Friday, March 9, 2018

Miranda Fricker at Washington & Lee

Yesterday Miranda Fricker spoke at Washington & Lee University about "Epistemic Equality as a Condition of Well-functioning Blaming and Forgiving." It was a strange experience for me because we were contemporaries as undergraduates, not just at the same university but at the same college within the university, although I don't think we've ever had a conversation. She has achieved rather more than I have since then. I'm not sure that her promise was recognized as much as it should have been at the time.

She talked her talk rather than reading it, which was impressive and more engaging than the usual philosophy presentation, but it also led to a problem with timing and, unless I missed something, she didn't get to finish saying what she meant to say, even in abbreviated form. It didn't help that a man in the audience interrupted the talk to ask a question. What she did say was a kind of (necessarily very brief) summary of her ideas about epistemic injustice, followed by some application of these ideas to blame (I don't think she got to forgiveness, except perhaps very briefly).

Epistemic injustice occurs when someone either is not listened to, or is not taken fully seriously, when they make a statement because of unjust prejudice against them or some group to which they belong, or when their participation in "practices of shared social understanding" is limited. These ideas of Fricker's are relatively well known.

What was new in this talk, as far as I know, was the application to blame. I was slightly confused by some of this, so I may be presenting the ideas inaccurately, but here's what I think she said. One kind of blame (and by 'blame' she seems to mean the public act of accusing someone of having done wrong, not just holding a grudge or privately judging someone to be in the wrong) is fairly straightforward: your friend is late to meet you, say, and you point this out (perhaps she had thought the arranged time was later than it really was), whereupon she acknowledges the badness of her behavior, apologizes, and life goes on as normal. Another kind, though, is more complicated. This is the part I struggled with, especially in terms of imagining an actual example of the phenomenon in question.

This kind of blame involves someone who does not see anything wrong with their behavior, who sees no reason why they should have behaved differently. Here pointing out what they did will make no difference to them. Perhaps they acknowledge that they were late but see no reason why they should ever be punctual, for instance. Fricker's handout says:
Treat someone as if she already recognizes a reason to have acted differently, and (given she has sufficient base-line respect or care for you) you may thereby cause her to come to recognize the reason.
I'm speculating here, but maybe the idea is something like this. I tell my friend not to worry about her lateness since the time flew by as I waited for her because I was enjoying reading and rarely get a chunk of time like that in which to read; she is initially puzzled because she doesn't expect people to care about lateness, but realizes that I obviously take it to be something one might well care about; putting two and two together, she comes to see that even if she never minds when others are late, she had better be more careful with other people's time in future.

If she goes through a process of reasoning like this then the value of punctuality has now become more widely entrenched in our social world. But whether his happens, or to what extent it happens, will depend in part on how seriously she takes what I say and on how well she is able to understand what I am saying. So there is room for problems of epistemic injustice to make a difference here.

That, at least, is what I think she means. And it seems right to me.

5 comments:

  1. The word 'blame' is used to refer to the act of assigning responsibility for an agent's performing an action when the result of the action is negative somehow (harm, pain, hurt, inconvenience, etc.). (The word 'praise', among others, refers to a case where the result is somehow positive.) 'accuse' refers to a further step, presupposing blame and involving an overt act of language use (I don't think it requires a third person audience) and an appeal to shared norms. ("Norms" here referring to general ethical principles held in common or as social convention in a community.) An expressed judgment of blame will misfire (in Austin's sense) if the person responsible does not recognize or understand the existence of the relevant ethical norm. How does it happen that a person does not recognize what ought to be a condition for belonging to a "just" society? We have an example in the short-fingered vulgarian that nominally holds the office of POTUS. There are many examples where he expresses the idea that he is "someone who does not see anything wrong with their behavior, who sees no reason why they should have behaved differently." This person operates under a system of justification of personal action that is non-rational and unethical, unethical because in a society and in interaction with others, following these faulty reasons results inevitably and often in harm and hurt to others. He should be blamed for his lack of effort to attain a view of social interaction that recognizes the fundamental principle of equality and mutual respect. The logic of action in this case is that of the parasite. He does not have a psychological disability, either developmental or senescent; rather his pathology is logical, and because it is correctable is also subject to condemnation on ethical grounds.

    Forgiveness is a deep and beautiful concept, and involves acceptance and recognition of a violation by the agent of the wrongful act and compensation for it, and is an aspect of the principle of reciprocity.

    I had never heard of Amanda Fricker, but just on the basis of her title and your account of the talk, I'm going to check out her writings. (I don't know if what I've said above corresponds to the way she sees these matters, but I'm always looking to adjust my views.)

    JPL

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    1. Yes, I think she uses 'blame' to mean 'accuse'. And the relation of all this to Trump is interesting. I wondered whether Sarah Silverman's recent work (on TV) is a good example of the more complicated kind of 'blaming' that Fricker talks about. She says, by the way, that she got the idea of this kind of blaming from Bernard Williams, so if you're interested in the topic you might want to read his work too. I don't know which of his works she had in mind, but I think it's "Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame," possibly among others.

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  2. Sorry, I meant Miranda Fricker. You see my ignorance.

    JPL

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  3. 'blame' refers to an act of judgment that, as you indicate, may or may not be expressed overtly, while 'accuse' requires an overt act of expression, at least to the wrongdoer, if not necessarily to a wider audience. In addition, 'blame', although it may be used in the case of results that are ethical violations, tends often to refer to judgments that are causal in nature, rather than ethical, as when someone makes a mistake and something bad happens as a result. With 'accuse', the judgment refers to an act of identifying the agent of an intentionally performed act that violates an ethical principle (or norm), and would not ordinarily be used to refer to causal errors. Also, pointing out to someone that they wronged you or hurt you is not as severe or confrontational as accusing and is more hopeful of an end in forgiveness, which is what seems to be happening in Fricker's handout example.

    So Sarah Silverman draws on Bernard Williams for her comedy bits! In addition to looking at the Williams article I now have to check out Sarah Silverman, who I already like a lot. Thanks for the tip!

    JPL

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    1. Thanks, you're right that 'accuse' doesn't seem to be the right word either.

      I haven't watched Sarah Silverman's series yet, so I can't confirm or deny that she draws on Bernard Williams. We can always hope that she does though.

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