Epistemology and the Ethics of Animal Experimentation

In this chapter, Mylan Engel Jr. argues that animal experimentation is neither epistemically nor morally justified and should be abolished. Engel argues that the only serious attempt at justifying animal experimentation is the benefits argument, according to which animal experiments are justified because the benefits that humans receive from the experiments outweigh the costs imposed on the animal subjects. According to Engel, the benefits we allegedly receive from animal-based biomedical research are primarily epistemic, in that experimenting on animal models is supposed to provide us with knowledge of the origin and proper treatment of human disease. However, Engel argues that animal models are extremely unreliable at predicting how drugs will behave in humans, whether candidate drugs will be safe in humans, and whether candidate drugs will be effective in humans. Engel concludes that animal-based research fails to provide the epistemic, and thereby moral, benefits needed to justify its continued use.

Sexual Consent and Epistemic Agency

In “Sexual Consent and Epistemic Agency,” Jennifer Lackey examines sexual consent in the context of the widely accepted thesis that knowledge is sufficient for epistemically permissible action; that is, the view according to which if someone knows a given proposition, then it is epistemically permissible for this person to act on it. To the extent that this is denied, it is argued that either more, or less, than knowledge is required, such as certainty or justified belief. Lackey shows that being able to act on knowledge that someone has consented to sex provides an interesting challenge to this framework. In particular, Lackey argues that someone may know that another consents to sex and yet it may still be epistemically impermissible to act on this knowledge. This is clearest when the knowledge of the consent in question is secondhand, rather than firsthand.

The Epistemology of Consent

Philosophers spend a lot of time discussing what consent is. In this chapter, Alexander Guerrero suggests that there are also hard and important epistemological questions about consent and that debates about consent often mistake epistemological issues for metaphysical ones. People who defend so-called “affirmative consent” views sometimes are accused of, or even take themselves to be, offering a new, controversial view about the nature of consent. Guerrero argues that this is a mistake. The right way of understanding “affirmative consent” is as a view about what is required, epistemically, before one can justifiably believe that another person has consented. This view will be justified, if it is, because of background views about epistemic justification and the way epistemic justification interacts with moral norms governing action. Guerrero concludes by discussing the implications of this view for the morality and law regarding consent.

How Twitter Gamifies Communication

In this chapter, C. Thi Nguyen argues that Twitter makes conversation into something like a game. It scores our communication, giving us vivid and quantified feedback, via Likes, Retweets, and Follower counts. But this gamification doesn’t just increase our motivation to communicate; it changes the very nature of the activity. Games are more satisfying than ordinary life precisely because game goals are simpler, cleaner, and easier to apply. Twitter is thrilling precisely because its goals have been artificially clarified and narrowed. When we buy into Twitter’s gamification, then our values shift from the complex and pluralistic values of communication to the narrower quest for popularity and virality. Twitter’s gamification bears some resemblance with the phenomena of echo chambers and moral outrage porn. In all these phenomena, we are instrumentalizing our ends for hedonistic reasons. We have shifted our aims in an activity, not because the new aims are more valuable, but in exchange for extra pleasure.

Rape Culture and Epistemology

In this chapter, Bianca Crewe and Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa consider the complex interactions between rape culture and epistemology. A central case study is the consideration of a deferential attitude about the epistemology of sexual assault testimony. According to the deferential attitude, individuals and institutions should decline to act on allegations of sexual assault unless and until they are proven in a formal setting, i.e. a criminal court. Crewe and Ichikawa attack this deference from several angles, including the pervasiveness of rape culture in the criminal justice system, the epistemology of testimony and norms connecting knowledge and action, the harms of tacit idealizations away from important contextual factors, and a contextualist semantics for “knows” ascriptions.

Applied Epistemology

In this chapter, Jennifer Lackey shows how applied epistemology brings the tools of contemporary epistemology to bear on particular issues of social concern. While the field of social epistemology has flourished in recent years, there has been far less work on how theories of knowledge, justification, and evidence may be applied to concrete questions, especially those of ethical and political significance. Lackey highlights the seven areas that will be the focus of the volume: epistemological perspectives; epistemic and doxastic wrongs; epistemology and injustice; epistemology, race, and the academy; epistemology and feminist perspectives; epistemology and sexual consent; and epistemology and the internet. She then offers a brief overview of each chapter.

Epistemic Responsibility in Sexual Coercion and Self-Defense Law

Those accused of sexual coercion and unjustified killing can defend themselves in American courts by arguing that a reasonable person in their situation could have held an exonerating belief—respectively: a belief in another person’s sexual consent, or another person’s murderous intentions. In this chapter, Liberto argues that this reasonable belief standard is problematic. Liberto presents an alternative suggestion by Donald Hubin and Karen Healey with regard to cases of sexual coercion that she labels the “reasonable expectation from state” (REfS) standard. Liberto argues that adopting a REfS standard for adjudicating both self-defense and sexual coercion cases is better than the “reasonable person” standard. However, contra Hubin and Healey, Liberto argues that expectations from the state towards victims of these criminal cases—expectations that ascribe epistemic responsibility to the victims—are misdirected.

My Body as a Witness

In this chapter, José Medina and Tempest Henning examine the role that bodily testimony can play in social and political epistemology. They develop an account of how to understand the testimonial force and content of non-verbal communicative acts, such as gestures and facial expressions, that depends on three features: the communicative context, the embodied positionality of the communicator, and the communicative uptake that the audience gives, or fails to give, to the expressive behavior of the body. In particular, Medina and Henning argue that under conditions of racial oppression, all racialized bodies—non-white as well as white—are epistemically valued in different ways and thus receive different kinds of communicative uptake. At the same time, Medina and Henning argue that bodily group testimony is well suited for cultivating in-group communicative solidarity and for giving center-stage to in-group members in testimonial dynamics, and so bodily communication can be used in resistant testimony.

The Internet and Epistemic Agency

In this chapter, Hanna Gunn and Michael Patrick Lynch examine the connection between epistemic agency and the internet. They identify two conditions that are true of responsible epistemic agency: first, responsible epistemic agents aim to develop epistemic virtues, merit, and capacities that help them to responsibly change their epistemic environment, as well as the capacities that enable them to recognize and respect these epistemic traits in others. Second, responsible epistemic agents treat other epistemic agents with a form of respect that demonstrates a willingness to learn from them. Gunn and Lynch then show that the ways in which the internet makes information more widely available can also undermine our ability to be responsible epistemic agents. For instance, the personalization of online spaces can unwittingly lead users into echo chambers and filter-bubbles and away from a diverse range of perspectives, and fake news and information pollution can make for a hostile online epistemic environment.

The ‘White’ Problem

In this chapter, Charles Mills looks at the historic framing of race as “the Negro problem” and its implications for the development of American sociology in particular. As black radical theorists of the socio-political order have always insisted: to the extent that there is a Negro problem, it has to be contextualized within the larger structural matrix of the white problem. But the failure to recognize white oppression as the environing and shaping causal background has necessarily misoriented inquiry from the start. Drawing on two prizewinning sociological texts, Stephen Steinberg’s Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (1995) and Aldon Morris’s The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (2015), Mills argues that “epistemic injustice” as a concept has to be expanded to include possible foundational distortions in the structure of the disciplines themselves.