Should Political Philosophers Attend to Victim Testimony

Bibliographic Data

ID21497479
AuthorsAne Engelstad (0000-0003-2167-8825, University of Leeds Leeds UK, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume40
Issue4
Pages676-689
Publication date2023-08-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Applied Philosophy (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0264-3758 • E-ISSN: 1468-5930
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/japp.12663
OpenAlexW4378468655
LanguageEN
References cited27

There is a growing recognition that victims of injustice may have privileged access to knowledge about the injustices they experience, and that injustices are perpetuated through silencing victims by taking them to be less credible, and through denying them the platform and capacity to speak. However, these are not ideas that political philosophers tend to engage with in a sustained manner, to the extent that they alter methodological approaches to be systematically attentive to victim testimony. In this article, I provide two arguments in favour of political philosophers attending to victim testimony, one moral, one epistemic, and demonstrate that the moral case has little purchase, but that the epistemic case is more successful. Then, I present the strongest case against including victim testimony in political philosophy, and I argue that it does not hold up to scrutiny. In so doing, I demonstrate how methodological practices in political philosophy could be improved through drawing on feminist social epistemology; attending to victim testimony can enrich political philosophy in epistemically acceptable ways, and it also corrects for a range of potential biases

Epistemology · Harm · Injustice · Political philosophy · Political science · Politics · Scrutiny · Sociology · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Feminist Epistemology and Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics