ABSTRACT
What I hope to do in this chapter is first to try to reconfigure the relationship between dignity and ubuntu, and then show how we might rethink this relationship in some crucial court cases and activist projects in South Africa. The notion of dignity comes from Immanuel Kant’s distinction between who and how we are as sensible beings in the world, subjected to determination by the causal laws of nature in our lives as sensual creatures. 2 Yet in our lives as creatures capable of making ourselves subject to the law of the categorical imperative, we can also make ourselves legislators of the moral law and moral right. We are free and as free we are of infinite worth. The categorical imperative in Kant is a demand put on us that could be succinctly summarized as follows: who I am only has a claim to dignity because I comply my life with who I should be, and the categorical imperative is a practical imperative that commands the “should be.” Since it is only in the realm of morality that we find our freedom, there is no contradiction in Kant between subjecting ourselves to that command and our freedom.
