Ubuntu and the Problem of Belonging

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes an original ubuntu-inspired account of human-animal moral status for engaging the problem of belongingness—the ethico-ecological community view. This account embodies two integrated features: locatedness and relationality. While locatedness prompts us to attend to the embeddedness of beings in the built and natural environment, relationality allows the discussion to focus on human-nonhuman interdependencies. I argue that a deep sense of both features prompts us to move the moral status conversation away from capacities to a non-capacity-based approach, thereby helping to disrupt unjustified human moral superiority over animals in a way that commits us to environmental flourishing.

KEYWORDS:

• Belonging
• environment
• moral status
• Ubuntu

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the Eberhard Karls University of Tubingen (UT) for supporting my research with a fellowship. I also wish to appreciate Dr. Niels Weidtmann and other colleagues at the College of Fellows, UT for their feedback on an earlier draft of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The notion of belonging here points us to the individuals and groups that must be treated as deserving moral consideration—all things being equal.

2. I use ‘location’ in a purely geographical site, independent of what we feel about it. I should emphasize here that I am neither proposing nor defending Aristotle’s conflation of both concepts. I only draw on his view to point out that a being is always situated in a site. This is what I mean by the term ‘locatedness’.