No Future Without a Past
Desmond Tutu · 2002 CE
Excerpt
“Ubuntu holds that a person is a person through other people, and that no human being is exempt from the obligation to care for the whole. (paraphrase of the 2002 essay)”
Why the atlas keeps it
Tutu argues from ubuntu — that a person becomes fully human through relationship with other people — to a politics of shared responsibility rather than blame. The formulation that matters for a governance question is the negative one: a future without the past that made it is not a future anyone can build on. The excerpt below paraphrases the essay rather than quoting it.
Terms this text reaches for
Ranked by the codex search index against the summary above, not hand-picked.
Ubuntu
ethicsI am because we are: a person becomes fully human in relationship with others.
Imperative of responsibility
philosophyThe duty to weigh the full, indefinite consequences of an action before taking it.
Person-affecting principle
ethicsThe view that an action is wrong only if it affects someone for the worse.
Compute governance
governanceGoverning the hardware that trains frontier systems rather than the software.
Global governance
governanceCoordination across states for problems no state can solve alone.
Governance brittleness
governanceThe tendency of a safety mechanism to fail precisely under the pressure it was built for.