What’s Wrong With Epistemic Injustice?

This chapter examines the wrong of epistemic injustice by discussing, respectively, its harmful consequences, its standing as an epistemic and ethical vice, and its standing as a degrading objectification of a rational subject. Taking each of these models in turn allows us to illuminate how each of the three most influential strands of mainstream normative ethics - utilitarianism, virtue ethics, and Kantianism - could address the question of the wrongfulness of epistemic injustice. The chapter focuses on an approach that, though massively influential in its own right, is not usually grouped amongst the standard normative ethical theories, namely, Hegelian recognition theory. It shows that a multipronged conception of the wrongfulness of epistemic injustice as involving harm, vice, objectification, and misrecognition is required. Examining these four approaches to the question, "What's wrong with epistemic injustice?" helps us locate the concept of epistemic injustice within the broader discipline of normative ethics.