Epistemic injustices, human rights, and equitable policies

The topic of epistemic injustice has snowballed and ramified in various research directions over the past decades. In my work in philosophy of science (Massimi 2022, chapter 11, Section 11.5) I got interested in two varieties of epistemic injustices that I see at work in narratives about scientific knowledge production. Who produces scientific knowledge? Who should be benefitting from scientific knowledge and its advancements? 

I call ‘epistemic severing’ the injustice of severing from the fabric of knowledge production the contributions of some epistemic communities whose knowledge for various reasons tend to be discounted (maybe because oral rather than written; artisanal and experiential rather than theoretical). I call ‘epistemic trademarking’ the further injustice of ringfencing the severed fabric of knowledge as if it were the ‘trademark’ of one particular epistemic community. 

At the receiving end of epistemic severing and epistemic trademarking there are historically and culturally situated epistemic communities whose contributions to scientific knowledge go unnoticed, erased, and often appropriated or assimilated into the ‘scientific canon’. It is often a task left to historians of science to go back and try to retrieve through archival research these ‘epistemically severed and trademarked’ scientific contributions.

But this is not just a problem about how narratives about scientific knowledge get off the ground and develop over time. Nor is it just a problem about how a culture writes its own history of science with more or less awareness or acknowledgement of the kaleidoscope of contributions coming from other cultures. It is also a contemporary problem—and an ongoing concern—with how scientific research is often presented as interfacing with varieties of expertise and so-called local knowledges. Time and again, these are ways of knowing belonging to communities that for various reasons have been historically and culturally marginalised, including e.g. indigenous people and local communities (IPLC). 

Ocean

In my work I have become increasingly interested in how these philosophical questions are entangled with a host of pressing legal issues concerning for example the so-called Right to Science (Art. 27(1) of the UN Declaration of Human Rights), which expressly recognises as a universal human right for everyone to “share in scientific advancement and its benefits” (for a discussion see Massimi 2022b and Massimi 2024a). But I have also got very interested in how these issues pan out in the context of ocean governance, where for example the right to science becomes entangled with the right to a clean environment and broader questions about the role of local coastal communities in marine knowledge production. 

The latter is a topic at the forefront of the current UN Ocean Decade (2021-2030) and knowledge by IPLC has been increasingly recognised in legal documents, including the UN High Seas Treaty (known also as Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdictions BBNJ Treaty) which was agreed in March 2023 and is currently at the ratification stage for States.

My latest paper in the journal Environmental Science and Policy (Massimi 2024b) is part of a special issue on epistemic injustices co-edited by David Ludwig and others. In it I look at how epistemic severing and trademarking might be surreptitiously at stake in different interpretations of a key legal principle, the so-called Common Heritage of Humankind (CHP), which is enshrined in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III) and has been re-stated in the BBNJ Treaty. 

I articulate a possible philosophical reading of CHP that in my view has the potential to eschew these epistemic injustices in understanding the ocean and its resources as ‘communal goods’ which ground “relational and reciprocal obligations to care for its environmental sustainability and equitable governance against individualistic nation state interests and corporate private interests” (p. 8). The history of the CHP (and associated legal debates about it) is really interesting in showing how debates about who produces scientific knowledge and who ought to benefit from it are entangled with debates about who owns the ocean and who ought to benefit from its resources. 

Michela Massimi is Professor of Philosophy of Science in the Dept. of Philosophy, at the University of Edinburgh, affiliated with the Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics. 

Her recent monograph, Perspectival Realism, received the 2023 Lakatos Award.