Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T06:52:16.307Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Epistemic Justice and Democratic Legitimacy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Susan Dieleman
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The deliberative turn in political philosophy sees theorists attempting to ground democratic legitimacy in free, rational, and public deliberation among citizens. However, feminist theorists have criticized prominent accounts of deliberative democracy, and of the public sphere that is its site, for being too exclusionary. Iris Marion Young, Nancy Fraser, and Seyla Benhabib show that deliberative democrats generally fail to attend to substantive inclusion in their conceptions of deliberative space, even though they endorse formal inclusion. If we take these criticisms seriously, we are tasked with articulating a substantively inclusive account of deliberation. I argue in this article that enriching existing theories of deliberative democracy with Fricker's conception of epistemic in/justice yields two specific benefits. First, it enables us to detect instances of epistemic injustice, and therefore failures of inclusion, within deliberative spaces. Second, it can act as a model for constructing deliberative spaces that are more inclusive and therefore better able to ground democratic legitimacy.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 30 , Issue 4 , Fall 2015 , pp. 794 - 810
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderson, Elizabeth. 2012. Epistemic justice as a virtue of social institutions. Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy 26 (2): 163–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benhabib, Seyla. 1992. Models of public space: Hannah Arendt, the liberal tradition, and Jürgen Habermas. In Situating the self: Gender, community and postmodernism in contemporary ethics. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Benhabib, Seyla. 1996. Democracy and difference: Contesting the boundaries of the political. Princeton: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Code, Lorraine. 2008. Review of Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/23398/?id=12604 (accessed January 18, 2014).Google Scholar
Dieleman, Susan. 2012a. An interview with Miranda Fricker. Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy 26 (2): 253–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dieleman, Susan. 2012b. Solving the problem of epistemic exclusion: A pragmatist feminist approach. In Contemporary feminist pragmatism, ed. Hamington, Maurice and Bardwell‐Jones, Celia. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Epstein, Jeffrey. 2013. Habermas, virtue epistemology, and religious justifications in the public sphere. Hypatia 29 (2): 422–39.Google Scholar
Fischer, Frank. 2009. Democracy and expertise: Reorienting policy inquiry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fraser, Nancy. 1992. Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. In Habermas and the public sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Freeman, Lauren. 2010. Review of Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. APA newsletter on feminism and philosophy 10 (2): 22–23. http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.apaonline.org/resource/collection/D03EBDAB-82D7-4B28-B897-C050FDC1ACB4/v10n2Feminism.pdf (accessed January 18, 2014).Google Scholar
Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fricker, Miranda. 2013. Epistemic justice as a condition of political freedom? Synthese 190 (7): 1317–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gripsrud, Jostein, Moe, Hallvard, Molander, Anders, and Murdock, Graham. 2010. The idea of the public sphere. Toronto: Lexington Books.Google Scholar
Habermas, Jürgen. 1962/1989. The structural transformation of the public sphere. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Pettit, Philip. 2001. Deliberative democracy and the discursive dilemma. Philosophical Issues 11 (1): 269–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rawls, John. 1971. A theory of justice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Rawls, John. 1993. Political liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Young, Iris Marion. 1997. Difference as a resource for democratic communication. In Deliberative democracy: Essays on reason and politics, ed. Bohman, James and Rehg, William. Cambridge: The MIT Press.Google Scholar