“A person is a person through other persons.”
Nguni maxim, English as given in Thaddeus Metz, Toward an African Moral Theory, 2007, p. 322
Ubuntu
Ubuntu is not one doctrine and not the ethics of a continent, but a family of Southern and sub-Saharan African relational traditions. The line above is the English of its Nguni maxim, umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. Sophecs takes Thaddeus Metz's relational reading, not Ifeanyi Menkiti's stronger claim that the community confers personhood once its demands are met. Kwame Gyekye's moderate version sits between them, insisting individuals keep their own worth and rights. Its sources are lived practice and oral tradition rather than a canon, so the maxim is quoted from the philosopher who reports it, not from a named translator.
For AI this changes the first question. Sabelo Mhlambi argues that a discriminatory automated decision is not only an unfair output but a failure of relational personhood. Metz argues against building systems to maximise expected utility. Your data is rarely only yours: it carries your family and neighbours, people nobody asked. So the test is whether a system lets people flourish through one another, and who was left out of deciding.
What Ubuntu gets wrong
Bernard Matolino and Wenceslaus Kwindingwi argued in The End of Ubuntu that post-apartheid Ubuntu-isation is open to elite appropriation and rests on a romantic story about conditions that no longer exist. The related charge is vagueness: Ubuntu can be stretched to endorse almost anything, flattens very different African identities into one, and has protected women and dissenters poorly. That matters most where it is strongest, because community is not a single stakeholder. Somebody decides what communal welfare means and who counts as inside, and an appeal to harmony is a convenient way to make a dissenter the problem. Stoics would add that a self defined through others has handed away the one thing that was its own.
The other five
- Stoicism“Of things some are in our power, and others are not.”
- Utilitarianism“Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.”
- Virtue Ethics“We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.”
- Confucianism“When the prince is prince, and the minister is minister; when the father is father, and the son is son.”
- Buddhist Ethics“Treating others like oneself, neither kill nor incite to kill.”