Book Review: Epistemic Injustice
Summary
Miranda Fricker begins her book Epistemic Injustice with a crucial look at power relations. Fricker conceives of power as a capacity rather than an action and remarks that there both active and passive powers as well as agential and structural formations of it. She introduces the idea of an overall social power and how it depends on the coordinated social imagination. And though she sees social power is generally neutral, in the coordinated ideas of identity power there are often dynamics that bring about injustice.
From this foundational idea of power, she introduces the concept of Testimonial Injustice. Testimonial Injustice is when a hearer’s prejudice causes them to withhold credulity from a speaker creating an unjust credibility deficit and ultimately denying the speaker of her ability as a knower. This comes from the power on the part of the hearer and lies in the nature of living out of shared social conceptions of what identities are, which is a key component of the mechanism of testimonial exchange. The identify power can lead to identity prejudice on the part of the hearer, which then has the dual dysfunction of being both unethical and epistemically undesirable (for it leads away from truth). Using literary and film examples, Fricker delineates between culpable and non-culpable injustice to show that one can be unjust but not culpably so, an idea she explores later in the book.
As she demonstrates in Chapter 2, the main method by which prejudice influences a hearer is by stereotypes. While stereotypes have the power to simplify life as a useful heuristic, the prejudice that forms from them towards social identities is generally culpable. Fricker remarks that would take a “special feat of self-consciousness” to be fully rid of these prejudices, for prejudice can also be diachronic (or lingering prejudice despite an evolution in beliefs) and synchronic (stated prejudiced beliefs but un-prejudice action) in form.
In the case of Testimonial Injustice, the hearer suffers both an immediate and an ongoing epistemic wrong. The immediate wrong lies in the initial degradation of the capacity of the knower as a human and the person is dishonored. In the grander scheme, the knower might lose confidence in her status as a knower (important in the Cartesian sense of knowing), and suffer from self-doubt, which can reflect both in personal and professional settings. In a very real sense, this self-doubt has the ongoing ability to shape the speaker’s identity, for if they are unable to stabilize their status as a knower within community, they may live into the oppressive injustice spoken over them and stop recognizing themselves as a knower at all.
In chapter 3, Fricker counters the idea of Testimonial Injustice by examining instead what a virtuous account of testimonial exchange would require. She acknowledges that frequently a hearer operates on a default setting and a more critical approach may be required to become responsible. She introduces a concept of a well-trained testimonial sensibility for this responsible hearer. She examines testimonial sensibility in five main tenants: That the model for judgment is perceptual and so non-inferential; that good judgment is uncodifiable; that judgment is intrinsically motivating; intrinsically reason-giving; and that judgment typically contains an emotional aspect. Through these descriptors she paints a picture of a general guideline, not a theory, by which the hearer learns through experience, through the actual practice of testimonial exchange.
In chapter 4, Fricker further examines identity prejudice in the collective imagination to ask, can we identify a virtue that the hearer needs in order to avoid this prejudice influence her perception? She returns an earlier example the from the film, The Talented Mr. Ripley to demonstrate one’s fault in judgment at a spontaneous, unreflexive level. While ultimately, she finds the character carrying out testimonial injustice, she finds him non-culpable in his judgment due to the historical context. This illustration leads her to consider what critical awareness would be needed to correct for identity prejudice in such a judgment. Fricker returns to agential and structural considerations to remark how a hearer must be aware of the speaker’s social identity and, crucially, their own in order to assess how prejudice influences their judgment. The virtuous hearer must take this reflexive critical social awareness, which is often corrective unless, by moral luck, the hearer happens to be naively without prejudice. Fricker dubs this virtue Testimonial Justice. Fricker acknowledges that Testimonial Justice is difficult to achieve but through training can become second nature.
Fricker steps back to uncover the origins of Testimonial Justice as a virtue in Chapter 5. Using the hypothetical idea of the “State of Nature” adapted for epistemic necessity, she shows that every minimal social grouping has basic epistemic needs. While there is necessarily some role of stereotyping even in the smallest groups, the epistemic virtues of Accuracy and Sincerity emerge regardless, stemming from the need to stabilize epistemic trust. While she argues that the necessity for these two virtues is self-evident, she contends that the virtue of Testimonial Justice must also arrive out of necessity in order to counteract irrational prejudice. And while Testimonial Justice is certainly instrumentally valuable, thereby leads to gaining more truth, Fricker contends that it remains simultaneously a component of justice—therefore it is a hybrid virtue that is both ethically and epistemically virtuous. This idea of a hybrid virtue should not be troubling, for even virtues such as intellectual courage require underlying emotional motivation. Furthermore, Fricker shows that to ruthlessly seek out truth or desperately avoid prejudice would be to miss the mark of epistemic justice—demonstrating its hybrid nature.
In therefore re-examining the wrongness of testimonial injustice, Fricker looks at epistemic objectification and silence in Chapter 6. As used in feminist contexts, the idea of objectification is often seen as reductive of a full, complex and subjective person. And certainly, to objectify a knower as a mere knower, or nothing but a knower, limits them as a full human. However, the context of relationship can allow for flexibility in this definition of objectification. Objectification of the bad kind is that which leads to an “undermining” of the speaker’s objectivity. She also makes a distinction between a good informant in contrast to a knower, where a knower possesses the information, but in not being seen as a knower is effectively to be silenced.
Fricker ends her book by examining a final crucial component to epistemic justice: hermeneutical justice. Hermeneutical injustices come in the form of marginalization on the part of certain social identities in their attempts to understand their experience. As a response to this injustice, but unlike testimonial justice, the virtue hermeneutical justice is always corrective and cannot be come about “luckily,” for instead of pointing to the prejudice on the part of a hearer, hermeneutical injustice stems from the prejudice of collective understanding as it has been created structurally. As Fricker says, it comes from the “shared resource” that is available to some and not others. For those who suffer from hermeneutical injustice, often there is a gap, a lacuna, in how they can describe their experience. Though it is a structural problem, the hearer can afford the speaker greater understanding in listening well, and therefore mitigate the effects of the hermeneutical gap. Fundamentally, the realization of gaps in the interpretive resources can be overcome through ongoing work to verbalize them and make the knowledge increasingly accessible to marginalized groups.
In examining testimonial justice and hermeneutical Justice, Fricker acknowledges that the first step to effecting change in society requires understanding. While not instantly will everyone be able to understand her own inadequacies as a hearer, or even the hermeneutical gaps that exist for others, beginning to critically reflect on them is a crucial first step. In taking purposeful action towards securing justice for those at risk of being stripped of their status as knowers, Fricker works to reestablish their very humanity.
Reflections
Miranda Fricker does impressive work exposing the reality of epistemic injustice as it is so frequently carried out in our world. In her attempts to add even “a drop in the ocean”[1] to justice, it is clear that she carries out her task. And while her work alone merits great respect, there are places where it remains susceptible to dismissal, mainly in regard to its practicality in our (often overtly) biased postmodern era. Specifically, there remains one question as to whether Fricker provides sufficient evidence for accepting her argument from either intrinsic or instrumental motivation.
In Fricker’s exploration of the genealogy of injustice in chapter 5, she makes an argument for Testimonial Injustice as an epistemic virtue using the hypothetical situation of the “state of nature.” Using this typically political situation as it is posited by Bernard Williams and influenced by Edward Craig, she uses it as a setting in which the minimal human society forms in order to have the “basic epistemic needs” met instead of political needs.[2] These epistemic needs would be essential to obtain the knowledge necessary to survive, to pool that knowledge, and to develop epistemic trust. She ultimately argues that the virtues of Accuracy, Sincerity, and ultimately Testimonial Justice must arise for instrumental reasons (in order to gain more truth), they inherit intrinsic value from their “action-guided” potential.[3] This, I argue, is a leap.
There are two observable shortcomings regarding this argument. The first is that the “state of nature” concept she adopts is not an agreed-upon status. Taking note that Fricker herself acknowledges that she has crossed into a political sphere, it is thereby worth noting that she relies upon a state of nature not shared by all philosophers. It might be too much to quibble with Fricker’s concept of the “state of nature” for the intentions of the book itself, for she makes her point sufficiently regarding the needs of a minimal human society as a starting concept, but the distinction actually leaves her eventual position of epistemic charity vulnerable to attack.
Thomas Hobbes, the inventor of the “state of nature” concept, would see the state of nature as quite distinct from Fricker’s amicable minimally viable society. Instead, he paints a picture of warlike chaos from which people need protection. Similarly, John Locke asserts a sort of lawless natural existence in this state. While he is a bit more charitable in his view of humankind itself, assuming they will not be quite as fierce as in Hobbes’s picture, he nevertheless sees this state as one in which each person has the complete right to protect herself and use violence if necessary. The saving grace to this violent state, and the fundamental structure presented in many political philosophies, is the adoption of a social contract. Adopting a social contract, however, assumes a defensive stance. It does not seem obvious that this self-interested disposition crosses over into virtue simply based on need. On the contrary, Fricker blames “fundamental human proneness to act from self-interest” as what leads to the dysfunction of prejudice. [4] Despite her assertions of the need for the epistemic virtues, Fricker’s approach requires still essential openness for which a defensive position cannot account.
A second area of potential weakness—tied to the first—lies in Fricker’s notion of “merit” that she leaves relatively unexplored from an ethical standpoint. Several times Fricker looks into the idea of merit as it relates to the epistemic ability of determining the truth as it can be found through “indicator properties.”[5] She uses an example of a historically untrustworthy teenager talking with his social worker to show the teenager merits belief when he indeed does tell the truth, and his social worker will not grant him credulity if she senses him being dishonest.[6] Her aim is not solely to find the truth but to establish trust and grant him epistemic justice. Yet there is an ongoing problem behind the idea of “indicator properties” and granting credulity that remains even in this aim: those with power will still dictate what is credible.
At the beginning of the chapter Fricker crucially notes at this point in her argument that she aims to present a fantasy (or overly utopian) view of human nature,[7] however she creates a fantasy approach to how people actually interact. For example, if someone in a position is not telling the truth about a matter, yet they assert that they are and actually believe it is so, how the hearer both grant them epistemic justice and arrive at the truth. They arrive at an impasse. This problem lies in determining what exactly are “indicator properties” as it relates to the alternative picture of a social contract: if one cannot ultimately develop epistemic trust, for which Fricker has not provided evidence, then there are no grounds to determine what is truth and what is self-interested defensiveness.
The true weakness behind these points is that making the leap to epistemic justice, even in a complex society, asks the hearer in an exchange to willingly take the vulnerable position of trusting another’s epistemic position without providing proper motive for doing so. The motive for Hobbes and Locke was clearly protective. And therefore, the reason why this discrepancy on the state of nature and merit are so fundamentally important to get right is the mailable nature of present-day ethics. This problem can be highlighted by what I will call the Machiavelli problem.
Niccolò Machiavelli, unlike his successors Hobbes and Locke, was distinctly and unabashedly self-interested in his political philosophy. The upshot of his work determined that it is better to be feared than loved in order to maintain power.[8] What makes a Machiavellian position dangerous is it is always defensive and can never provide sufficient motivation for being ethical. This is, I will argue, the problem of the twenty-first century. Despite apparent intellectual progress, the means of self-protection are exhibited in a still fiercely self-interested society.
It would be easy to say that evidence for this emphasis on self in the modern era is too self-evident to need explanation. Anyone living in the modern western world will know the drive towards profitability and a genialized attitude of “winning” run the game both at work and in our personal lives. (The language of competition used to convey “romantic” victories does not evidence testimonial justice as its the fundamental aim.) An alternative concept that demonstrates the conundrum is the concept of virtue signaling. One only need think of Ring of Gyges to see the root of the problem.
The idea of “good for the sake of the good” versus the good that brings a certain result pertains to society today most directly through this modern-day phenomenon. Again, the question asks “Why possess an actual virtue when the display of virtue protocol will suffice for getting one the desired results?” For the nature of virtue signaling to apparently care for ‘the good’ while not actually needing to personally value the good. Because there is no clear way to distinguish, the danger of not providing adequate motivation for pursuing the good in itself creates a paradoxical situation that can lead to further discrimination towards “the other.” This concept is Machiavellian to the core:
“Therefore, it is not necessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is necessary for him to appear to have them. I shall dare say that to have them is injurious, while to appear to have them is useful. The prince may appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright, and even be so, but he must always keep a mind so disposed that should it become necessary for him not to be so, he will know how to change to the opposite.”[9]
To solve this problem historically, Hobbes and Locke ultimately grounded their work in the golden rule[10] that could serve as an unshifting foundation and, more importantly, would be accepted by all as long as they were protected in the context of a contract. However, the idea of the golden rule could easily be held from impure motivation.
Fricker seems to have come into a blind spot regarding this self-interest for several reasons. It begins when she speaks of the diachronic and synchronic distinction in chapter one.[11] By differentiating between what one says to believe and how one actually acts, she creates a split that essentially proves one cannot know the motivation behind her actions. She, in fact, cannot fully control the way she acts without extreme self-awareness. This pertains to her discussion of emotional motivation in the end of Chapter 5. There she argues that Testimonial Injustice is a hybrid epistemic and ethical virtue, saying that the motivation to be both truth-seeking and just is essentially linked. But how can people act virtuously from proper motivation if they cannot know their own motivation? And if, as Fricker claims, injustice is the norm[12], how will arguing for an inaccessible virtue help one become virtuous in reality and not just as a means to a self-interested end of which they may not even be aware.
Fricker seems to argue that, besides intrinsic value, there is a communal epistemic loss by failing to view the right knowers as knowers.[13] But, as shown, her distinction between the intrinsic and non-instrumental is unclear and therefore unhelpful. And while arguably the moral person will say certainly Testimonial Justice should be an accepted virtue, Fricker has not sufficiently established it as a necessity nor provided adequate proof of underlying motivation for it to be pursued. In fact, an argument could be made that people do not have the morality necessary to recognize any of these virtues, but instead hold them defensively or self-interestedly. By assuming the virtue of people, regardless of in the diachronic or synchronic respect, Fricker essentially seems to live into a fantasy that seems to emphasize fundamental human goodness despite beginning at a place of fundamental injustice.
By failing to either assert a fundamental underlying morality, Fricker can rely on nothing more than contract. For a more foundational argument, she would need to develop underlying ethical—and ultimately metaphysical—considerations that she does not explore in the book. Considering the recent turn to a more Machiavellian approach in politics and culture, Fricker cannot guarantee such ethical sufficiency and she does not provide a sufficient contractual argument by which could. Her book—and her ideas of epistemic justice—might benefit if she had. By failing to provide a truly intrinsic motivation for Testimonial Justice, Fricker leaves the argument vulnerable. And because Fricker’s aim is essential to a just society, the evidence as to why must be strengthened in order to promote epistemic justice as a fundamental virtue.
Bibliography
Bailey, Andrew, Samantha Brennan, Will Kymlicka, Jacob Levy, Alex Sager, and Clark Wolf, eds. From Plato to Nietzsche. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2008.
Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power & the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Footnotes
[1] Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power & the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011),
175
[2] Ibid., 109
[3] Ibid., 112
[4] Ibid., 118
[5] Ibid., 115
[6] Ibid., 123
[7] Ibid., 116
[8] “Returning to the question of being feared or loved, I conclude with this: men love according to their own free will, but fear according to the will of the prince. Therefore a wise prince should base his rule on that which is in his own control and not in the control of others. He must endeavor only to avoid hatred, as I said.” Bailey, Andrew, et al. From Plato to Nietzsche. (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2008.), 364.
[9] Bailey, Andrew, et al. From Plato to Nietzsche. (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2008.), 362
[10] Ibid., 467
[11]Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power & the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 39
[12] Ibid., 39
[13] Ibid., 110
