Judges and epistemic injustices

Institutional recommendations and the interdependence of the individual and the structural

Abstract

Epistemic injustices concern a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as an epistemic subject; that is, as a subject that participates in the production, maintenance and transmission of epistemic goods. Assuming that one of the goals, but certainly not the only one, of the judicial system is to promote decisions that are reasonably plausible, epistemic injustices interfere with such goal. One aim of this paper is to offer a couple of institutional recommendations that contribute to mitigate the epistemic injustices that judges could commit. These recommendations are based on empirical data from the social sciences. Another aim is to argue, partly on the basis of those interventions, that neither the individualist approach nor the structuralist approach, which locate the problem and the necessary changes to remedy it in the individual’s mind or the structures of our environment (respectively), are adequately understood. In particular, this article answers the question: what kind of interventions, given the empirical data available, is more likely to be efficient?, showing that such interventions are hybrid, combining the individual and the structural, given the interdependence of the individual and the structural, and offering two illustrative examples of diverse strategies of this sort of interventions.