•  738
    Epistemic justice as a condition of political freedom?
    Synthese 190 (7): 1317-1332. 2013.
    I shall first briefly revisit the broad idea of ‘epistemic injustice’, explaining how it can take either distributive or discriminatory form, in order to put the concepts of ‘testimonial injustice’ and ‘hermeneutical injustice’ in place. In previous work I have explored how the wrong of both kinds of epistemic injustice has both an ethical and an epistemic significance—someone is wronged in their capacity as a knower. But my present aim is to show that this wrong can also have a political signif…Read more
  •  687
    The dual aim of this article is to reveal and explain a certain phenomenon of epistemic injustice as manifested in testimonial practice, and to arrive at a characterisation of the anti–prejudicial intellectual virtue that is such as to counteract it. This sort of injustice occurs when prejudice on the part of the hearer leads to the speaker receiving less credibility than he or she deserves. It is suggested that where this phenomenon is systematic it constitutes an important form of oppression. …Read more
  •  603
    Epistemic Oppression and Epistemic Privilege
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 29 (sup1): 191-210. 1999.
    [T]he dominated live in a world structured by others for their purposes — purposes that at the very least are not our own and that are in various degrees inimical to our development and even existence.We are perhaps used to the idea that there are various species of oppression: political, economic, or sexual, for instance. But where there is the phenomenon that Nancy Hartsock picks out in saying that the world is “structured” by the powerful to the detriment of the powerless, there is another sp…Read more
  •  554
    In this paper I respond to three commentaries on Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. In response to Alcoff, I primarily defend my conception of how an individual hearer might develop virtues of epistemic justice. I do this partly by drawing on empirical social psychological evidence supporting the possibility of reflective self-regulation for prejudice in our judgements. I also emphasize the fact that individual virtue is only part of the solution – structural mechanisms also h…Read more
  •  535
    Précis
    Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 23 (1): 69-71. 2008.
    This paper summarizes key themes from my Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (OUP, 2007); and it gives replies to commentators.
  •  517
    Rational authority and social power: Towards a truly social epistemology
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 98 (2). 1998.
    This paper explores the relation between rational authority and social power, proceeding by way of a philosophical genealogy derived from Edward Craig's Knowledge and the State of Nature. The position advocated avoids the errors both of the 'traditionalist' (who regards the socio-political as irrelevant to epistemology) and of the 'reductivist' (who regards reason as just another form of social power). The argument is that a norm of credibility governs epistemic practice in the state of nature, …Read more
  •  509
    When we hope to explain and perhaps vindicate a practice that is internally diverse, philosophy faces a methodological challenge. Such subject matters are likely to have explanatorily basic features that are not necessary conditions. This prompts a move away from analysis to some other kind of philosophical explanation. This paper proposes a paradigm based explanation of one such subject matter: blame. First, a paradigm form of blame is identified—‘Communicative Blame’—where this is understood a…Read more
  •  388
    I—Miranda Fricker: The Relativism of Blame and Williams's Relativism of Distance
    Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 84 (1): 151-177. 2010.
    Bernard Williams is a sceptic about the objectivity of moral value, embracing instead a qualified moral relativism—the ‘relativism of distance’. His attitude to blame too is in part sceptical. I will argue that the relativism of distance is unconvincing, even incoherent; but also that it is detachable from the rest of Williams's moral philosophy. I will then go on to propose an entirely localized thesis I call the relativism of blame, which says that when an agent's moral shortcomings by our lig…Read more
  •  326
    Group Testimony? The Making of A Collective Good Informant
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84 (2): 249-276. 2012.
    We gain information from collective, often institutional bodies all the time—from the publications of committees, news teams, or research groups, from web sites such as Wikipedia, and so on—but do these bodies ever function as genuine group testifiers as opposed to mere group sources of information? In putting the question this way I invoke a distinction made, if briefly, by Edward Craig, which I believe to be of deep significance in thinking about the distinctiveness of the speech act of testim…Read more
  •  316
    Powerlessness and social interpretation
    Episteme 3 (1-2): 96-108. 2006.
    Our understanding of social experiences is central to our social understanding more generally. But this sphere of epistemic practice can be structurally prejudiced by unequal relations of power, so that some groups suffer a distinctive kind of epistemic injustice—hermeneutical injustice. I aim to achieve a clear conception of this epistemicethical phenomenon, so that we have a workable definition and a proper understanding of the wrong that it inflicts.
  •  236
    The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. 2000.
    The thirteen specially-commissioned essays in this volume are written by philosophers at the forefront of feminist scholarship, and are designed to provide an accessible and stimulating guide to a philosophical literature that has seen massive expansion in recent years. Ranging from history of philosophy through metaphysics to philosophy of science, they encompass all the core subject areas commonly taught in anglophone undergraduate and graduate philosophy courses, offering both an overview of …Read more
  •  215
    My overarching purpose is to illustrate the philosophical fruitfulness of expanding epistemology not only laterally across the social space of other epistemic subjects, but at the same time vertically in the temporal dimension. I set about this by first presenting central strands of Michael Williams' diagnostic engagement with scepticism, in which he crucially employs a Default and Challenge model of justification. I then develop three key aspects of Edward Craig's ‘practical explication' of the…Read more
  •  171
    The Value of Knowledge and The Test of Time
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 64 121-138. 2009.
    The current literature on the value of knowledge is marred by two unwarranted presumptions, which together distort the debate and conceal what is perhaps the most basic value of knowledge, as distinct from mere true belief. These presumptions are the Synchronic Presumption, which confines philosophical attention to the present snapshot in time; and the Analytical Presumption, which has people look for the value of knowledge in some kind of warrant. Together these presumptions conceal that the va…Read more
  •  169
    Replies to critics
    Theoria 23 (1): 81-86. 2008.
    Replies.
  •  166
    The notion of recognition is an ethically potent resource for understanding human relational needs; and its negative counterpart, misrecognition, an equally potent resource for critique. Axel Honneth’s rich account focuses our attention on recognition’s role in securing basic self-confidence, moral self-respect, and self-esteem. With these loci of recognition in place, we are enabled to raise the intriguing question whether each of these may be extended to apply specifically to the epistemic dim…Read more
  •  144
    Introduction to Special Issue on Applied Epistemology
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 34 (2): 153-156. 2016.
  •  144
    Ambivalence About Forgiveness
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 84 161-185. 2018.
    Our ideas about forgiveness seem to oscillate between idealization and scepticism. How should we make sense of this apparent conflict? This paper argues that we should learn something from each, seeing these views as representing opposing moments in a perennial and well-grounded moral ambivalence towards forgiveness. Once we are correctly positioned, we shall see an aspect of forgiveness that recommends precisely this ambivalence. For what will come into view will be certain key psychological me…Read more
  •  128
    Bernard Williams as a Philosopher of Ethical Freedom
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (8): 919-933. 2020.
    Interpreting Bernard Williams’s ethical philosophy is not easy. His style is deceptively conversational; apparently direct, yet argumentatively inexplicit and allusive. He is moreover committed to evading ready-made philosophical “-isms.” All this reinforces the already distinct impression that the structure of his philosophy is a web of interrelated commitments where none has unique priority. Against this impression, however, I will venture that the contours of his philosophy become clearest if…Read more
  •  124
    Intuition and reason
    Philosophical Quarterly 45 (179): 181-189. 1995.
  •  123
    Forgiveness—An Ordered Pluralism
    Australasian Philosophical Review 3 (3): 241-260. 2019.
    There are two kinds of forgiveness that appear as radically different from one another: one presents forgiveness as essentially earned through remorseful apology; the other presents it as fundamentally non-earned—a gift. The first, which I label Moral Justice Forgiveness, adopts a stance of moral demand and conditionality; the second, which I label Gifted Forgiveness, adopts a stance of non-demand and un-conditionality. Each is real; yet how can two such different responses to wrongdoing be of o…Read more
  •  123
    Alice Crary, Beyond Moral Judgment (review)
    European Journal of Philosophy 18 (2): 311-315. 2010.
  •  114
    The Routledge Handbook of Social Epistemology (edited book)
    with Peter Graham, David Henderson, and Nikolaj Jang Pedersen
    Routledge. 2019.
  •  111
    Whose morality is it anyway?
    with Simon Blackburn, A. C. Grayling, Anthony O’Hear, and Bhikhu Parekh
    The Philosophers' Magazine 30 41-49. 2005.
  •  106
    Philosopher's zone
    with Alan Saunders
    In London in 1993, a black teenager named Stephen Lawrence was fatally stabbed by a small gang of white teenagers. His friend Duwayne Brooks was a witness but the police failed to take his testimony seriously. When someone speaks but is not heard because of accent, sex, or colour, that person is undermined as a knower. This week, we look at was it means to do justice to someone's status as a knower.
  •  87
    This chapter focuses on the different styles of moral relativism. The history of moral relativist thinking features different branches to the family tree, each representing a different impetus to relativism, and so producing a different style of moral relativist thought. At the root, however, is a broadly subjectivist parent idea that morality is at least in part the upshot of a shared way of life, and shared ways of life tend to vary markedly from culture to culture. The discussions cover the b…Read more
  •  60
    James P. Sterba, Justice for Here and Now (review)
    Mind 110 (439): 854-857. 2001.
  •  56
    Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (review)
    Journal of Philosophy 97 (8): 471-475. 2000.