Select Papers in Progress
Sexual Violence and the Epistemic Injustice of Consent
With the rise of the #metoo movement, questions about consent are more visible than ever, and yet conceptual difficulties surrounding consent plague sexual interactions. Even minimal attention to news and media outlets reveals that individuals harbor widespread disagreement and misunderstandings regarding what constitutes a completely consensual sexual interaction.
In this paper, I explore the extent to which the epistemic burdens women face regarding consent can rise to the level of epistemic injustice. To begin, I explain how popular public, legal, and philosophical notions of consent tend to involve a communicative element. I then outline some ways that consent’s communicative element is epistemically burdensome for women. In the third section, I suggest some ways women can suffer epistemic injustice as a result of current consent norms. I conclude by suggesting that, in public and legal discourse, the subjective model of consent is the best model for circumventing the majority of epistemic injustices related to consent because it does not require communication.
What’s Wrong with Testimonial Justification?
This paper defends the view that rape victim testimony undermines current conceptions of testimonial justification. I argue that the very features causing rape victim testimony to appear unreliable according to current popular theories of testimonial justification are the same features that point to its reliability. That is, I claim that it is precisely when rape victim testimony appears unreliable that hearers should trust the victim that rape occurred. Thus, I will argue that–in at least some real-world circumstances–some testimony is reliable precisely when it does not seem reliable. While I suspect some, perhaps many, readers will initially balk at this idea, this paper demonstrates the significant epistemic and moral implications of trauma.
Agape and the Limits of Mutuality
Christian love often emphasizes self-sacrifice and other-regard, implicitly disparaging and sometimes explicitly rejecting regard for the self. From early second wave feminism through today, many feminists criticize self-sacrifice; feminists worry that a Christian conception of love that heavily involves self-sacrifice negatively and disproportionately affects women. Mutuality—marked by equality between the sexes—is a promising reformulation primarily because it allows agape to be transformed: agape as mutuality now requires both parties’ active involvement. It is my contention, however, that mutuality is not an adequate response to critiques of self-sacrifice in Christian conceptions of love. In this paper, I argue that mutuality is susceptible to critiques similar to those brought against agape.
Social Media: New Venues for Hermeneutical Injustice
When Betty Friedan describes women’s widespread unhappiness in the 1950s as “the problem that has no name,” she provides a poignant example of what Miranda Fricker would later call hermeneutical injustice. Like the women who lacked the conceptual resources to understand sexual harassment before coining the term, Friedan expresses a historical difficulty women have naming, understanding, and articulating their experiences as women. Rather than fault women for this difficulty, Fricker points to structural gaps in social interpretive resources—gaps that harm members of marginalized groups in virtue of structural identity prejudice. Hermeneutical injustice harms individuals in virtue of their capacity as knowers insofar as it undermines an epistemic agent’s knowledge of their own lived experience.
Scholars have since expanded Fricker’s notion of hermeneutical injustice, but what Friedan, Fricker, and other scholars could not have anticipated decades ago is the way hermeneutical injustice intersects with contemporary social media. Now an indispensable component of daily life, social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit emerge as new sites for debate, expression, knowledge, and interpretation.
New social media technology brings new hermeneutical tools, and so it is tempting to think that social media might help circumvent hermeneutical injustice. A case can be made, for example, that the #metoo movement trending on Twitter and Facebook helps victims understand their own experiences with sexual violence. Like the women who came together to articulate sexual harassment, women around the world are newly able to connect with one another and develop the tools necessary to understand their own experience with sexual violence. But just as social media can help users develop interpretive tools, it is worth exploring the ways social media creates opportunities for new forms of hermeneutical injustice.
In this paper, I argue that social media platforms can create an environment susceptible to hermeneutical injustice. Using Facebook as a case study, I first lay out Fricker’s criteria for hermeneutical injustice emphasizing that hermeneutical injustice (1) is structural, (2) involves bias, and (3) creates gaps in (4) collective interpretive resources for its users. I then argue that Facebook meets Fricker’s four main criteria for hermeneutical injustice. I examine the way Facebook purposefully employs biased algorithms to determine the content it displays to individual users. Pairing these structurally biased algorithms with Facebook’s popularity as a shared (i.e., collective) platform for social interpretation, I argue that Facebook can contribute to users’ difficulty understanding and articulating their experiences. That is, I argue that the algorithmic bias creates gaps in interpretive resources for Facebook’s users.