saharan peoples typically ascribe dignity to human beings (e.g.,Wiredu 1996: 158; Bujo 2001: 2, 138— 139, 142; Deng 2004: 501; Gyekye 2010: section 6).

As with the nature of humility, there is more one could say about an ubuntu ethic, construed as prescribing one to realize oneself by prizing harmonious or friendly ways of relating. On the one hand, many will want to know why the ‘African' label is apt for this principle, beyond the fact that it is grounded on the remarks of two African intellectuals from South Africa.The brief answer, and the only one space allows for here, is that something counts as ‘African' if it has been characteristic of—not necessarily unique or essential to—much of that place and for a long time in a way that differentiates it from many other locales (Metz 2015), and that harmony indeed captures a wide array of beliefs and practices salient below the Sahara desert (Paris 1995; Metz 2017a; Ejizu n.d.).

On the other hand, readers will hanker for more specifics about the nature of the ethic. Is one to relate that way only with human persons, or do some other parts of nature, such as animals, count? Does an ethic prescribing harmony categorically forbid the use of force, and, if not, under what conditions does it permit force? How is one to balance actual harmonious rela­tionships of which one is a part with merely potential ones with strangers? These are important questions, but we do not need answers in order to make headway on the ethic's implications for humility.

22.3.2 Ubuntu and humility

There are a number of ways in which an ethic instructing agents to respect others in virtue of their capacity for harmonious relationships, and hence characteristically to relate harmoni­ously, plausibly includes some form of humility, whether that means tempering claims, avoiding presumptuousness, or eschewing extravagance.

The relationship between harmony and humility that is probably the most tempting to note is a causal one.That is, one naturally judges that a lack of humility, say, in the form of arrogance or self-centeredness, would likely discourage people from entering into or sustaining ties with those who manifest these traits. Instead, such attitudes can be expected to prompt discord, roughly understood as division and ill-will between people. Conversely, as Nelson Mandela (2000) has pointed out in an interview, if one is humble and so not a threat to others, then one will be in a good position not merely to avoid, but also to resolve, discord between others.

These claims are true, but they are also weak, in the sense that they ground no necessary relation between harmony and humility. Often haughtiness or selfishness will lead to aliena­tion between people down the road, and is to be discouraged for that reason, but not invari­ably. Whether a certain attitude, or even its expression, brings about particular results or not depends on contexts that vary, for instance, on whether others have noticed it or not. If you did not hear another person gratuitously disparage you, his attitude will not on that occa­sion lead you to put more distance between yourself and him. Similarly, even if one is in fact humble, if people perceive one otherwise, then one's ability to resolve conflict amongst them will be hindered.

Here are some connections between harmony and humility that are stronger for being con­stitutive and not merely causal.To begin, consider that an ethic that ascribes a dignity to at least human persons straightforwardly forbids treating others as worth less than oneself.To have dig­nity is to possess superlative final value, and, by most interpretations of it these days, everyone has equal dignity if they have enough of the requisite property, in this case, the capacity to be party to harmonious relationships.

One way to avoid discrimination and arrogance would be to remove oneself from society. However, an ethic of harmony also forbids doing so. This ethic implies that the value of others is such as to require one to come closer to them, typically interpreted to require reconciliation between victims and those who have committed crimes against them, for instance (e.g.,Tutu 1999; Krog 2008). If one were to isolate oneself, one would be failing to recognize other people's worth adequately and so failing to be humble before them. Paying attention to only oneself would amount to ascribing a certain kind of importance to oneself that one does not in fact have. It would mean that others do not matter enough for one to go out of one's way for them, but their dignity calls for more than that. If we have dignity by virtue of our ability to relate harmoniously, then the default mode of engagement (viz., with innocent parties) should be to relate in that way.

More specifically, by the present ethic, one is obligated to acknowledge the importance of others in two major ways. First, one must come closer to them by participating with them cooperatively. One must rein in one's ends so that they are at least substantially consistent with those of others, if not shared with them. One may not spend so much time, labor, money, and the like on oneself that one is left unable to advance other people's projects. Second, one should advance certain kinds of ends, ones that are at least unlikely to make people's lives objectively worse, and ideally those likely to make them better. Indeed, according to what is probably the dominant strain of thought about African morality, there is no category of supererogation, a view that is sometimes explicit (e.g., Gyekye 1997: 70—75) and other times implicit in the prin­ciples advanced (consider, say, the Golden Rule in Wiredu 1992: 198). In the African tradition, it is imperative to curb one's demands on others and instead to go out of one's way for them, espe­cially for extended family members, to the point where, in some cultures, having slaughtered an animal and not offered some to relatives would be considered theft (Metz and Gaie 2010: 278).

There is an additional respect in which ubuntu as an ethic prescribes humility, which concerns not how one should treat others, a first-order virtue, but how one should regard oneself in respect of how one has treated others, a second-order virtue. In brief, one should be humble about one's having been humble.³ It is one thing to be presumptuous in respect of others' interests and thereby lack virtue, and another to be presumptuous in respect of one's own virtue, another type of a lack of virtue. M. K. Gandhi accepts this point when he says,‘A humble person is not himself conscious of his humility.... (A) man who is proud ofhis virtue often becomes a curse to society' (1932: 30).⁴

How would failing to be humble about one's humility, or one's virtue more generally, show disrespect of others' ability to be party to relationships of harmony? One idea, suggested by Gandhi above, is that if one were to label oneself as ‘humble' or ‘virtuous', then one would rest on one's laurels and be disinclined to reflect critically on oneself. There is always room for growth as a moral person, or at the very least decline for one to ward off, both of which seem to prescribe erring on the side of underestimating the extent to which one has realized virtue. Notice, though, the ‘often' in Gandhi's formulation: this rationale cannot explain why it is always a vice to some degree to fail to be humble about one's virtue, as sometimes being proud about it will not be expected to have bad consequences for others.

Reflecting on Nelson Mandela's virtue occasions awareness of other, stronger reasons for thinking that one should be humble about one's humility and, more generally, one's virtue. Mandela is famous for having illustrated humility about his moral accomplishments, and it is reasonable to think that it is a function of the ubuntu ethic to which he subscribed (Mandela 2012: 147, 155, 2013a: 227). Mandela would, for instance, often pay tribute to others beyond himself, such as the South African people, for major positive changes to their country's socio­political structure, and he also recommended doing so as an ideal form of leadership (Mandela 2013b). Here, it is plausible to think of sharing credit and praise with others as an instantiation of ubuntu; it is another way to give to others, instead of directing good things to oneself.

For another respect in which Mandela was humble about his achievements, consider that he avoided comparing them to those of others, instead being known for having referred to all the greater tasks he had yet to accomplish. In the last paragraph of his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela famously remarks,‘I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb' (1994: 751). By focusing not on how great his achievements were relative to most people's, but instead on how many more achieve­ments he had yet to make, Mandela respects others, in two ways. He avoids making people feel inadequate, and prompts himself to do all the more for human beings, the sole relevant achieve­ment by an ubuntu morality.

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