Abstract
One of standpoint theory’s main claims is the thesis of epistemic advantage, which holds that marginalized agents have epistemic advantages due to their social disadvantage as marginalized. The epistemic advantage thesis has been argued to be true with respect to knowledge about particular dominant ideologies like classism and sexism, as well as knowledge within fields as diverse as sociology and economics. However, it has yet to be analyzed with respect to ethics. This paper sets out to complete this task. Here, I argue that we have good reason to believe that the marginalized are epistemically advantaged with respect to moral knowledge overall, including moral facts other than those about the morally problematic features of systems of domination. To do so, I first articulate the connection between marginalization and the moral domain, drawing on the rich history of feminist and non-ideal ethics. Then, I argue that the marginalized are more likely to have several particular epistemic skills that are necessary to come to have moral knowledge. Utilizing real-world cases where moral knowledge is at stake, I show how marginalized agents have better access to evidence (broadly), as well as advantages distinguishing between considerations that are morally relevant and those that aren’t (sorting), determining the weight a certain piece of evidence has with respect to determining a moral matter (significance), and using concepts which bear on moral questions (conceptual competency). I close by considering the upshots my analysis here has for other areas of moral epistemology like moral testimony and expertise.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Data availability
No new data were created or analyzed in this study. Data sharing is not applicable to this article.
Notes
As will be clarified in the next section, these epistemic advantages are not generated from mere occupation in marginalized social positions, but rather achieved through a critical consciousness of such a position.
The significance of this point to my claim about the scope of moral facts the marginalized are better situated to come to have knowledge about is clarified in the next section.
This is a point that Mills, 2005 makes as well with respect to ideal theory at large; I return to this point below.
The way in which epistemic differences between the marginalized and the dominant are not symmetric by being merely different in equally limiting ways is one I will return to throughout the paper.
This is widely accepted in the standpoint theory literature. It is somewhat controversial whether such standpoints are in principle unavailable to the dominant or not; I assume here that they are possible for dominant agents to adopt, though difficult, as that is the position most explicitly stated and discussed (e.g. see, for example, Wylie, 2004).
One may worry here that the marginalized are not more likely to come to occupy standpoints, as they are likely to suffer from false consciousness. However, even if some marginalized agents do suffer from false consciousness and thus are unable to occupy a standpoint, it is extremely implausible that the marginalized are more vulnerable to accepting unjust ideologies than the dominant, and much more likely that it is the dominant who accept them.
For those readers entirely unfamiliar with theories of oppression, see Frye (1983) and Young (1990). As these theorists note, being oppressed is importantly different than merely undergoing a short period of suffering or bad luck, such that agents who temporarily have a negative experience of suffering like breaking one’s leg is not sufficient for being oppressed.
I am grateful to Hille Paakkunainen for bringing this issue to my attention.
In other words, there is a difference between the question of who is marginalized with respect to a particular moral question, and the question of whether being marginalized with respect to the moral question makes one epistemically advantaged. I take myself to only be addressing the latter question in this paper, while acknowledging that the former question merits attention and is fruitful for further work.
Medina’s claim of the epistemic virtues of the oppressed is distinct from the question of whether moral virtues vary between the marginalized and the oppressed; for the latter, see Tessman, 2005.
This is a point I will return to later in the paper.
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to clarify the connection between marginalization and the moral domain, as well as for helpfully articulating this precise argumentative strategy traditionally used by standpoint theorists in arguing for the epistemic advantage thesis.
Some issues with this option is that it is unclear whether in being systematically wronged marginalized people have a better comprehension of morality, as sometimes these conditions inhibit agents from acting in moral ways (e.g. it seems that there are many cases where being the victim of repeated and serious wrongs causes one to treat others quite callously or wrongly in return). Of course, there is a difference between how agents act and what they know, such that one could say that these bad moral actors are still good moral knowers, citing features of their context which prohibit them from acting on their moral knowledge. I set further consideration of this argumentative strategy aside here, both for the sake of space, and since I ultimately adopt the second strategy. I thank an anonymous reviewer for both their proposal of this as one way to account for the link between marginalization and the moral domain, as well as for flagging this issue with this argumentative strategy.
One may worry here that this argument only provides grounds to believe that marginalized philosophers doing philosophical ethical theorizing have epistemic advantages with respect to moral knowledge. However, this way in which ethical questions and reasoning cannot be divorced from actual social locations and non-ideal social reality concerns all instances of ethical theorizing, including that done by ordinary agents. This is because both the philosophical domain of ethical theorizing and actual social contexts where ordinary agents engage in moral reasoning are imbued with ideological underpinnings and structured by systems of domination. I thank a helpful anonymous reviewer for urging me to clarify this matter.
This being said, it is ambiguous whether this is because individual dominant agents, in exercising their epistemic agency, ignore or reinterpret such facts, or whether this is because dominantly constructed institutions present visions of the world which fail to include or reinterpret such facts about the marginalized’s experiences; the latter is most clear that such facts are quite literally unavailable to or walled off from the dominant, thus making it that they completely lack access to such facts. Importantly, both rationales are available to the standpoint theorist (the latter especially if they adopt the situated knowledge thesis), and both support the claim that the marginalized have better access to evidence regarding moral facts. I am grateful to Preston Werner for bringing this two different possibilities to my attention.
The way in which the suffering of others has been perceived as enjoyment is noted by Mills (1997) when he notes how “happy slaves” were represented in text books as late as the 1950s, as well as feminist analyses of how pornography created from a male perspective depicts the suffering of women in sexual acts as something they enjoy (see Langton, 1993).
Tarrant et al., 2012.
It is controversial whether ideologies, as a concept, should be understood neutrally, as being neither bad nor good, or negatively, as falsely representing reality. Here the authors I reference and I assume the latter (see, for example, Shelby, 2016 for an understanding of racist ideologies as negative in this way).
See, for example, Weng See, 2017.
For an understanding of how moral virtues and vices are encoded into physical bodies, especially in ways that serve white supremacy, see Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia (2019).
One might also think here that dominantly situated agents are unlikely to even catch that the situation of selecting a textbook is a moral matter to begin with; I address such a thought in the last section on conceptual competency.
See Fricker, 2007. Importantly, even if concepts particular to marginalized group’s experiences are missing from the collective hermeneutical resources, this does not give us reason to believe that the marginalized are less competent with the concepts that do exist in the collective resources than the dominant.
All of the considerations mentioned here speak against the thought that due to the mere existence of conceptual lacunas the marginalized are less conceptual competent than the dominant.
References
Ashton, N. A., McKenna, & Robin (2020). ‘Situating Feminist Epistemology’ Episteme, 17 (1), 28–47.
Baier, A. (1994). Moral prejudices: Essays on Ethics. Harvard University Press.
Crary, A. (2016). Inside Ethics: On the demands of Moral Thought. Harvard University Press.
Crasnow, S. (2013). Feminist Philosophy of Science: Values and objectivity. Philosophy Compass, 8(4), 413–423.
Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against women of Color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1994). The Souls of Black Folk. Dover Publications.
Dular, N. (2017). Moral Testimony under Oppression. Journal of Social Philosophy, 48(2), 212–236.
Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press.
Frye, M. (1983). The politics of reality. Crossing Press.
Galinsky, A. D., Magee, J. C., Inesi, M. E., & Gruenfeld, D. H. (2006). Power and perspectives not taken. Psychological Science, 17, 1068–1074.
Gilligan, C. (1982). In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Harvard University Press.
Grasswick, H. E. (2012). Knowing Moral agents: Epistemic dependence and the Moral Realm. In S. L. Crasnow, & A. M. Superson (Eds.), Out from the shadows: Analytical Feminist contributions to Traditional Philosophy. Oxford University Press.
Haraway, D. (2004). Situated knowledges: The Science question in Feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. In Sandra Harding (Ed.), The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader. Routledge.
Harding, S. (1992). Rethinking standpoint epistemology: What is ‘Strong objectivity’? The Centennial Review, 36(3), 437–470.
Hartstock, N. C. M. (2004). The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the ground for a specifically Feminist historical materialism. In Sandra Harding (Ed.), The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader. Routledge.
Held, V. (1993). Feminist Morality: Transforming culture, Society, and politics. University of Chicago Press.
Held, V. (2006). The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and global. Oxford University Press.
Hill Collins, P. (2004). Learning from the outsider within: The sociological significance of Black Feminist Thought. In Sandra Harding (Ed.), The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader. Routledge.
hooks, bell. ((2004).) ‘Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness’. In Sandra Harding (Ed.) The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader. (New York: Routledge).
Jaggar, A. M. (2000). Ethics Naturalized: Feminism’s contribution to Moral Epistemology. Metaphilosophy, 31(5), 452–468.
Jaggar, A. M. (2004). Feminist politics and Epistemology: The standpoint of women. (Ed.) The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader. Routledge. Sandra Harding.
Janack, M. (1997). Standpoint epistemology without the ‘Standpoint’? An examination of Epistemic Privilege and Epistemic Authority. Hypatia, 12(2), 125–139.
Karen, J. (2004). Trust and terror. In DesAutels, P., & Walker, M. (Eds.), Moral psychology: Feminist ethics and social theory. Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 3–18.
Kittay, E. F. (1999). Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. Routledge.
Kraus, M. W., Cote, S., & Keltner, D. (2010). Social class, contextualism, and empathic accuracy. Psychological Science, 21, 1716–1723.
Kukla, R., & Ruetsche, L. (2002). Contingent natures and virtuous knowers: Could Epistemology be ‘Gendered’? Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 32(3), 389–418.
Lammers, J., Galinsky, A. D., Gordijn, E. H., & Otten, S. (2008). Illegitimacy moderates the effects of power on approach. Psychological Science, 19, 558–564.
Langton, R. (1993). Speech acts and unspeakable acts. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 22(4), 293–330.
Lombrozo, T. (2013). ‘Name Five Women in Philosophy. Bet You Can’t’. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/06/17/192523112/name-ten-women-in-philosophy-bet-you-can-t.
Manstead, A. S. R. (2018). The psychology of social class: How socioeconomic status impacts thought, feelings, and behaviour. British Journal of Social Psychology, 57, 267–291.
Mason, R. (2011). Two kinds of Unknowing. Hypatia, 26(2), 294–307.
Medina, J. (2013). The Epistemology of Resistance. Oxford University Press.
Mills, C. (1997). The racial contract. Cornell University Press.
Mills, C. (2005). Ideal Theory. As Ideology’ Hypatia, 20(3), 165–184.
Mills, C. (2007). ‘White Ignorance’. In Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (Eds.), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Noddings, N. (1984). Caring: A feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. University of California Press.
Noddings, N. (2013). Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (,Second Edition Updated.). University of California Press.
Pohlhaus, G. (2010). Knowing communities: An investigation of Harding’s standpoint epistemology. Social Epistemology, 16(3), 283–293.
Pohlhaus, G. (2012). Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a theory of willful hermeneutical ignorance. Hypatia, 27(4), 715–735.
Radke, H., Hornsey, M., Sibley, C., Thai, M., & Barlow, F. (2017). ‘Is the racial composition of your surroundings associated with your levels of social dominance orientation?’. PLoS ONE, 12 (10).
Rolin, K. (2009). Standpoint theory as a methodology for the study of Power relations. Hypatia, 24(4), 218–226.
Ruddick, S. (1989). Maternal thinking. In A. Trebilcot (Ed.), Essays in Feminist Theory (pp. 213–230). Totowa: Rowman and Allanheld.
Rudman, L. A., & Kalinski, S. E. (2000). Implicit and explicit attitudes toward female authority. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, 26, 1315–1328.
Sanders, M., & Mahalingam, R. (2012). Social Dominance Orientation and John Henryism at the intersection of race and class. Political Psychology, 33(4), 553–573.
Schwitzgebel, E. (2020). ‘Diversity in Philosophy Departments: Introduction’. Blog of the American Philosophical Association. https://blog.apaonline.org/2020/06/11/diversity-in-philosophy-departments-introduction/.
See., W. W. (2017). Differences of rape myth Acceptance between Genders: A systematic review. Graduate Research in Education Seminar, Universiti Putra Malaysia.
Serrano, J. (2007). Whipping girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the scapegoating of femininity. Seal Press.
Shelby, T. (2016). Dark ghettos: Injustice, dissent, and Reform. BelknapPress.
Sidanius, J., Kteily, N., Sheehy-Skeffington, J., Ho, A. K., Sibley, C., & Duriez, B. (2013). You’re inferior and not worth our concern: The interface between empathy and social dominance orientation. Journal of Personality, 81, 313–323.
Sirin, C. V., Valentino, N. A., & Villalobos, J. D. (2017). The Social causes and Political consequences of Group Empathy. Political Psychology, 38(3), 427–448.
Srinivasan, A. (2017). ‘Feminism and Metaethics’ in T. McPherson and D. Plunkett (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics.
Strings, S. (2019). Fearing the black body: The racial origins of Fat Phobia. New York University Press.
Tarrant, M., Branscombe, N. R., Warner, R. H., & Weston, D. (2012). Social identity and perceptions of Torture: It’s moral when we do it. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(2), 513–518.
Tessman, L. (2005). Burdened virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory struggled. Oxford University Press.
Tessman, L. (2015). Moral failure: On the impossible demands of morality. Oxford University Press.
Tobin, T. W., & Jaggar, A. M. (2013). Naturalizing Moral Justification: Rethinking the Method of Moral Epistemology. Metaphilosophy, 44(4), 409–439.
Toole, B. (2019). From Standpoint Epistemology to Epistemic Oppression. Hypatia, 34(4), 598–618.
Toole, B. (2020). Demarginalizing standpoint epistemology (pp. 1–19). Episteme.
Vorauer, J. D. (2006). An information search model of evaluative concerns in intergroup interaction. Psychological Review, 113, 862–886.
Walker, M. U. (2003). Moral contexts. Rowman and Littlefield.
Walker, M. U. (2007). Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics, 2nd edition. New York: Oxford.
Wang, Y., Davidson, M. M., Yakushko, O. F., Savoy, H. B., Tan, J. A., & Bleier, J. K. (2003). The scale of ethnocultural empathy: Development, validation, and reliability. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 50, 221–234.
Wiland, E. (2017). Moral testimony: Going on the offensive. In Shafer-Landau, R. (Ed.), Oxford studies in metaethics (Vol. 12). Oxford University Press.
Wylie, A. (2004). ‘Why Standpoint Matters’. In Sandra Harding (Ed.) The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader. New York: Routledge.
Young, I. M. (1990). Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton University Press.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Hille Paakunainen, Hannah Read, and Preston Werner for their helpful comments on previous drafts, and Madeline Ward for their helpful discussion of the paper. I would also like to thank the audience at the 2022 Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association where this paper was presented.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
The author confirms sole responsibility for the manuscript.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Declarations
The authors did not receive support from any organization for the submitted work.
The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.
Ethics approval
N/A (no study was conducted in support of this manuscript).
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Dular, N. Standpoint moral epistemology: the epistemic advantage thesis. Philos Stud (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-02072-9
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-02072-9