144 Ethics in Higher Education: Values-driven Leaders for the Future
about natural goodness of humankind with what I will call the
ordinary (111).”
His conclusion is that as a moral philosophy Ubuntu is deficient
because it promises what it cannot deliver. The tension here is between
the world as it could be or as it ought, or the world as it has become –
between is and ought, between being and becoming. The moral
challenge, ethicists will tell you, is to move from is to ought, without
appearing to be preaching pie in the sky. If one were to assume a
deontological supposition, one still has to justify what rules or how one
arrives at the rules that shape one’s moral outlook.
My own reservations stem from a different perspective. In fact it is
much more as a warning to me than a rejection of the concept. I fear that
in pointing to some imaginary past, that does not appear to be grounded
in present realities of life, Ubuntu may be guilty of undermining the
challenge of revolt and critical consciousness and lead to paralysis and
atrophy that Karen van Merle in her chapter, Lives of Action, Thinking
and Revolt: A Feminist Call for Politics of Becoming in Post Apartheid
South Africa, talks about^8.
“a complacent society where political action, thought, eternal
questioning and contestation are absent and replaced by an
understanding of freedom as mere commercial/economic
freedom and of thought as calculated and instrumental (2007:34 -
58).”
As the unwritten moral law and practice of the peoples and
communities of Africa, Ubuntu calls for a taken-for-granted rendition of
moral conduct. In reality there are two factors that do not always get
taken into account. One is that by whatever name it is stated Ubuntu is
an ethical compass that subsists in all communities and cultures. Africa
8
In Roux W & van Marle K: Post-Apartheid Fragments: Law Politics and
Critique; 2007, Pretoria, Unisa Press; 34-58.