HEAL Seminar - "The Testimonial injustice and the disclosure of 'personal conflicts of interest'" Event

Event details

Miranda Fricker’s recent work calls attention to problems of testimonial injustice, i.e. injustice relating to how individuals are perceived in their capacity as ‘knowers’. In this paper, I consider Fricker’s concept of testimonial injustice in relation to speakers’ duties to reveal (or conceal) personal information about themselves. Specifically, I will focus on so-called ‘personal conflicts of interest’. While in many disciplines, academic journals standardly require authors to disclose financial interests, authors are sometimes also encouraged to disclose non-financial, ‘personal’ interests. In this paper, I argue, first, that disclosures of personal characteristics can raise problems of testimonial injustice: they can (a) unfairly undermine researchers’ credibility and (b) have broader effects that contribute to testimonial injustice. Second, the discussion highlights that duties of testimonial injustice arise not only when we act as hearers but also when act as speakers; I discuss three specific duties of this kind.