Epistemic Injustice and Expertise in Political Deliberation

Many claims featuring in political deliberation are epistemically dependent. Especially in current day society, characterized by hyper specialization and distribution of epistemic labour, we increasingly rely on testimony of others to inform ourselves on complex, politically relevant matters. The introduction of the internet and later the smartphone have made relevant expert testimony instantly accessible to the average citizen – yet has also brought challenges to our shared epistemic practices. The increasing spread of misinformation and lack of epistemic oversight online (a combination I call epistemic pollution) have made it increasingly challenging for citizens to determine the credibility of different information sources, leading to uncertainty and erroneous credibility appraisal. In short, epistemic pollution disrupts the mechanisms of epistemic trust that are vital for well-functioning public discourse and thwarts the epistemic value of deliberation. Vaccination is such a topic for which most of us depend on expert-testimony in evaluating the need, effectiveness and safety of vaccines. However, despite overwhelming scientific evidence proving vaccination to be one of the most successful public health practices to date, an increasing number of people show vaccine hesitancy or even vaccine opposition. Survey studies show that (firmly held) distrust against health care experts plays a significant role in the formation of unwarranted beliefs regarding vaccination. Especially in so-called anti-vaccination echo chambers, health care experts’ testimonies are assumed to be financially or politically motivated to promote a ‘Big Pharma agenda’. At the same time, anecdotes of parents claiming their child’s illness was caused by vaccination are believed at face value without valid evidence or good epistemic reasons. To phrase it differently: the healthcare experts’ testimonies are not given apt credibility due to a negative stereotype of the social group they belong to. These mechanisms of expert-distrust seem to echo Miranda Fricker’s account of ‘testimonial injustice’, a term she coined to refer to instances where a speaker “receives a credibility deficit owing to identity prejudice in the hearer” (Fricker 2007:28). Fricker’s analysis, as well as the array of literature inspired by her work on epistemic justice, focus mainly on epistemic disadvantages that are rooted in social injustices. Acknowledging that healthcare experts are not disadvantaged speakers I nevertheless argue that they can receive testimonial injustices. Moreover, I argue that severity of these testimonial injustices shouldn’t be measured only by their impact on individual speakers. The prejudice against healthcare experts might not lead to systematic testimonial injustices; it is nevertheless a structural social phenomenon that impacts public deliberation at large. Finally, I argue that widespread expert-distrust is not only problematic for instrumental accounts of democratic legitimacy, but also for epistemic procedural reasons. Structural prejudices, even if not rooted in social injustice (e.g. against experts), create epistemically unfair conditions for political deliberation. According to Fabienne Peter’s Pure Epistemic Proceduralism (2007), democratic decision making is legitimate if deliberation takes place under conditions of epistemic fairness and political equality. From this perspective, testimonial injustices against healthcare experts are not just ethically and epistemically problematic; they undermine democratic legitimacy.