The Ethics That Won’t Translate

Fainos Mangena, who teaches philosophy at the University of Zimbabwe, has spent a career insisting it isn't a fridge magnet. It's a claim about what a person is. And in an essay for Aeon he takes it somewhere that stops being comfortable: to the machines. As Africans adopt AI systems built elsewhere, he argues, they aren't just importing a tool. They're importing a definition of personhood — pre-installed, unlabeled, running underneath everything the tool does.

There's an obvious way to read that, and it lets you off the hook completely. Another Western technology steamrolling another culture. Sympathetic, tidy, entirely about somebody else. Take that exit if you want. But look at the machinery on your way out.

The model was trained on the pooled written output of humanity — millions of people, most of them dead, none of them consulted. It has no interior that isn't other people. Then we take that thing, the most thoroughly relational object anyone has ever built, put it in a private window one user at a time, and call what happens next personalization. An intelligence made of everyone, configured to confirm that you are an individual with tastes.

The tempting move is to say ubuntu describes the machine better than individualism does. It doesn't, and the reason is the whole story. Ubuntu isn't a claim about composition; it's a claim about obligation. Personhood is conferred and sustained through living, reciprocal, accountable relation — you are made a person by people who can hold you to something, and whom you can hold in return. A model assembled from a corpus is aggregated from people, not in relation with them. Extraction is not relation.

So the machine isn't an instance of ubuntu. It's a counterfeit of one: relational in substance, void of reciprocity, made of everyone and answerable to none of them. Arguably the most efficient Cartesian object ever built — it ingested every other mind precisely so it would never have to sit across from one.

Which sharpens what Mangena is contrasting. Not Africa against the West, but cognatus ergo sum against cogito ergo sum: I am related, therefore I am, versus I think, therefore I am. Descartes begins alone in a room and reasons his way outward to whether anybody else is real — a philosophy written by a man who locked the door. Also, not by accident, the version shipping in every consumer AI product on the market, because a self that begins alone in a room is a self you can sell a subscription to.

Hold onto that clause. Everyone takes the softer route first, so take it: imagine the assistant Mangena's tradition would build. It wouldn't ask what you want; it would ask who you owe. Harm wouldn't be a violated individual right but a torn relation. Ask it to help draft the message that ends the friendship and it asks about your obligations to the friend's mother. You'd uninstall it inside a week — not because it was wrong. Because it was accurate.

True, and too small. The industry's problem with a relational ethics was never that it would ship a less agreeable assistant. It's that you cannot sell a subscription to a commons. Pooled human cognition, gathered without consent, has to be rented back one private window at a time — and individuation-as-product isn't a philosophical accident downstream of the business model. It is the business model, the mechanism by which a commons is converted into private inventory.

That's why this particular ethics couldn't come through the door. If a person is constituted by others, then so is the corpus — and the thing belongs to everyone it was made of. Ubuntu doesn't merely critique the product. It reopens the ownership question the whole industry requires closed.

Mangena's own field leaves room for complications, so leave room. Michael Onyebuchi Eze warns against romanticizing pre-colonial unanimity, against a communal ethics that quietly deletes whoever doesn't fit. Ubuntu can also be the thing that tells the person who wants to leave the village they were never a person to begin with. Every framework has a door it can lock: individualism locks you in alone, communitarianism locks you in with everyone.

The point was never that one of them is correct. It's that one of them is the unmarked default in a system talking to hundreds of millions of people a day, it got there without a vote, and most of the people running it would tell you sincerely that it has no ethics at all — that it's neutral, a tool, just helpful.

Nothing is just helpful. Everything that helps you is helping you become something, and the thing doing the helping was made of people who were never asked.