ABSTRACT
Critical humanitarian discourses have primarily focused on subjective hierarchies and problems of moral imperialism. Dominant conversations often yield a pessimistic outlook of the overall humanitarian agenda. To justify humanitarian interventions, scholars have often relied on legitimate inferences from universalist conceptions of the good and abstract morality. This chapter explores ways in which ubuntu philosophy could generate a new humanitarian discourse. It examines ways in which humanitarianism has embedded neoliberal practices that alienate the supposed victims of humanitarian needs. The chapter evaluates and critiques the moral hierarchies of the neoliberal paradigm which thrives through the obliteration of the concrete character of individuals in humanitarian situations. It then uses ubuntu philosophy to suggest that instead of a binary morality, people seek subjective equality where they recognize that they are all indeed victims or casualties within a moral contemporaneity that shuns moral positivism in favor of an ethical mandate that prioritizes context-based human reconciliation.
