Epistemic Injustice

Fricker opens with an observation borrowed from Judith Shklar: philosophy says a great deal about justice and very little about injustice. Injustice is treated as the mere absence of justice, as if once we knew what was fair we would know everything else. Fricker argues the reverse: in the epistemic sphere injustice is normal, and we can only understand what epistemic justice is by looking at its negative space. The book is a map of that negative space.

The introduction sets out the two key concepts. Testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice leads a hearer to give a speaker less credibility. Hermeneutical injustice happens earlier, when someone tries to make sense of their own experience: there is a gap in the shared stock of concepts, and that gap disadvantages the least powerful groups most. Fricker frames both as wronging someone «in their capacity as a knower», because giving knowledge and understanding one's own experience are part of what makes us human. Fricker also settles accounts with postmodernism: reducing reason to power, the book argues, erases the difference between rejecting someone's word for good reason and rejecting it out of prejudice, and ends up serving conservatism.

Chapter 1 opens with a scene from «The Talented Mr Ripley». Herbert Greenleaf, whose son has vanished, silences Marge, who suspects Tom Ripley of murder: «Marge, there's female intuition, and then there are facts.» From this line Fricker draws the idea of «identity power». Greenleaf may mean well and act paternally, yet by invoking the stereotype of women as intuitive rather than rational he discounts what Marge says. More interestingly, this kind of power does not even require either party to believe the stereotype: it lives in the shared social imagination and can steer our conduct despite our beliefs.

The most striking section deals with credibility «excess» and «deficit». Is it also an injustice to believe someone too much because of prejudice? The examples are well chosen: a GP whose patients assume she knows everything and who carries a heavy burden as a result, a professor who gets no critical feedback because a junior colleague admires him, the emperor Claudius surviving assassination attempts because everyone thought him a fool, Lieutenant Columbo deliberately looking scatterbrained. The conclusion: single instances of excess are not injustices, but a lifetime of being flattered can make a member of the elite arrogant and closed to criticism — a hidden epistemic harm of its own.

Fricker draws the boundaries of the concept with care. Not every failure to believe is an injustice: a hearer can simply be mistaken. In one example a philosopher finds a colleague's name listed under medicine online, assumes he is a doctor and gives less weight to his view on ethics, when in fact he is a medical ethicist. This, Fricker says, is an innocent error even if the search was sloppy, because no prejudice is involved. Injustice requires an ethical fault — prejudice against the person's identity. This care is what sets the book above much popular writing on bias: it does not call everything an injustice.

The weakness is the prose. Analytic philosophy's long, nested sentences take patience, phrases about «credibility judgements» and «collective hermeneutical resources» recur constantly, and some pages need to be read twice. Yet the central idea is so strong that once you finish the book you start noticing, in everyday conversations, whose word you discount and why.

• Memorable examples drawn from film, literature and daily life
• Careful analysis that marks the limits of its concepts rather than calling everything injustice
• A new angle that joins ethics and the theory of knowledge