Principles for compensating the epistemic injustices of colonialism

Abstract

I aim to make headway towards understanding how to compensate properly for epistemic injustices committed during large-scale forms of intergroup domination, with my focus being European colonialism in much of Africa and apartheid in South Africa. I point out that there is a wide array of suggestions about how concretely to effect reparations for these injustices in the literature, and seek to discover which (if any) are justified by a plausible theory of compensatory justice. One potential theory is the principle that people done an injustice should be put into the position they would have been in had the injustice not occurred, while another is to give wrongfully harmed peoples control over what had been taken away from them. These principles have frequently been applied to major racial injustices pertaining to property and opportunity, but I present new reason to think that both have counterintuitive implications when applied to epistemic injustices. Drawing on values and practices salient in parts of South America and Africa as well as some Anglo-American thought about restorative justice, I advance a unique third account of compensatory justice in general that I show both avoids the criticisms facing rivals and has plausible implications for how to respond to the relevant epistemic injustices in particular.