Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: Proponents of epistemic partiality in friendship argue that friendship makes demands of our epistemic lives that are at least inconsistent with the demands of epistemic propriety, and perhaps downright irrational. In this paper, I focus on the possibility that our commitments to our friends distort how we respond to testimony about them, their character, and their conduct. Sometimes friendship might require us to ignore (or substantially underweight) what others tell us about our friends. However, while this practice might help promote your friendship and protect your friends, refusing someone’s testimony can constitute a special kind of insult towards them, according to Allen Hazlett ( 2017 ) and Finlay Malcolm ( 2018 ). It seems to follow that friendship can require us to insult people by refusing their testimony. This should count against treating your friends with epistemic partiality, one might think. It’s plausible that we have moral reasons not to insult other people, whether they’re our friends or not. The risk of insulting non-friends, it turns out, is just the beginning of the problems for the epistemic partiality in friendship. Recent discussions in social epistemology, led by Miranda Fricker ( 2007 ), Kristie Dotson ( 2011 ) and José Medina ( 2012 ), among others, have brought renewed attention the distinctly epistemic nature of some kinds of injustice. Drawing on this work, I’ll suggest a principled way to determine when epistemic partiality in friendship is morally impermissible because of the genuine risk of harmful epistemic injustice.
Source: The Journal of Value Inquiry
Author: Jack Warman
Institution: Victoria University of Wellington
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,990
Award: G6195951964
OpenAlex ID: W4389455259