Epistemic Equality: Distributive Epistemic Justice in the Context of Justification

Abstract

Social inequality may obstruct the generation of knowledge, as the rich and powerful may bring about social acceptance of skewed views that suit their interests. Epistemic equality in the context of justification is a means of preventing such obstruction. Drawing on social epistemology and theories of equality and distributive justice, we provide an account of epistemic equality. We regard participation in, and influence over a knowledge-generating discourse in an epistemic community as a limited good that needs to be justly distributed among putative members of the community. We argue that rather than trying to operationally formulate an exact criterion for distributing this good, epistemic equality may be realized by insisting on active participation of members of three groups in addition to credited experts: relevant disempowered groups, relevant uncredited experts, and relevant stakeholders. Meeting these conditions fulfills the political, moral, and epistemic aims of epistemic equality.

Epistemic Injustice and Nonmaleficence

“…It is however unclear how the principle of nonmaleficence gives sufficient normative traction to ask physicians to undertake these steps. The principle of beneficence, or the principle of justice to the extent that epistemic rights and privileges are goods that ought to be distributed fairly and equally (Miller and Pinto 2022 ), seem far better equipped to tackle the problem of promoting epistemic justice in healthcare. This, however, is beyond the scope of this paper and its conceptual goals.…”

Navigating dissent by managing value judgments: the case of Lyme disease

“…On the other hand, these sorts of deliberative bodies also have weaknesses (e.g., Kourany 2018;Harvard and Werker 2021). For example, the outcomes of a working group's deliberations are likely to be heavily dependent on the makeup of the group itself (e.g., Miller and Pinto 2022). One can shift a group toward being more or less accepting of a dissenting view like long-term antibiotic therapy by altering who has the opportunity to participate in it.…”