Irreparable Epistemic Wrongs

The notion of epistemic reparations has recently gained increasing attention in social epistemology. These are reparations due to victims of distinctively epistemic wrongs attaching to gross human rights violations. An example of such a wrong is not having the true story about yourself known due to being wrongfully convicted of murder (Lackey, 2022). In the last few years, several authors have proposed accounts of epistemic reparations under various labels (Almassi, 2018; Lackey, 2022; Hull, 2022; Song, 2021). Although these views gesture at structural ways in which victims can be wronged, we do not yet have an account of how accepting this structural dimension might introduce distinctive features or difficulties for the notion of epistemic reparations. In this paper, I argue that certain structural wrongs, such as the epistemic wrongs of colonialism, turn out to be irreparable on the existing backward-looking epistemic reparations framework. A more promising model for redressing such injustices, I argue, is Iris Marion Young’s social connection model, supplemented by some tools from the group responsibility literature. The arguments bring into dialogue three bodies of scholarship that are currently not talking to each other—on epistemic reparations, structural injustice, and collective agency. This dialogue will not only be of mutual theoretical benefit to all three but will also up our chances of attaining epistemic justice.