There are many differences and similarities between Aristotles’ Virtue Ethics - which places the individual at the centre of morality as well as reason – and the community based Ubuntu dialogical moral theory which places the community’s prosperity above individual opinions and rights. One of the differences, among many, is the specific and contradicting role of an individual in both theories.
With regards to the Ubuntu dialogical moral theory - translated to humanness – involves two-way communication, where the individuals involved in the dialogue don’t consider themselves to be isolated beings. This is because an individual is born into a community with existing values. This reveals that the individual’s identity is dependent on the community’s norms as well as relations with other people in the community. A saying which expresses this is “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” which means “a person is a person through other persons”. This suggest that whatever a person does must be for the betterment of the community to which they belong. However, in the Virtue Ethics view, an
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An individual’s importance is seen with regards to the way they positively contribute to the sustenance of their community. In moral terms; it is the collective morality that counts and not individual morality. Furthermore, the actions of an individual are not judged in isolation from the group thus making an individual’s behaviour a reflection of all the members in the community, thus making it important for the individual to conform to communal norms. This differs from Virtue Ethics which states that “only individual moral acts are subject to evaluation and judgment and not the collective conscience of the community”. The manner of how each theory decides what is the right thing to do differs