Boult on normative expectations and testimonial injustice
Boult has recently suggested that there are two distinct ways in which testimonial injustice is epistemically blameworthy namely (1) when it embodies a kind of culpable irrationality in believing someone less credible than they are; and (2) when it embodies a deficiency of normative epistemic expectations of a speaker. Importantly, he argues that the second is independent of the balance of evidence and so provides a way in which testimonial injustice is blameworthy even in cases of contaminated evidence in which unjust social structures generate misleading evidence regarding the epistemic capacities of marginalised groups. I raise a number of questions about his appeal to deficient normative epistemic expectations including (1) whether it provides an epistemic answer to the question of when we owe it to a speaker to accept their word; (2) whether the kind of wrong involved in it is specifically epistemic; and (3) whether it overgeneralises, characterising the deficient normative expectations of victims of oppression as blameworthy.
Authors
- Jessica Brown (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1149-4814)
Institutions
- University of St Andrews (GB)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Inquiry
- Published
- 2025-09-03
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174x.2025.2549728
- Primary Topic
- Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00