Ubuntu - A Guide to a Bill of Responsibility

The 20th century will rightly go down in history as the century of rights: voting rights, women's rights, sexual and reproductive rights, workers' rights, civil rights, human rights, disability rights, privacy rights and many more. However, there remain billions of people in the world who sit outside our rights framework that we privileged few take for granted, and even within free democratic societies our rights are not exempt from being trampled on.

Yet, our current systems of individual rights should be the start of an ongoing and evolving understanding of people in society and not some end point goal.

The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights establishes the dignity of all persons as the basis for freedom and justice in the world. The framework of individual rights that is laid out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has its origins in Immanuel Kant’s writings.

For Kant, a human being is of incalculable worth and has dignity precisely because through our practical reason we can potentially exercise our autonomy and lay down a law unto ourselves, which for Kant is the moral law or the Categorical Imperative.

Human beings have equal worth because we all have the possibility of the rational exercise of freedom. We should, as a moral mandate, regard all other human beings through the representation of that possibility.

Kant introduces the idea of horizontal thinking; the recognition that all creatures that are defined by the possibility of rational exercise of freedom have equal worth. Any society which denies its member the right to partake in the development of this potential should be rejected.

While we continue to fight for individual rights this does not excuse us from looking ahead. A key criticism of the Kantian notion of autonomy is that it is too individualistic. It fails to grasp how human beings are products of, and producers of, society. I hope that the 21st century will go down in history as the century of human responsibilities: civic duties, fiduciary duties, professional responsibilities, intellectual duties, humanitarian duties, environmental duties, responsibilities to future generations and many more.

Ubuntu provides an interesting framework from which a ‘Bill of Responsibilities’ can be developed. The concept Ubuntu, like many African concepts, is not easily definable. To define an African notion in a foreign language and from an abstract as opposed to a concrete approach can also be particularly elusive.

A core belief in Ubuntu is that a person can only be a person through others. In other words the individual’s whole existence is relative to that of the group. In Ubuntu individuals are intertwined in a  world of ethical relations and obligations from the time they are born. We come into the world obligated to others, and in turn these others are obligated to us, to the individual.

The concept of a person in Ubuntu is an ethical concept. A self-regarding or self-interested human being is one that has not only fallen away from her sociality with others; she has lost touch with her humanity.

The intrinsic worth of a human being, which justifies an egalitarian ethic, is not defined in the same way as Kantian humanity, because that being has the potential to act in accordance with the dictates of pure reason. Nor is it because of who that individual is in his or her actual achievements. A human being has dignity because they are a unique being born into the human community, raised and supported there.

Within the Ubuntu framework society is not something 'out there', but instead how we are inscribed in each other. Just as people have obligations to the society, so the society (not limited to the state) has obligations to them.

While Ubuntu all may seem a little vague, the US Constitution has a preamble that outlines citizens responsibility (I would find a example from somewhere closer to home but Australia being the ‘lucky country’ has yet to formalize a bill of rights):

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Perhaps the next step in our societal evolution will be a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. (Here’s hoping that when Australia gets around to writing a Bill of Rights that it is conceived of as a Bill of Rights and Responsibility)

note: Ubuntu’s social value will always depend on the approach and the purpose for which it is depended on. Ubuntu can be misappropriated to deny the importance of individual autonomy and through a conservative lens Ubuntu is both authoritarian and patriarchal (looking at you, ANC). This does not differ too much from how some rights are bastardised and used as trump cards against others in the name of “freedom”, “safety” or “community”.