There's No (Testimonial) Justice: Why Pursuit of a Virtue is Not the Solution to Epistemic Injustice

Miranda Fricker's book Epistemic Injustice calls attention to an important sort of moral and intellectual wrongdoing, that of failing to give others their intellectual due. When we fail to recognize others' knowledge, or undervalue their beliefs and judgments, we fail in two important respects. First, we miss out on the opportunity to improve and refine our own sets of beliefs and judgments. Secondand more relevant to the term injusticewe can deny people the intellectual respect they deserve. Along with describing the wrong of epistemic injustice, Fricker proposes that epistemic justice is a virtue we can, and should, aim for in practice (98-99). But I argue that there are two major problems. First, it is not clear that it is reasonable to imagine there is any such stable dispositionthat is, any such virtueas the sort of justice she imagines. Second, even if there could be such a virtue, her theory of epistemic justice does not provide good guidance for avoiding epistemic injustice. While it could give us an accurate description of the good agent, it is at best unhelpful, and at worst counterproductive, for the ideal of the virtue of epistemic justice to guide our thinking in practice.