Fricker and Ruíz on the Ethics of Testimony

Posted: Tue, Nov 11, 2025

“Knowledge is power”

Our epistemic practices—how and what we don’t know/believe/perceive—are normatively important and are subject to moral critique.

Fricker identifies and analyzes two mechanisms:

• Testimonial injustice: Unequal social power messing up our testimonial practices.
  • Ruíz: Fricker’s treatment of testimonial injustice is ahistorical and whitewashing.
• Hermeneutical injustice: Unequal social power messing up our interpretative practices.
  • Berenstain: Fricker’s fails to do justice to the structural, systematic nature of hermeneutical injustice.

Fricker’s analysis

Testimonial exchange: You ask me where the train station is -> I give you an answer -> you judge me to be credible -> you believe what I tell you.

• This can go wrong epistemically (e.g., you misjudge my credibility).
• It can also go wrong morally (e.g., you judge me to be less credible for racist reasons).

Fricker’s example: In To Kill a Mockingbird, Tom Robinson, who’s accused of raping a white girl (the story clearly indicates that Robinson is innocent), is not believed by the jury due to the social meaning of him being a Black man in Alabama in 1935.”

• Credibility deficits are not inherently unjust (e.g., you’ll want to discount the testimony of a flatearther when it comes to the shape of the earth).
• The injustice arises from a prejudicial exercise of what Fricker calls identity power: Robinson is assigned less credibility than is due because of a prejudice on the hearers’ part based on Robinson’s social identity, which reflects the hierarchical power of white people over Black people.

Testimonial injustice = identity-prejudicial credibility deficit.

• Credibility deficit: The speaker receives less credibility than they otherwise would.
• Identity prejudice: The speaker is assigned less credibility due to the hearer’s bias against the speaker based on the speaker’s social identity, especially social stereotypes that the hearer uses as heuristics in their credibility judgment.

Some internal questions:

• Is identity-prejudicial credibility surplus testimonially unjust?
• Does testimonial injustice always have to involve a prejudice?
• How to counter this?
  • A hearer with the virtue of testimonial justice will reliably succeed in “neutralizing the impactof prejudice in her credibility judgements” (p. 92).
  • “Epistemic affirmative action.”

Ruíz’s external critique: Testimonial injustice is not our testimonial practices gone wrong; it is them working exactly right.

Ruíz’s analysis

Credibility-based testimonial practices so natural because they have been naturalized.

• To testify is not simply to witness; there are formal legal rules and informal social norms that constitute what it is to be worthy of belief.
  • Cf. the credibility of informal community knowledge vs. a peer-reviewed publication.
  • What do you consciously or unconsciously pick up on as proxies/defeaters of credibility?
  • What are some factors that are often taken to undermine the credibility of survivors of sexual assault?
  • Why do credibility judgments work this way?
• Credibility-based testimony is a specific social practice with a specific historical origin—a Western legal technology which “produces asymmetric harms and profits for different populations depending on one’s processive relation to/ within settler social structures.”
  • Roman law: Enslaved people may testify (under torture) only as “living documents” of their ownership.
  • Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions: Indigenous witnesses alone are not sufficient to establish ownership of land.
  • South Australia’s Aboriginal Evidence Act of 1844: Aboriginal witnesses alone are not sufficient to convict white settlers of massacre.
  • Descendents: Police interrogations, asylum/immigration “interviews,” depositions, medical evaluations/examinations, etc.
  • While “believe women” is seen as an intervention in a failure of a testimonial exchange, it is in fact our testimonial system succeeding when women are not believed.
• Another way to put the point:
  • For Fricker, the context/space of testimonial exchange is itself value-neutral; error gets introduced through individual hearer’s biases.
  • For Ruíz, the context/space of testimonial exchange is already unjust, which is why it produces testimonial injustice.