Truth, Moral Rightness, and Justification: A Habermasian Perspective on Decolonizing the University

Abstract

In this paper, Anniina Leiviskä examines the moral, political, and epistemic claims of the social justice movement known as “decolonizing the university” from the perspective of Jürgen Habermas's distinction between objective and normative validity and the respective notions of truth and moral rightness. Leiviskä challenges the view, held by some representatives of decolonization, that the normative and epistemic claims of the movement are inseparable from each other and suggests that evaluating the justification of the movement requires holding these claims at least analytically distinguishable. She argues that while the moral and political claims of “decolonizing the university” find strong justification through Habermas's discourse morality, its epistemic claims, especially the rejection of shared standards of knowledge, might have epistemically problematic consequences. Accordingly, Leiviskä suggests here that the epistemic justification of decolonization is conditional on the acceptance of shared epistemic standards — the pragmatic truth concept and the criterion of impartiality — which she develops in the paper on the basis of Habermas's pragmatic theory of truth and rational discourse as a model of justification. Finally, she proposes that the implications of these criteria for practices of higher education and the curriculum should be determined through an open and unconstrained discussion by the members of an inclusive university community.