Testimonial Injustice and the Disquieting Conclusion: A Critique of the Critical Consciousness Requirement for Moral Culpability

In this paper, I will provide a critique of what I wish to call the “critical consciousness requirement” for moral culpability in Miranda Fricker’s theory of testimonial injustice. In my view, this requirement is stronger than our usual “epistemic requirement” for moral culpability. If this is so, it is more difficult to hold agents morally culpable for their actions using Fricker’s requirement. As I see it, this poses a significant threat to Fricker’s overall theory. One of the key claims that I make in this paper is that the combination of Fricker’s theory of testimonial injustice and her critical consciousness requirement for moral culpability leads to an undesirable outcome: a scenario where an injustice has been committed and yet nobody can be held morally responsible for it. This is problematic for this can be interpreted to mean that the combination mentioned above is committed to what I wish to call the “disquieting conclusion.” Generalizing on the undesirable outcome mentioned above, we can therefore say that some injustices, like the ones entertained by Fricker, are morally permissible. If I am correct, there is only one viable option for Fricker: She must drop the critical consciousness requirement and adopt the weaker epistemic requirement for moral culpability.