Engelstad, A orcid.org/0000-0003-2167-8825 (2023) Should Political Philosophers Attend to Victim Testimony? Journal of Applied Philosophy, 40 (4). pp. 676-689. ISSN 0264-3758
Abstract
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.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2023 The Author. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Education, Social Sciences and Law (Leeds) > School of Politics & International Studies (POLIS) (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 05 Jul 2023 11:59 |
Last Modified: | 14 Nov 2024 12:24 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Identification Number: | 10.1111/japp.12663 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:200583 |
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Licence: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0