JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Ubuntu has become an influential moral framework in contemporary bioethics, especially through Thaddeus Metz’s analytic account of right action as promoting harmonious relationships constituted by shared identity and goodwill. We argue that Ubuntu remains an important bioethical resource but should not function as a proxy for African moral philosophy as a whole. Its continental extension is descriptively fragile, given Africa’s linguistic, religious, legal, and philosophical diversity; methodologically problematic, because critique of Western universalism should not be replaced by another continental generalization; and practically limiting, because research ethics gains legitimacy when it engages the moral vocabularies through which communities reason about personhood, obligation, trust, evidence, kinship, and harm. Using the Yoruba moral tradition as a worked example, we show that African traditions beyond Ubuntu contain bioethically relevant resources, including character-centered virtue, moral epistemology, individual destiny, lineage obligation, confidentiality, and institutional accountability. We advance principled pluralism: the view that bioethics in Africa should draw on the specific moral traditions relevant to the communities in which research is conducted, while identifying defensible cross-traditional convergences. This approach is not relativism; it explains how multiple traditions can support shared ethical norms while articulating them through distinct philosophical vocabularies. We conclude by considering implications for research ethics governance, including genomic research, data science health research, benefit-sharing, and algorithmic accountability.