Prejudicial Content Filtering, Dennis Whitcomb & Robin Dembroff
AIDS was an enormous threat to public health in the United States from the 1980’s into the early 1990’s, taking tens of thousands of lives. Nonetheless, research into its treatment proceeded at a glacially slow pace; preventative drugs were not widely available until the mid-1990’s. While many factors explain the glacial pace of AIDS research, one major factor was a lack of appropriate research funding during the 1980’s. Despite clear testimony from the Department of Health and Human Services–and the surgeon general–that AIDS posed a serious threat to Americans’ health, Reagan’s administration repeatedly undercut efforts to combat AIDS. It flatly refused to approve funding Congress eventually allocated for AIDS research, brushing off AIDS as if “it was measles and it would go away.” In doing so, Reagan’s administration rejected expert testimony that AIDS posed a significant and urgent threat to public health. Commenting on the matter, Don Francis (an official at the Center for Disease Control) testified before Congress in 1987 that “Much of the HIV/AIDS epidemic was and continues to be preventable. But because of active obstruction of logical policy, active resistance to essential funding, and active interference with scientifically designed programs, the executive branch of this country has caused untold hardship, misery, and expense to the American public”.
Officials in Reagan’s administration did not hide their motivations for doing these things. Referring to AIDS as “the gay disease”, they overtly construed support for AIDS research as support for the gay community. On the basis of this construal, the administration - which was openly anti-gay - was motivated to reject expert testimony that AIDS threatened the American public at large. By rejecting this testimony, officials in Reagan’s administration committed an epistemic injustice – epistemic, because they rejected transmission of knowledge, and injustice, because the rejection contributed to the systemic oppression of gay persons. But this rejection does not fall under either of the two forms of epistemic injustice most commonly discussed by philosophers: testimonial injustice and hermenuetical injustice. In what has become the canonical explication of these notions, Miranda Fricker writes that “Testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice [regarding a speaker’s identity] causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word; hermeneutical injustice occurs at a prior stage, when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences.” For example, the first occurs when a police officer refuses to believe someone because they are black, and the second occurs when some-one experiences sexual harassment but cannot articulate this experience because they lack a concept of sexual harassment.
The Reagan administration’s rejection of AIDS related testimony does not match either category. The speakers in question were, by and large, heterosexual white men in government and the sciences, making it extremely unlikely that testimonial injustice (in Fricker’s sense) was occurring. And these speakers did not lack any concept critical to expressing their testimony, meaning that no hermeneutical injustice was occurring either. Instead, these speakers experienced what we will refer to as prejudicial content filtering — roughly, an injustice that is committed when a hearer rejects a speaker’s assertion, not because of identity prejudice regarding the speaker, but rather because of identity prejudice regarding the thing the speaker says.
In this paper we develop a concept of prejudicial content filtering, which manifests when a hearer’s identity prejudice involves the content of an assertion, and when this prejudice drives the hearer’s rejection or preemption of that assertion. We acknowledge that there is a clear sense in which prejudicial content filtering arises in a vast number of cases, including ones where the hearer is prejudiced against a socially privileged group. However, these are not the cases of central interest to us. For this reason, the concept we develop of prejudicial content filtering is one in which the prejudice at work targets a structurally oppressed social group – that is, to borrow from Sally Haslanger, a group that is “systematically and unfairly disadvantaged within a social structure.” While identity-prejudice against privileged social groups certainly exists, we are only interested in cases that involve prejudices which exist within and perpetuate a context of oppression. Thus narrowed down, we focus on cases where a hearer harbors identity prejudiced against an oppressed group.
Prejudicial content filtering (PCF) is an important phenomenon because of the way its manifestations relate to social and political injustice, as well as epistemic injustice. Before examining these connections, though, we begin in §2 by illustrating the phenomenon of prejudicial content filtering and distinguishing several ways in which it manifests. Here, we examine two species of PCF: Reactive and Preemptive prejudicial content filtering. In §3, we argue that PCF is a form of epistemic injustice, and examine the relationship between PCF and socio-political oppression. We then show in §4 that PCF also is closely connected to other forms of epistemic injustice, focusing on the interactions between PCF, testimonial injustice, and hermeneutical injustice. Finally, in closing, we point to ways in which we have simplified our target phenomenon for the purposes of initial analysis, directing future research of PCF to other nearby phenomena.
AIDS was an enormous threat to public health in the United States from the 1980’s into the early 1990’s, taking tens of thousands of lives. Nonetheless, research into its treatment proceeded at a glacially slow pace; preventative drugs were not widely available until the mid-1990’s. While many factors explain the glacial pace of AIDS research, one major factor was a lack of appropriate research funding during the 1980’s. Despite clear testimony from the Department of Health and Human Services–and the surgeon general–that AIDS posed a serious threat to Americans’ health, Reagan’s administration repeatedly undercut efforts to combat AIDS. It flatly refused to approve funding Congress eventually allocated for AIDS research, brushing off AIDS as if “it was measles and it would go away.” In doing so, Reagan’s administration rejected expert testimony that AIDS posed a significant and urgent threat to public health. Commenting on the matter, Don Francis (an official at the Center for Disease Control) testified before Congress in 1987 that “Much of the HIV/AIDS epidemic was and continues to be preventable. But because of active obstruction of logical policy, active resistance to essential funding, and active interference with scientifically designed programs, the executive branch of this country has caused untold hardship, misery, and expense to the American public”.
Officials in Reagan’s administration did not hide their motivations for doing these things. Referring to AIDS as “the gay disease”, they overtly construed support for AIDS research as support for the gay community. On the basis of this construal, the administration - which was openly anti-gay - was motivated to reject expert testimony that AIDS threatened the American public at large. By rejecting this testimony, officials in Reagan’s administration committed an epistemic injustice – epistemic, because they rejected transmission of knowledge, and injustice, because the rejection contributed to the systemic oppression of gay persons. But this rejection does not fall under either of the two forms of epistemic injustice most commonly discussed by philosophers: testimonial injustice and hermenuetical injustice. In what has become the canonical explication of these notions, Miranda Fricker writes that “Testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice [regarding a speaker’s identity] causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word; hermeneutical injustice occurs at a prior stage, when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences.” For example, the first occurs when a police officer refuses to believe someone because they are black, and the second occurs when some-one experiences sexual harassment but cannot articulate this experience because they lack a concept of sexual harassment.
The Reagan administration’s rejection of AIDS related testimony does not match either category. The speakers in question were, by and large, heterosexual white men in government and the sciences, making it extremely unlikely that testimonial injustice (in Fricker’s sense) was occurring. And these speakers did not lack any concept critical to expressing their testimony, meaning that no hermeneutical injustice was occurring either. Instead, these speakers experienced what we will refer to as prejudicial content filtering — roughly, an injustice that is committed when a hearer rejects a speaker’s assertion, not because of identity prejudice regarding the speaker, but rather because of identity prejudice regarding the thing the speaker says.
In this paper we develop a concept of prejudicial content filtering, which manifests when a hearer’s identity prejudice involves the content of an assertion, and when this prejudice drives the hearer’s rejection or preemption of that assertion. We acknowledge that there is a clear sense in which prejudicial content filtering arises in a vast number of cases, including ones where the hearer is prejudiced against a socially privileged group. However, these are not the cases of central interest to us. For this reason, the concept we develop of prejudicial content filtering is one in which the prejudice at work targets a structurally oppressed social group – that is, to borrow from Sally Haslanger, a group that is “systematically and unfairly disadvantaged within a social structure.” While identity-prejudice against privileged social groups certainly exists, we are only interested in cases that involve prejudices which exist within and perpetuate a context of oppression. Thus narrowed down, we focus on cases where a hearer harbors identity prejudiced against an oppressed group.
Prejudicial content filtering (PCF) is an important phenomenon because of the way its manifestations relate to social and political injustice, as well as epistemic injustice. Before examining these connections, though, we begin in §2 by illustrating the phenomenon of prejudicial content filtering and distinguishing several ways in which it manifests. Here, we examine two species of PCF: Reactive and Preemptive prejudicial content filtering. In §3, we argue that PCF is a form of epistemic injustice, and examine the relationship between PCF and socio-political oppression. We then show in §4 that PCF also is closely connected to other forms of epistemic injustice, focusing on the interactions between PCF, testimonial injustice, and hermeneutical injustice. Finally, in closing, we point to ways in which we have simplified our target phenomenon for the purposes of initial analysis, directing future research of PCF to other nearby phenomena.
