Thailize Brandolt

The present thesis, entitled Agential Injustice and Explanatory Injustice: Miranda Fricker and G.E.M. Anscombe in Dialogue, investigates the extent to which practices of asymmetric credibility attribution compromise not only the epistemic standing of certain subjects, but also the conditions under which their actions are recognised as expressions of reasons and their explanations are recognised as legitimate authority with respect to their actions. The central hypothesis of this thesis is that epistemic injustice, when analysed in light of G.E.M. Anscombe's philosophy of action, reveals itself also as a undermining of the fundamental conditions of intelligibility of agency. By compromising the epistemic standing of the subject, one equally compromises the subject's capacity to recognise herself, and to be recognised, as the author of her own actions and, consequently, her ethical responsibility. To sustain this hypothesis, the work develops a dialogue between Miranda Fricker's social epistemology and Elizabeth Anscombe's philosophy of action, reconstructing the theory of epistemic injustice in its internal structure and the central elements of Anscombian philosophy, in particular, the notion of practical knowledge as the ground of agency and the role of the question "why?" as the criterion for delimiting intentional action. From this articulation, an expansion of the diagnosis of epistemic injustice is proposed by means of a distinction between two modalities of practical injustice: agential injustice, which bears upon the recognition of action as an expression of reasons in the public space, and explanatory injustice, which compromises the authority of the first person in explaining their own action. It is argued that both modalities produce harms irreducible to the epistemic plane, including ethical consequences, that are insufficiently captured by Fricker's diagnosis.