ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a critique of liberal theories of justice and what is called normative political philosophy/theory through first outlining their tendency to treat political philosophy as applied moral philosophy and then raising the problem of colonial forms of justice and the task of decolonizing normative life. Additionally, this chapter questions the presumption of justice as the primary virtue of social institutions through building on the critique, offered from the previous two chapters, of Eurocentrism and other forms of cultural-posed-as-epistemic and philosophical reductivism. Those models, the author argues, ultimately serve a conservative purpose through which projects of social transformation are hindered by arguments that at best amount to changing players but not games or social systems dependent on structurally maintained practices of dehumanization. The author also offers here a critique of certain decolonial approaches to this problem, as they tend to focus on epistemic colonialism and coloniality and not also normative forms such as the presupposed scope of justice. That critique draws upon resources from potentiated double consciousness (the dialectical realization of societally-causes problems) to intersectionality theory in Africana thought.
