Humility, disablement, and the effects of testimonial injustice

We argue that the foregoing connections among disability, humility, and disposition suggested in Hume's writing raise an important question upon which the work ofJose Medina and Miranda Fricker may be brought fruitfully to bear.

Fricker and Medina agree that social injustice goes hand in hand with unjust knowledge practices, the latter of which serve to perpetuate and further entrench unfair balances of power. Medina states,“Social injustices breed epistemic injustices; or rather, these two kinds of injustice are two sides of the same coin, always going together, being mutually supportive and reinforcing each other” (2013, p.

Medina contends that racist and sexist attacks upon an individual's credibility can cause that person to develop chronic deficiencies in confidence and self-trust that can destroy the motivation necessary for learning and self-cultivation. And, as Fricker avers, it is the feelings of shame and inferiority often aroused by those attacks which factor most importantly into the development of such deficiencies. She argues that the experience of having one's cred­ibility undermined owing to identity prejudice demeans one not only as a potential giver of knowledge but also in one's very humanity. This is because those who are so treated suffer the symbolic meaning of that treatment.As she writes,“Such a dehumanizing meaning, especially if it is expressed before others, may make for a profound humiliation, even in circumstances where the injustice is in other respects fairly minor” (2007, p. 44). If humiliation is an apprehension of oneself as defective, as less than human, then clearly it has pernicious effects (unless, of course, some voluntarily performed error or wrongdoing is being exposed). Echoing Medina's point about the influence of identity prejudice on our epistemic habits, Fricker argues that this kind of humiliation leads to the inculcation of certain tendencies such as backing away from well- founded convictions and failing to see projects through to completion (2007, pp.

While there is much discussion of the foregoing issues in the contexts of gender and race, lit­tle has been written on epistemic injustice as it is experienced by the disabled. Elizabeth Barnes (2016) has recently addressed the topic, but her focus lies with the tendency of the non-disabled to disbelieve disabled people who claim to be proud of their bodies, rather than the ways in which our epistemic practices may perpetuate and even worsen feelings of inferiority arising from prejudicial assumptions about those with disabilities.As Barnes (2016) argues, many disa­bled people are happy with their bodies and do not wish to become non-disabled despite the widely held, ableist belief that it is always better to be able-bodied.Yet there is little doubt that disability remains a stigmatized and stigmatizing identity, and that one of the potential difficul­ties of being disabled is dealing with ableist stereotypes and assumptions.These include, but are of course not limited to, the idea that disabled bodies are inherently flawed, that disabled people are burdensome to society, that their physical characteristics are outward manifestations of hid­den moral failings, that they are possessed of overwhelming envy and hatred of the able-bodied, that they would be better off never having been born, and that they should not reproduce. On the flip-side, successful disabled people are often depicted as being possessed of transcendent qualities of personal strength and inner fortitude by reason of which they are believed to be moral exemplars for the able-bodied.

How might instances of epistemic injustice work to compound these feelings? To provide an especially insidious example of epistemic injustice in a disability context, consider that people with disabilities are more likely than the non-disabled to be sexually assaulted and disbelieved when they report instances of assault. One commonplace way of discrediting their testimony is to claim that disabled individuals cannot be assaulted, either because they lack sexuality or that they must have been solicitous of and/or grateful for what was done to them. The disability rights activist, Nidhi Goyal, has discussed this issue at length as it pertains to disabled women and girls living in India. She has said that a disabled woman who reports an assault in India is unlikely to be believed because “She is considered asexual, unattractive, or on the other extreme: des­perate and only wanting sex (www.cnn.com/2018/04/05/health/india-disabled-sexual-assault -survivors-intl/index.html).” Having one's testimony discredited in this manner can, of course, destroy confidence in one's ability to understand the events in question, and contribute to an overall sense of uneasiness about the accuracy of one's judgments of the world.As Fricker states,

When you find yourself in a situation in which you seem to be the only one to feel tension between received understanding and your own intimated sense of a given experience, it tends to knock your faith in your own ability to make sense of the world.

(2007, p. 163)

The painful feelings of inferiority a person may develop because of their disability can be engen­dered by the epistemic interactions to which they are subjected and the demeaning stereotypes according to which they are depicted. This underscores the complexity and degree to which these feelings may often feature in the experiences of those who have disabilities.

It is just here that Medina's recent work on the epistemic virtues and vices characteristic of stigmatized groups is especially helpful. As we indicated previously, Medina recognizes along with Fricker that the humbling experiences characteristic of oppressed minorities can so erode confidence in one's capabilities that one is unmotivated to learn, cultivate oneself, or explore possibilities for transforming one's situation for the better. However, he also argues that the epis­temic humility manifested by oppressed individuals can be virtuous in the sense that it increases the likelihood one will be able to engage successfully in all three of these activities. He states,

When it does not undermine one's confidence and erode one's character (that is, when it does not become pathological), epistemic humility can afford great benefits. Having a humble and self-questioning attitude toward one's cognitive repertoire can lead to many epistemic achievements and advantages: qualifying one's beliefs and mak­ing finer-grained discriminations; identifying one's cognitive gaps and what it would take to fill them; being able to formulate questions and doubts for oneself and others; and so on.

(2013, p. 43)

Medina goes on to link proper epistemic humility with other virtues including open- mindedness and diligence. Such virtues are grounded in the kind of “ego-skepticism” often engendered in one by a situation of oppression, according to Medina; however, they are also virtues that can be of assistance in becoming properly critical of one's situation and help one determine effective methods of resisting it (2013, 43).

Oppressed subjects tend to feel the need of being more attentive to the perspectives of others.They have no option but to acknowledge, respect, and (to some extent) inhabit alternative perspectives, in particular the perspective(s) of the dominant other. They are often encouraged and typically even forced to see reality not only through their own eyes, but also through the eyes of others whose perspectives and social locations matter more. In this way oppressed subjects accomplish the epistemic feat of maintain­ing active in their minds two cognitive perspectives simultaneously as they perform various tasks...The epistemic perspective of oppressed subjects often exhibits a char­acteristic kind of hybridity, inclusiveness, and open-mindedness, whereas the cogni­tive functioning of privileged elites tends to be more parochial and one-sided, often operating in complete disregard of alternative standpoints.

(2013, p. 44)

As Medina points out, this phenomenon is what is known in race theory as “double-consciousness.” Ultimately, the epistemic perspective made possible by double consciousness is one of greater lucid­ity regarding oneself and one's environment (2013, pp. 44—45).

To provide an example of how this multi-faceted epistemic perspective can potentially arise in the context of ableism, consider the well-known phenomenon of passing for able-bodied. Many disabled people face significant pressure to conceal and deflect attention from their dis­abilities so as to appear as “normal”—especially in professional situations.They are often shamed into passing, not only because their bodies are seen to fall short of the able-bodied ideal, but because disabled people are viewed as burdensome to those around them. As Tobin Siebers has argued, passing is a psychologically complex act that involves anticipating what others are likely to need to perceive for it to be successful. He describes this psychic complexity in the following manner:

Disability passing involves playing roles, but its essential character is less a matter of deception than of an intimate knowledge of human ability and its everyday definition. Those who pass understand better than others the relation between disability and abil­ity in any given situation. As careful strategists of social interaction, they know what sightedness looks like, though they may be blind; they know what conversation sounds like, though they may be deaf. Passers are skillful interpreters of human society.

(2008, pp. 117-18)

In short, anyone who routinely passes for abled spends significant time and energy imagina­tively inhabiting the perspectives of those in positions of relative privilege—namely, the able- bodied—alongside their own experiences of the world. Though there are practical reasons to engage in passing such as the protection of one's job, it is very often the shame of stigma that motivates the development of habits such as anticipatory watchfulness and sympathy with other perspectives which make it possible to pull off a performance of able-bodiedness. If Medina's account of epistemic virtue can be accepted, such habits may at times prove instrumental in the formation of intellectual humility. But this seems to be dependent upon a necessary degree of moderation, such that the patterns of feeling and thought by which we recognize such humility are not taken to extremes. We take it that the intellectual modesty of which Medina writes is indeed a virtue, thereby placing it beyond the ambit of our critique of humility as an emotion.

We conclude, then, that the connections among disability, humility, and disposition that are emergent in Hume's writing are rendered more intelligible when interpreted from the stand­point of recent scholarly discussions of epistemic injustice and ableism. Hume's recognition of these connections was surely accurate; however, it is important to understand that the effects of humility upon one's disposition may be seen to be outcomes of social and epistemic forms of injustice.

References

Barnes, Elizabeth. (2016), The Minority Body:A Theory of Disability, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fricker, Miranda. (2007), Epistemic InjusticeThe Power and Ethics of Knowing, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hume, David. (1978), Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Medina, Jose. (2013), The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imagination, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Siebers, Tobin. (2008), Disability Theory, Ann Arbor:The University of Michigan Press.