Speaker Xichen Li(Pembroke College): 'Epistemic Justifications for Civil Disobedience?'
Abstract: One common accusation against people engaging in civil disobedience in a democratic society is that they are epistemically arrogant— they think they are in a better epistemic position or have better judgment than their peers, such that they feel entitled to break the majority’s decision to persuade the majority to change their mind. Recent literature on epistemic activism (Medina 2023, 2026) challenges this view by arguing that certain marginalised, stigmatised groups depicted as a threat to society (e.g. queer people in the 80s) often experience “epistemic silencing”, which means that they, as knowers, are not taken seriously or even ignored in public discourses. Those dissenters, by challenging the social conditions and norms of visibility and affirming each other’s experiences through disobedience, should be seen as silence-breaking rather than epistemically arrogant.
In this talk, I argue that this kind of epistemic justification risks enabling civil disobedience by those who hold views so extreme or so misinformed that the majority consider them unworthy of serious engagement (e.g., people who buy into extremely ridiculous conspiracy theories). If we want to justify civil disobedience on epistemic grounds, we must also have some normative constraints. One of them—I propose—should be whether the epistemic effects of the disobedience will be adherent to some fundamental principles of democracy.
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Ockham Society Convenors: Jack Tristani, Yuxin Tang and Meredith Ross-James | Ockham Society Webpage
