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Decolonial work is often discussed as if it were principally about knowledge: whose histories appear, whose concepts travel, whose methods count. Yet the deeper claim is ethical. It is about how we should live with others under conditions shaped by conquest, extraction and racialised hierarchy, and how institutions normalise some harms while treating others as aberrations. A decolonial ethic, on our reading, is not a new moral fashion. It is an attempt to cultivate forms of care that are disciplined rather than sentimental, and forms of critique that are responsible rather than merely oppositional.

So what are decolonial ethicists doing when they engage in moral theorising?

1. They are clarifying how we ought to act

One answer is straightforward: decolonial ethicists attempt to give a systematic account of how we should behave in the world. They articulate moral prescriptions that have been suppressed, marginalised or treated as cultural rather than philosophical. This is not simply a matter of adding neglected voices. It is a challenge to the way moral authority is allocated, considering which traditions are treated as universal, which are treated as local, and who gets to define the terms of ethical seriousness.

2. They treat ethics as dispositional learning, not only rule-following

A second answer shifts the frame from commandments to formation. If we want to understand the idea and practice of a concept such as caring, we need to approach it as a learned disposition rather than as a slogan. That means attending to three constellations, involving the antecedents of the concept, its relations to other concepts, and the way it is used in the lifeworld (Scott, 2021, 2025). This guards against treating care in essentialist, detheorised, or positivistic ways, as if it were a natural property that some groups possess and others lack.

‘Language is never neutral. Ethical terms are valorised through histories of use, institutional uptake and political struggle.’

On this view, language is never neutral. Ethical terms are valorised through histories of use, institutional uptake and political struggle. Care can name tenderness and solidarity, but it can also name patronage, management and the soft violence of being helped into compliance. A decolonial ethic insists that caring must be careful, which means being attentive to power, to voice, to conditions of consent, and to the difference between support and control.

3. They link care to truth-telling and self-formation

A third answer draws on Michel Foucault’s account of ethics as work on the self. In one sense, ethics is the intentional labour through which a person forms herself as a moral agent, meaning a practice of self-making rather than a list of external rules. In another sense, ethics involves parrhesia – truth-telling that is risky, situated and directed towards a public world (see Foucault, 1983).

This matters for decolonial ethics because it helps separate being good in private from acting responsibly in public. A decolonial ethic is not simply about personal decency. It is about cultivating dispositions of critical attentiveness, including the capacity to notice how institutions distribute recognition and misrecognition, the courage to name harm without turning moral speech into performance and the discipline to keep inquiry open even when political pressures demand closure. Care, in this sense, is not softness. It is a learned stance towards truth, self-limitation and other people.

4. They refuse easy universals, including romanticised indigeneity

A fourth answer is the hardest to state well. Decolonial ethics cannot be reduced to the claim that ‘indigenous’ equals ‘ethical’, or that decolonial norms are automatically universal. Some practices carried in the name of tradition are indefensible. A decolonial ethic must be capable of saying so without retreating into colonial superiority or cultural contempt. Female genital mutilation (FGM) is a clear case.

What we have argued in this blog post is that decolonisation in education cannot be reduced to content, nor to posture. It is a practical ethic of institutional life. We develop these arguments further in Colonising and decolonising: Concepts, learnings and praxes (Scott et al., 2025).

References

Foucault, M. (1983). Discourse and truth: The problematization of parrhesia [Lecture series]. University of California, Berkeley, October–November 1983.

Scott, D. (2021). On learning: A general theory of objects and object-relations. UCL Press.

Scott, D. (2025). On learning: Volume 3. Curriculum, knowledge and ethics. UCL Press.

Scott, D., Leaton Gray, S., & Chawla-Duggan, R. (2025). Colonising and decolonising: Concepts, learnings, and praxes. Routledge.