Thierry Ngosso
Political philosopher interested in global justice, climate change, human rights and migration
Thierry Ngosso is a political philosopher interested in global justice and more precisely in three important and interconnected contemporary issues in this field: climate change, human rights and migration. He addresses global justice from both the State/Firm division of labor and the Western/non-Western perspectives. His research has therefore a strong focus on business corporations and on comparative philosophy. Ngosso earned a PhD in Philosophy from the Catholic University of Louvain (2015) and is currently a lecturer at the department of philosophy of the Catholic University of Central Africa where he led the efforts towards the establishment of the Ethics and Public Policy Laboratory in 2019, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Business Ethics at the University of St. Gallen.
Talk
I will use the communality and relationality that define personhood in many African Ethos, particularly the ‘Ubuntu’ Ethos, to provide some ‘African’ perspectives on sustainability in general and sustainable ICT in particular. I will claim that the values of generosity and empathy that are entrenched into the ‘Ubu-Ntu’ worldview as opposed for instance to the vice of greed that descends from individualism rooted in the Western worldview should be the way forward for making the necessary spiritual shift in this digital era that will safeguard our environment which is part of that communal ethos and identify our ICT needs in a way that distinguishes between subsistence and luxury pollution. Moreover, if we look at human beings as deeply linked to both the environment and community/society as Ubuntu claims, this should in a positive way reflect on and inform also our policies in terms for instance of the ownership of big tech companies, the access and control of data by citizens or in terms of technological inclusion.