Knowledge and justice - How to remedy epistemic harm

[Celerity]

Any legal system that fails to compensate people for epistemic harm is unjust. Their damage must be named and remedied

https://aeon.co/essays/we-must-stop-treating-victims-of-epistemic-harm-as-things


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Sheilah Miller (a fictional character, though representative of a widespread phenomenon) is a 39-year-old Black woman who was admitted to the hospital to give birth to her child. But there were complications. Hours later, she had lost a lot of blood and suffered a debilitating stroke. Her physician, Dr Smith (likewise, fictional but representative), a white man, repeatedly ignored her complaints of pain and discomfort due to his prejudice against her identity. The baby lived but Ms Miller was paralysed from the neck down. As a patient, she had knowledge to share about her pain, her discomfort, her suffering. But, for more than 10 hours, Dr Smith refused to consider her knowledge due to his bigotry.

Ms Miller suffered enormously as a result of Dr Smith’s medical malpractice. She was harmed financially with medical expenses from her hospitalisation, and lost wages due to time away from work. Her physical harm, paralysis, is obvious, and her emotional harm may manifest itself as anxiety or depression or other emotional maladies. But there is another kind of harm she suffered: epistemic. Epistemic harm, while real, is not widely known.

The term ‘epistemic’ is derived from the Ancient Greek word episteme, meaning knowledge. Knowledge, and especially seeking and giving knowledge, is essential to being human, as essential as breathing and loving. As profoundly social creatures, humans are givers of knowledge but, according to the philosopher Miranda Fricker in her groundbreaking book Epistemic Injustice (2007), epistemic harm prevents, denies and rejects that. If our ability to give knowledge is rejected, then so is our humanness and our dignity. To be harmed epistemically is to be humiliated and degraded as a human being; it is to be treated not as a someone but as a something. People don’t need to listen to things or regard them with respect or credibility. As the philosopher Pamela Ann Boongaling put it in 2022:

A victim of epistemic harm is not regarded as a rational human being but as an infant or an animal or a piece of furniture. A great injustice of the United States’ legal system is that it will allow Ms Miller to be compensated for her financial, physical and emotional harm but not her epistemic harm. Think about that: Ms Miller suffered serious epistemic harm and yet cannot be compensated for it, even though all (or almost all) of the other harms flowed from her original epistemic harm. Her attempt to give her knowledge was rejected and ignored for 10 hours. Imagine how frustrated and scared she must have felt – hours of pleading and yet being ignored by Dr Smith as one unworthy of care or credibility. At some point, Ms Miller may have started to doubt herself and her objectivity and reasoning. She might have thought: ‘Maybe I’m not in pain – after all, he’s the expert,’ or ‘Maybe I’m just being irrational or emotional.’ If Ms Miller did not suffer epistemic harm, she likely would not have suffered the other harms. Fix the epistemic harm, and the other harms likely never arise. If she is to be made whole, she needs to have a legal remedy for her epistemic harm.

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[Passages]

1. Horrifying.