Mary Astell on Bad Custom and Epistemic Injustice

Abstract

Mary Astell is a fascinating seventeenth‐century figure whose work admits of many interpretations. One feature of her work that has received little attention is her focus on bad custom. This is surprising; Astell clearly regards bad custom as exerting a kind of epistemic power over agents, particularly women, in a way that limits their intellectual capacities. This article aims to link two contemporary sociopolitical/social‐epistemological projects by showing how a seventeenth‐century thinker anticipated these projects. Astell's account of bad custom shows that she was attuned to the kinds of institutional or structural explanations theorized by Sally Haslanger, and that she acknowledges that bad custom—as an institutional or structural explanation—is intimately linked with epistemic injustice, albeit a kind not yet captured by contemporary social epistemologists. I call this form of epistemic injustice found in Astell epistemic internalization injustice. I argue that the epistemic significance of Astell's notion of bad custom is that it enables us to understand how bad custom conditions human relations in such a way as to result in epistemic injustice. Through coming to understand her notion of bad custom, we can expand our understanding of social epistemic phenomena like epistemic injustice.

Mary Astell (1666–1731)

“…Most recently, this interpretation has been put forward by myself (Broad 2015: ch. 9;2019), Karen Detlefsen (2016Detlefsen ( , 2017aDetlefsen ( , 2017b, and Allauren Forbes (2019), but its origins can be traced back to Ruth Perry's biography of Astell as "An Early English Feminist" (1986) and Bridget Hill's work on Astell as "The First English Feminist" (1986). These scholars draw their evidence from Astell's writings addressed to women, namely her Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Parts I andII (1694, 1697), Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700), and The Christian Religion, as Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church of England (1705).…”

“…Using this method enables them to overcome bad custom and "epistemic internalization injustice," the internal assumption that they have defective reasoning abilities (Forbes 2019: 778; see also Sowaal 2007: 238). In short, the cultivation of intellectual integrity provides the necessary mindset for women to challenge oppressive gender norms and practices and to determine their life paths according to their own beliefs and values.…”