Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on testimonial justice. I argue that moral emotions such as love and compassion must be incorporated into the model of credibility judgment, and that epistemic tolerance is need when consequences of epistemic oppression are taken into account. Testimonial justice is to restore one of the basic capabilities important for human epistemic well-being, the capability to be heard.

Paper long abstract:

In her seminal work Epistemic Injustice: Power & the Ethics of Knowing, Miranda Fricker identifies two kinds of epistemic injustice - testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice – and explicates ways to counteract theses injustices. (Fricker, 2007) This paper focuses on the first kind of injustice and expose major flaws of her account of testimonial justice. The first flaw is with Fricker’s perceptual model of credibility judgement, the second with the judgment of untrustworthiness given by a hearer to a speaker. I would like to argue that emotions like love, compassion, benevolence and forgiveness must be incorporated into an unbiased model of credibility judgement, and that sometimes it is needed for the hearer to suspend her judgment of untrustworthiness toward the speaker. I will show that the harm of testimonial injustice is not just the severe undermining of the speaker’s capacity as a knower as Fricker puts it, it is a significant form of epistemic oppression in which the socially prejudiced people are deprived of their capability to be heard. Therefore, the pursuit and realization of testimonial justice is to restore and protect one of the basic capabilities vitally important for human epistemic well-being.

Testimonial injustice happens when a speaker receives lower credibility judgment by a hearer based solely on identity prejudice. If a hearer judges the speaker’s words as less credible just because of the latter’s identity like gender, race and disability, then the speaker suffers testimonial injustice. Due to their disadvantaged position in social power structure, such speakers are deprived of the opportunities to speak, being ignored or even silenced. Fricker proposes a perceptual model of credibility judgment, that is, the hearer should develop virtuous testimonial perceptions. Such a model is spontaneous, unreflective, non-inferential and with critical alertness. I would argue that even if this perceptual model is correct, even if the credibility of a speaker is judged correctly by a testimonially virtuous hearer, the speaker would still suffer biased and prejudiced treatment in social interactions with the hearer. Testimonial justice is still unrealized.

Drawing on the concept of belief-discordant alief proposed by Tamar Szabo Gendler (Gendler, 2008), the hearer would show discriminative attitudes and feelings towards the speaker, even when she judges correctly the latter’s credibility. For example, one believes skin colour has nothing to do with intelligence and morality, but she still shows disgusted attitudes when facing an African person. She might believe this man’s words are trustworthy, but her feelings toward him are still discriminative, distrusting and despising. Fricker thinks that one’s trusting another person’s words “contains a feeling of trust” (Fricker, p. 79), this view is wrong. Taking another example, one might believe that homosexuality is nothing immoral, but she is still shamed about her family member’s homosexual behaviours. Such a mismatch between belief and attitude, and between judgment and feeling are not infrequently seen in social interactions. When a speaker suffers testimonial injustice, she faces two forms of harms: her words are disparaged, receiving lower credibility judgment; her feelings are despised, being treated with contempt by others repulsion and disgust. The former is the undermining of the speaker’s capacity as a knower, as Fricker points out; the latter harm is serious damage, even devastation of the speaker’s personality and dignity. One may suffer the latter harm, not the former one. Hence the whole picture of testimonial justice needs a correction of the latter harm, which requires the development of moral emotions in a hearer. To treat a speaker justly, a hearer not only needs reliable judgments, but also morally appropriate emotional responses. Compassion and love motivate respecting and understanding attitudes towards each other, no matter what the rational judgments are. (Haidt, 2001)

Fricker’s account of testimonial justice ignores the consequences of epistemic oppression. She aims to not “miss out on a truth” (Fricker, p. 122), i.e., the hearer would recognize a truth when a speaker tells one without being influenced by the speaker’s identity. But what if the speaker tells a non-truth, something that is not true? On Fricker’s account, the hearer would judge it correctly as being false and judge the speaker as being untrustworthy. But social identity influences people in a continuously constitutive way. People like women or disabled have been undermined in their intellectual capacity through years and years, and they would be made intellectually unable to tell truths in many fields of life. How should we treat them when they say p, and that p is false? We wouldn’t be giving them just treatment if we don’t take this factor into account. Judging them as untrustworthy would be reinforcing the social structure of epistemic oppression. I suggest that we must make a distinction between judging that p is false and judging that the speaker of p is untrustworthy. We must consider whether the speaker has long suffered testimonial injustice in her social life, such as: whether she has suffered unjust distribution of information and knowledge (not being able to get access to information and knowledge influences one’s epistemic growth as a knower), whether she has been laughed at, despised or ignored frequently when speaking out her mind, whether she has adapted to and even adopted prejudiced identity due to long-term epistemic prejudice. We may judge her telling p as false, but not judge her as untrustworthy. By giving her epistemic tolerance and epistemic compassion, we are treating her as a person who would become trustworthy if she had been given epistemic justice in her life. In so doing, we are creating an epistemic space in which she would change and grow in her epistemic capacities and in which she is given the vital capability to be heard.

1、 Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power & the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford University Press, 2007;

2、 Tamar Szabo Gendler, “ Alief in Action (and Reaction)”, Mind & Language, Vol. 23, No. 5, 2008, pp. 552-585.

3、 Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment”, Psychological Review, Vol. 108, No. 4, pp. 814-834.