PHIL 355 Epistemic Injustice: Chapter 1, Power and the Ethics of Knowing

Prejudice is not the only thing that can cause credibility deficit, and so not all sorts of credibility deficits are cases of testimonial injustice.

A credibility deficit might simply result from innocent error: error that is both ethically and epistemically non-culpable.

Social power

A practically socially situated capacity to control other's actions, where this capacity may be exercised (actively or passively) by particular social agents, or alternatively, it may operate purely structurally.

The influence of identity prejudice in a hearer's credibility judgment is an operation of identity power.

For in such a case the influence of identity prejudice is a matter of one party or parties effectively controlling what another party does-preventing them, for instance from conveying knowledge- in a way that depends upon collective conceptions of the social identities in play.

Identity power is only one facet of social identity categories pertaining to, say, class or gender, since such categories will have material implications as well as imaginative aspects.

Identity power, like social power in general, may be agential or purely structural; it may work positively to produce action or negatively to constrain it; and it may work in the interests of the agent whose actions are so controlled, or again it may work against them.

For a general practitioner, the credibility excess he receives from his patients brings an unwanted ethical burden and so we see that credibility excess can be disadvantageous.

In general, however, we shall see that credibility is a good that one needs to get enough of for all manners of well-functioning, and accordingly we should think of its deficits as generally disadvantages.

Power can also operate purely structurally so that there is no particular agent exercising it.

In purely structural operations of power, it is entirely appropriate to conceive of people as functioning more as the 'vehicles' of power than as its paired subjects and objects, for in such cases the capacity that is social power operates without a subject- the capacity is disseminated throughout the social system.

Social power that Wartenberg's notion of social alignment reflects is that the point of any operation of social power is to effect social control, whether it is a matter of particular agents controlling what other agents do or of people's actions being controlled purely structurally.

It is always a social group that is properly described as being controlled, even while that control has no particular agent behind it, for purely structurally operations of power are always such as to create or preserve a given social order.

What do we mean by power? And how does gender power relate to the general notion of social power?

Power can operate actively and passively

agential power

That sort of power that is exercised by an agent.

Accent can have a significant impact on how much credibility a hearer affords a speaker, especially in a one-off exchange.

The idea is rather the prejudice will tend surreptitiously to inflate or deflate the credibility afforded the speaker, and sometimes this will be sufficient to cross the threshold for belief or acceptance so that the hearer's prejudice causes him to miss out on a piece of knowledge.

It seems that the ethical poison of testimonial injustice must derive from some ethical poison in the judgement of the hearer, and there is none such wherever the hearer's error is ethical non-culpable.

The idea that women are irrational, blacks are intellectually inferior to whites, the working classes are moral inferiors of the upper classes, jews are wily, orientals are sly..... and so on in a grim catalogue of cliches more or less likely to insinuate themselves into judgments of credibility at different moments in history.

What, then, is distinctive social power? The classical response to the question is to say that power involves the thwarting of someone's objective interests.

Wartenberg's response to the question is to day that what makes the teacher's ability to grade her student's work a matter of social power is that the student encounters it as having control over certain things that she might either need or desire.

Whenever there is an operation of power that depends in some significant degree upon such shared imaginative conception of social identity, then identity power is at work.

Whether an operation of identity power is active or passive, it depends very directly on imaginative social co-ordination: both parties must share in the relevant collective conception of what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman, where such conceptions amount to stereotypes (which may or may not be distorting ones) about men's and women's respective authority on this or that sort of subject matter.

Prejudice results in the speaker's receiving more credibility than she otherwise would have-

a credibility excess- or it results in her receiving less credibility than she otherwise would have- a credibility deficit.

dyadic power

relates one party who is exercising power to another party whose actions are duly influenced.

Testimonial injustices that are connected, via a common prejudice, with other types of injustices, might appropriately be termed .... They are produce not by prejudice simplicity, but specifically by those prejudice that track educational, professional, sexual, legal, political, religious, and so on...

systematic testimonial injustices

If, for instance, the practical context in which injustices occur is that of a project, professional or otherwise, which is crucial to the person's life being worth living,

then the accumulation of incidental injustices may ruin their life.

In the context of a racist ideology structured around dogmas of white superiority, the fundamental ethical sentiment of plain human sympathy becomes disfigured in the eyes of whites so that it appears as little more than an indicator of self-perceived advantage on the part of the black subject.

A black man is not allowed to have feelings that imply a position of any sort of advantage relative to any while person, no matter how difficult any lonely her life might be.