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Academic writing and epistemic injustice
Injustice is, and has always been, a plague on the human condition. Over time, we have invented the concept of rights in an attempt to curtail such a plague. But there can be such thing as frivolous rights as well as frivolous talk about injustice. This article is about one example of the latter.
In a guest post at Practical Ethics, Oxford student Brian Wong argues that academic philosophers ought to write more accessibly, on penalty of perpetrating a new kind of hitherto unrecognized injustice: “respondent injustice.” What is he talking about?
Wong begins reasonably enough, by stating that philosophy should be, at least to some extent, publicly oriented. Indeed, the essay you are reading right now is an example of public philosophy, meaning a piece of writing by a professional philosopher discussing philosophical matters in a way that is (hopefully) accessible to the general public. In this, of course, philosophy is hardly alone. Scientists, historians, economists, and so on ought to engage, to a degree, in talk directed at explaining to the public what they are doing, and why it matters.
However, contra Wong, I don’t mean that every philosopher, scientist, and so forth should do this. Indeed, not even the majority of them. That’s not part of the job description of an academic. That description includes three classes of…
