Epistemic reparations in hostile contexts
摘要
I identify a further harm of agential testimonial injustice and explore its implications for epistemically reparative work. The central idea is that within the criminal legal system, the socio-epistemic norms apt to elicit false confessions are widely and deeply held to be predictive of good epistemic outcomes. Thus, many practitioners are poorly epistemically positioned in respect of their culpability/complicity in gross epistemic misconduct. This is significant for some victims of agential testimonial injustice. For false confessors, for instance, there is a further epistemic injury in that those most responsible—and with the greatest power to restore their standing—are among the furthest from the light of truth. This bears on the pursuit of epistemic reparations. Ensconced within epistemically hostile contexts, we might worry that epistemic reparations are out of reach. However, where perpetrators have a perfect duty of epistemic repair, non-perpetrators have imperfect epistemic obligations. Whenever possible, we can and should bear witness. Discharging our imperfect duties may not be ideally restorative. Nevertheless, the reparative value in this work may extend to both victims and perpetrators. It could be that by bearing witness nonculpable agents stand to promote the conditions in which perpetrators begin to reckon with their proper epistemic obligations. If so, then in epistemically hostile contexts, imperfect epistemic duties are all the more compelling.