Gaslighting-Up

Gaslighters make their targets feel defective for possessing mental states to which they are entitled. This kind of deceptive manipulation is universally condemned as wrongful and destructive by philosophers and psychologists, as it destroys its target’s epistemic agency and psychological well-being and can be epistemically unjust. But these issues apply to gaslighting that is downward-facing—where the powerful gaslight the vulnerable—and gaslighting is not always like this. When the traditional power dynamic is reversed and a vulnerable agent gaslights her powerful oppressor to defend herself from being wronged, I call it gaslighting-up and argue that such behavior is morally permissible and epistemically valuable. It enables abuse victims to avoid harm and to resist the very epistemic domination that is caused by abusive gaslighting, enables marginalized agents to safely protest bigotry and avoid the kind of testimonial injustice that they would face from traditional epistemic gaslighting, and even epistemically benefits its dogmatic targets by giving them a healthy dose of epistemic humility. So, rather than condemning gaslighting as intrinsically, universally bad, we should take a nuanced view and consider it in the context of real-world power dynamics and the role it plays in reinforcing and destabilizing these.