On the Privilege Argument

Is privilege an epistemological disadvantage?

There’s a tired old argument that seems to have gained a new lease of life in these less exacting times, which holds that privilege functions as an epistemological barrier when it comes to understanding sexism, racism, inequality, etc; and, conversely, that being part of a group that is in various ways marginalised, oppressed or subordinated confers a sort of epistemological privilege when it comes to understanding the nature and reality of that situation.

Obviously, there is a kernel of truth to this argument, but it is also highly problematic (especially for people committed to the importance of reason, evidence, etc., as mechanisms for assessing truth-claims). Here are some of the things you need to get straight about if you’re tempted to deploy this argument.

First: If you think that a person’s lived experience has regular and predictable epistemic consequences, you have to accept that this might flow in the opposite direction to the one suggested by the argument above.

In other words, it is entirely possible that privilege confers epistemological privilege, even when it comes to understanding the nature and reality of the situations of the subordinated, marginalised, etc.

This is not a particularly counterintuitive thought (indeed, one could argue that it underpins most of our ideas about education). It is easy enough to find examples of precisely this sort of argument from amongst even those who champion the cause of the underprivileged. So, for example, you’ll find that Marxists invoke false class consciousness, ideological state apparatuses, hegemonic projects, and so on, to explain how the marginalisation and powerlessness of the proletariat messes with its head so that it can’t see the reality of its true situation.

Second: An obvious rejoinder here is to claim that experience, in and of itself, is a kind of knowledge. For example, Donald Trump might have learned how to serve a burger, but he doesn’t “know” what it is like to do that over and over again for years on end.

There is obviously something to this argument. But in its details, it is complex and tricky. Here are three complications:

1. People don’t agree about the nature of their experience as members of purportedly marginalised groups (for example, for some women in the 1950s, the housewife role was nightmarish; for others, it was self-actualising).

2. There is a wealth of data that suggests we’re actually fairly bad at correctly understanding the situations we inhabit (for example, the UK public tends to massively overestimate the amount of immigration that involves a claim for asylum).

3. People do not necessarily experience what most of us would take to be a marginalised situation as being problematic (check out, for example, some of the literature on FGM; or ask yourself whether slaves in the ancient world would have accepted the legitimacy of the institution of slavery).

Third: Marginalised and subordinated groups are by no means homogenous, which undercuts the idea that a shared lived experience will generate reliable and generalisable knowledge. This point came up over and over again in 1970s feminist publications in the context of debates over the intersections of sex, race and class. Put simply, it might well be that a black lesbian feminist has more in common with a black male political activist than she does with a white middle-class movement feminist.

Fourth: There’s an epistemological problem with the argument to epistemological privilege. Specifically, it’s not easy to see that it is possible to substantiate the claim that epistemological privilege necessarily flows from certain kinds of marginalised experience without falling into contradiction. This is because the moment you appeal to evidence, argument, etc., you are operating precisely on the terrain of epistemic equality.

The problem is if you deny that this evidence is generally accessible — if you really are committed to the view that there are certain privileged ways of knowing (and that you can’t know this to be the case unless you’re in a position of privilege) — then your position is an article of faith. In fact, it’s disconcertingly similar to the proof of god from religious experience.

Fifth: There is a rather subtle point about how you can know that some particular belief you have about your experience as a marginalised person genuinely flows from your epistemological privilege, rather than just being a possibly flawed everyday sort of belief. Or, to put this crudely, if you are committed to the idea of epistemological privilege, it is hard to see that you can ever be sure you’ve got it.

Basically, the problem here is that if epistemological privilege (about certain sorts of things) belongs uniquely to the marginalised, it seems that knowledge claims acquired via this privilege must be valid even if they do not stand up to scrutiny in the court of universal reason. (This follows because if this kind of knowledge has to pass the usual tests, then there is nothing about being marginalised that necessarily generates reliable biographical and situational knowledge, albeit de facto it might still be true that it’ll be easier to come by particular beliefs that turn out to be true if one is marginalised.)

However, the trouble is, if the court of universal reason has no jurisdiction, it is not clear you can subject your own beliefs to any sort of test. This is because even the most minimal of tests — for example, determining whether your beliefs are in accord with your experiences — require that one makes use of the normal rules of rationality, evidential warrant, etc., all of which are generally available in the court of universal reason.

Okay, that’s enough for now. Perhaps at this point, you’re tempted to dismiss these arguments against what is sometimes called standpoint epistemology by claiming that they are themselves a function of privilege. If so, congratulations, you have just invoked a hermetically sealed argument that means you get to be right even if you have no idea why you are right.