Abstract
Is it possible to redress a wrong specifically in one’s capacity as a knower? Epistemic justice has largely been conceived of as either an ideal goal guiding present and future societal endeavours, or a set of ameliorative character virtues. Yet there is also a backward-looking component of epistemic justice, which has so far been neglected. I argue that exercises of our cognitive and epistemic capacities can constitute moral redress for wrong actions and wrongful harms for which we are responsible. Epistemic redress can take non-doxastic forms, but can also involve the formation of new beliefs. Acts of epistemic redress can redress not only epistemic but also non-epistemic wrongs. In the practice of natural science, epistemic redress can play legitimate and necessary roles both within and outside the core procedures of scientific reasoning, without compromising science’s truth-orientated epistemic credentials. When it plays these roles, it can contribute to generating restitutive knowledge.
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Notes
Fricker (2007, p. 1).
See Coady (2017).
See Fricker (2015).
Almassi calls the latter ‘amelioration as relative improvement’ (2018, p. 96).
See Glaser (2015).
Almassi (2018) addresses this question, answering it affirmatively, and advocating ‘relational repair’ (p. 97) as the best conception of how to do so.
See Dotson (2011) for characterisations of these epistemic wrongs.
Walker offers ‘the expropriation of a people’s land and destruction of their language and culture due to genocidal practices of colonization’ as examples of ‘losses that are not literally compensable at all’ (2006, p. 384).
See Keller (2004, p. 339).
In what follows, I take it for granted that someone’s overall level of well-being can change, without this change being due to or identical to a change in any mental state or states of theirs. Those who deny this are not thereby prevented from accepting my main conclusions, though they will object to some of the illustrations I offer. I here remain agnostic as to whether a change in someone’s level of well-being could occur after their death—whether because interpersonal relationships can survive the death of at least one party to them (for this view, see Ramose, 2005, pp. 60–67), or for some other reason (e.g., Aristotle 1976, pp. 82–85 concludes that a slight change in level of well-being can occur after death). (My thanks to anonymous reviewers for this journal for pressing me on these matters.).
Though it might be that this is true of some, but not all, types of genuinely good or successful human life (see Hull 2015a, pp. 141–142).
In this paragraph I am indebted to Keller (2018, pp. 20–25).
This phrase is Sen’s general formulation of the constitutive relationship between a particular ‘functioning’ and a person’s overall level of flourishing (1992, p. 40).
Such beliefs can evidently be harmful. Nolfi (2018) defends our ‘pre-theoretical intuition’ that holding such a belief—not just acting on it—can constitute ‘doxastic wronging’, meaning the believer will ‘incur a kind of moral debt’ (p. 56).
I give a more detailed motivation of the distinction between compensation and rectification in Hull (2015b, pp. 119–123), on which I draw here.
This example is from Bovens (2008, p. 222).
The matter is slightly more complicated. Compensatory redress is widely recognised under one label or other, and there is widespread agreement that it is not the only form of moral redress. However, what it is contrasted with is often a conception of reconciliation or restorative justice which, on examination, disaggregates into compensatory, rectificatory, and several other distinct components. I give examples later on in this section.
According to Davis, a ‘Consummate Apology’ involves a ‘doxastic element’, an ‘affective element’, and a ‘dispositional element’ (2002, pp. 170–171). Similarly, Bovens identifies a ‘cognitive component’, an ‘affective component’, and a ‘conative component’ in a ‘genuine apology’ (2008, p. 220).
Swinburne writes: ‘To give what we cannot too easily afford is always a serious act. The penitent constitutes his apology as serious by making it costly’ (1989, p. 84).
See Fricker (2007, p. 17).
For instance, on Radzik’s ‘reconciliation theory of atonement’ (2009, p. 111), atonement ‘withdraws the insult and the threat that wrongdoing contained, communicates respect, [and] redresses the harms caused’ (p. 127)—but it also involves the wrongdoer’s re-establishing themselves as a trustworthy member of the community (p. 114), among several further elements.
Walker’s view, for instance, is that a ‘corrective justice’ (2006, p. 378) approach—one based on the ‘responsibility to compensate for wrongful harm’ (p. 382)—will ‘serve adequately’ (p. 378) in some cases, but that ‘restorative justice’ is generally ‘a more adequate framing ideal for reparative practice’ (p. 379). Walker specifies that ‘restitution and compensation’ do feature ‘in a restorative framework’, but here they take on additional roles including ‘symbolic roles in repairing relationships’ (op. cit. pp. 384–385).
Chignell (2018, p. 15).
Keller defends the view that ‘good friendship’ can entail a ‘requirement that you be disposed to think well of your friend’ (2004, p. 337).
For example, Schroeder argues that, though ‘the only kind of epistemic reason in favor of any belief is evidence for the content of that belief’, there can be ‘epistemic reasons against belief that are not simply evidence against the content of that belief’—including ‘reasons with a practical (or moral) flavor’ (2018, p. 118).
See Schroeder (2018, p. 119).
See Basu (2019).
See Cohen (1989, p. 368). I take it that assuming and supposing are synonymous, and that they constitute a species of what Cohen calls accepting.
‘[T]he reasons for accepting that p,’ writes Cohen, ‘need not always be epistemic ones: they might be ethical or prudential’ (1989, p. 369).
Williams (1973a, p. 148). As Williams writes, ‘[i]f in full consciousness I could will to acquire a “belief” irrespective of its truth, it is unclear that before the event I could seriously think of it as a belief, i.e. as something purporting to represent reality’ (ibid.).
As Keller writes, ‘[y]ou can decide not to make the effort to assume a more objective stance, not to make the effort to critically investigate all sources of evidence, when it comes to your beliefs about your friends’ (2004, p. 348).
See Chignell (2018, p. 4).
As Jackson notes, admitting ‘that rationality is (sometimes) underdetermined by evidence alone’ does not entail admitting ‘that rationality is underdetermined in general’ (2021, p. 323). It can be true that, for any given content, there is one and only one rational doxastic attitude for agent A to hold towards that content at time t, even if it is false that that attitude is always fully determined by A’s evidentiary basis at t (op. cit. p. 324).
See Glaser (2015).
As Williams notes, ‘[m]oral conflicts are neither systematically avoidable, nor all soluble without remainder’ (1973b, p. 179).
Compare the argument that non-doxastic acceptance of religious doctrines is preferable to belief in them, because it enables these doctrines to play a positive moral role in a person’s life without that person’s ‘sacrificing rationality or epistemic virtue’ (Jay 2016, p. 255).
See Radzik (2009, pp. 83–86).
I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for this journal who raised this question.
See Cassam (2011, p. 15).
See Douglas (2016) for an overview of ‘the value-free ideal’ and various criticisms of it.
More or less what Hempel calls ‘the scientific ways of validation’ (1965, p. 83).
Hempel (1965, p. 95).
The phrase is Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s (2017, p. x). Though he doesn’t take the idea in the directions I have done here, it was his use of this phrase which first prompted me to explore these matters.
See Douglas (2000, pp. 563–564). As she says, in these cases ‘[n]on-epistemic values serve as constraints for some scientific choices, but do not interfere with internal scientific reasoning’ (p. 564). The legitimate influence of moral values on decisions of types (i) and (iii) in social science was pointed out long ago by Weber (1949).
For more detail on both these features of scientific reasoning, see Douglas (2017, pp. 83–89).
In Rudner’s seminal discussion of this, he writes: ‘[O]ur decision regarding the evidence and respecting how strong is “strong enough”, is going to be a function of the importance, in the typically ethical sense, of making a mistake in accepting or rejecting the hypothesis’ (1953, p. 2).
Hempel first used this phrase to refer to the phenomenon (1965, p. 92).
Douglas (2008, p. 9).
Here I am summarizing Douglas’s ground-breaking work in which she extends Hempel’s insight about inductive risk to areas besides theory acceptance (2000, pp. 565–577).
See Cranor (2007, p. 50).
See Walker (2006, pp. 385–386).
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Acknowledgements
I am especially grateful to my colleague Jack Ritchie, for invaluable conversations and suggestions which helped me think through the issues discussed here. In researching this article, I benefited from a National Research Foundation grant (RA180115305173-119067) and a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung (3.4-ZAF-1202237-HFST-E). Stefan Gosepath was most hospitable and encouraging during my stay at the Freie Universität, Berlin, in 2019 as a Humboldt Research Fellow. I presented an earlier version of this article to the Epistemic Injustice, Reasons, Agency Workshop at the University of Johannesburg on 28 February, 2019. I am grateful to the participants at that workshop, especially Ward Jones and Leonie Smith, for their input. I am also obliged to Chris Jay, Veli Mitova, Arthur Schipper, and two anonymous reviewers for this journal, who gave me very helpful written comments on drafts.
Funding
This study was supported by Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellowship 3.4-ZAF-1202237-HFST-E and National Research Foundation Grant RA180115305173-119067.
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Hull, G. Epistemic redress. Synthese 200, 201 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03613-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03613-1