Epistemic Reparations and the Right to Be Known

This lecture provides the first discussion in the literature of the epistemic significance of the phenomenon of “being known” and the relationship it has to reparations that are distinctively epistemic. Drawing on a framework provided by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, it is argued that victims of gross violations and injustices not only have the right to know what happened, as the UN maintains, but they also have a right that is altogether absent from these discussions—the right to be known. The case is then made for expanding the standard conception of reparations beyond the legal/political, psychological, and moral to include those that are distinctively epistemic, as we are members of an epistemic community in addition to a legal/political and moral community; we are not just agents in a political and moral sense, but also an epistemic one; we have epistemic duties distinct from our legal and moral obligations; and we can be wronged not only legally/politically, psychologically, and morally, but also epistemically. An account is then provided of epistemic reparations as intentionally reparative actions, which take the form of epistemic goods given to those who have been epistemically wronged by parties who acknowledge these wrongs and whose reparative actions are intended to redress them. This account captures both the right to know and the right to be known possessed by survivors of gross violations and injustices.

Programme

18.00 hrs | Open to public

18.30 hrs | Welcome/opening words

18.45 hrs | Start of lecture followed by discussion with audience

20.00 hrs | Reception

21.15 hrs | End

About Jennifer Lackey

Jennifer Lackey is the Wayne and Elizabeth Jones Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law (courtesy) at Northwestern University, Founding Director of the Northwestern Prison Education Program, and Senior Research Associate at the African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science at the University of Johannesburg.

Lackey’s research is primarily in social epistemology. She is the author of over 60 articles and three books, including her recent Criminal Testimonial Injustice, which won the 2024 North American Society for Social Philosophy Book Award. She is also the editor of five volumes and editor-in-chief of two journals, Philosophical Studies and Episteme. Lackey is the winner of the 2024 Humanitas Award, 2023 Horace Mann Medal, and the Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement and Contribution. She was elected President of the American Philosophical Association’s Central Division from 2021–2022 and has received grants and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

About the Spinoza Lectures

Since 1995, the Philosophy Department of the University of Amsterdam has annually appointed a foreign philosopher to the Spinoza chair. As part of the appointment, the Spinoza professor gives a number of lectures intended for a broad audience that wants to stay informed about contemporary developments in philosophy.