The right to be known: its scope, demands, and the role of individuals and collectives

Abstract The fulfillment of the right to be known is considered essential for achieving restorative justice. Victims must have the opportunity to tell their stories and be actively heard for a reparative process to be genuinely successful. The right to be known is a positive right that imposes duties on others, including the obligation to acquire knowledge about victims and their experiences of injustice. While few would deny that victims deserve to be listened to, understood, and recognized for their experiences, Lackey’s proposal remains underspecified in both content and scope of application, leaving some of its practical implications unclear. In the first part of the paper, we argue that depending on how the right to be known is interpreted, it risks imposing both epistemically and emotionally over-demanding requirements on both duty bearers and right holders. In the second part of the paper, we propose that the right to be known and the duty to know are primarily understood as group-based. Partly influenced by Lackey’s own work on collective epistemology, we argue that the group-based versions of the right and the duty avoid worries of over-demandingness and provide an overall plausible view of this essential part of epistemic reparations.