Abstract

Starting from Miranda Fricker’s recent work on the concept of testimonial injustice, this paper considers what duties testimonial justice creates for speakers. I discuss this question in relation to disclosures of so-called personal conflicts of interest, which authors are sometimes required or encouraged to declare when submitting their work to journals. Personal characteristics that have been disclosed by authors include smoking status, class background and ethnicity. The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, I argue that disclosures of personal characteristics raise problems of testimonial injustice in two ways: they can unfairly undermine researchers’ credibility and prejudice readers against the results or arguments proposed; and such disclosures can contribute to epistemic injustice more broadly by strengthening the view that individuals who share the features disclosed should, at least in some contexts, be given less credibility than others. The second goal of the paper is to argue that, while Fricker’s account focuses on the epistemic virtues of hearers in responding in the right way to testimonial injustice, there are also important duties of testimonial injustice incumbent on speakers. I propose three such duties.