Confucianism and Ubuntu: Reflections on a Dialogue Between Chinese and African Traditions

I. IntroductionWhich values are compelling to all kinds of people?And which ones are the contingent products of particular times and places, with no resonance outside of those contexts?Today, it is widely recognized that we need to go beyond "West-centric" outlooks to answer such questions.It is not sufficient to develop a theory of "universal" moral reasoning or a "global ethic" that draws only on the moral aspirations and social practices found in Western societies.Hence, there has been a marked increase in "East-West" dialogues over the past couple of decades: liberals talk to Islamists, Buddhists to Christians, Americans to Chinese, and so on.However, such dialogues still suggest that Euro-America must be, so to speak, the sun around which the others revolve.Dialogues between two non-Western traditions seem slightly eccentric in a global context so dominated by Western economic, political, and cultural power.Indeed, insofar as some make claims that a subfield of comparative political theory either does or should exist, it is characterized in terms of the study of relationships between Western and non-Western texts; it rarely acknowledges the existence of say, Indian-Chinese comparisons, let alone advocate much more systematic comparisons between non-Western traditions. 1 Upon reflection, though, it is hard to think of a good philosophical reason why such relationships should not also be explored.What if it turned out that two major non-Western traditions, together comprised of more than two billion people, have more in common than either has with the liberal tradition?What if it turned out that many more people in the world actually adhere to such "non-Western" values?