Epistemic Reparations and the Right to Be Known

Jennifer Lackey (Northwestern University)

The Anna Tumarkin Lectures in Philosophy are a lecture series dedicated to presenting top women philosophers.

This is part 1 of a series of three lectures on The Right to Be Known. Epistemic Reparations and the Making of Rounder Stories

Abstract This lecture provides a philosophical discussion of the epistemic significance of the phenomenon of “being known” as well as 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 made for expanding the standard conception of reparations to include actions intended to redress distinctively epistemic wrongs. An account is then provided of how to best understand these epistemic reparations that capture both the right to know and the right to be known possessed by survivors of gross violations and injustices.