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Difference between ubuntu and dignity 237
to the significance of this mis-reading of Kant shortly for the history and
the future of the ideal of dignity. As I have already argued, Kant also does
not reduce autonomy to self-determination. Whether or not ubuntu has
been undermined by modernity, apartheid, and capitalism is an empirical
question and must be addressed as such. At least in the townships of the
Western Cape, the Ubuntu Township Project has undertaken to investigate
whether an ubuntu ethic is alive, and what are the forces that either support
it or undermine it. Such empirical work can also help us grapple with the
undoubted reality that some leaders in South Africa have manipulated
ubuntu for their own purposes. Again, we will return to these important
criticisms of ubuntu.
7 Similarities with Kant
For now let me turn to ubuntu’s similarities with Kantianism. We have
already seen that there is a historical alliance between Kant and African
humanism. I want to emphasise two crucial aspects of that alliance.
First, both draw a close connection between freedom and morality, freedom
and obligation, freedom and necessity. One is not free outside of the ethical, but
through it. A human being cannot be free by doing whatever he or she
wants. We are constrained by the laws of nature. Our freedom is expressed
in our laying down a particular kind of law unto ourselves. It is a particular
kind of law, but it is a law. When we live up to the obligations of the moral law
we are also representing ourselves as free. What has come to be known as the
reciprocity thesis, that freedom and the obligations imposed upon us by the
moral law are two sides of the same coin, should show us how far we are, in
Kant, from the identification of freedom with self-determination. In his later
writing, Kant also argues that it is not only as a moral personality that we
have dignity but also through our humanity. 23 Kant underscores that even
when we act in our self-interest we do so through reason, by making a desire
a maxim that we choose to follow. In Religion within the boundaries of mere
reason, Kant holds that reason guides us in our humanity as well as in our
moral personality, a distinction he did not make in his earlier work.
But that said, it is through our capacity for practical reason and our
potential to be dictated by the demands of the moral law that humanity
itself becomes a moral ideal. And here we find the second basis for the
alliance with African humanism. Humanity matters because it is an ethical
ideal. Surely there are different notions of the meaning of the ethical ideal
of humanity, but broadly construed they share the insistence that
personhood and morality are inseparable. Hence, both Kantianism and
African humanism strongly promote human dignity. It is important to
note here that the misreading of Kantian autonomy that identifies it with
23 I Kant Religion within the boundaries of mere reason (2004) 50.