Miranda Fricker · Lablypedia

The concept has been influential well beyond academic philosophy, notably in healthcare; the Care Quality Commission, England's regulator of health and social care, describes it as "a key concept for us as a regulator" in its updated human rights approach.

Biography

Early life and education

Fricker received her D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 1996, co-supervised by Sabina Lovibond and Bernard Williams.

Professorship

She taught at Heythrop College, Birkbeck College, the University of Sheffield and the Graduate Center, CUNY, before moving to New York University in 2022.

She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2016 and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020. She served as President of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division) for 2022–23, delivering her presidential address, "How Is Forgiveness Always a Gift?", in January 2022. She has contributed to numerous BBC radio programmes, including four editions of In Our Time.

She has been invited to give a number of named lecture series, including the Whitehead Lectures at Harvard University (2024), the Uehiro Lectures at the University of Oxford (2026), the Dewey Lectures at Columbia University (2026), and the Tanner Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley (2027).

From 2015 she served as Moral Philosopher on the Spoliation Advisory Panel, a UK government advisory body that considers claims relating to cultural objects lost during the Nazi era (1933–45) that are now held in UK national collections.

She serves on the steering committees of two research projects that apply the concept of epistemic injustice: EPIC (Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare), a Wellcome-funded collaboration between the universities of Bristol, Nottingham and Birmingham, and Credible Witnesses, an AHRC-funded project on young people, performance and testimonial injustice.

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Philosophy

Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing

Fricker put forward the theory of epistemic injustice in her 2007 book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, in which she originated the concepts of "epistemic injustice", "testimonial injustice", "hermeneutical marginalization" and "hermeneutical injustice".

Testimonial injustice is a deficit of credibility caused by any kind of prejudice affecting judgement of the hearer. Hermeneutical injustice is a deficit of intelligibility caused by "hermeneutical marginalization", which happens when a lack of social power causes a group to under-contribute to the generation of shared meanings. Both kinds of epistemic injustice permit "incidental" cases—where the prejudice or hermeneutical marginalization respectively affects a relatively localized area of the person's social activity; and "systematic" cases, where the effect is on a wider range of social activity. Only systematic epistemic injustices form part of the wider picture of a person's susceptibility to social injustices more generally. For this reason, systematic cases are viewed as "core" from the point of view of the project of the book, though the intrinsic epistemic wrong that is done is constant through all cases.

Blame and forgiveness

Fricker's work on blame and forgiveness uses a philosophical methodology she calls "paradigm-based explanation", which is a quasi-genealogical approach to moral phenomena whose most interesting or explanatorily powerful features may not be necessary conditions. The paradigm case is identified by asking what positive moral role is played in our lives by blaming or forgiving, and the functional role emerges as a unifying factor for morally positive cases.

Other aspects

She has also written extensively on the ethical philosophy of Bernard Williams, the subject of both her 2024 Whitehead Lectures at Harvard and her forthcoming 2027 Berkeley Tanner Lectures, the latter examining the idea of "origins" in his thought.

Media appearances

"'Trust has been so eroded': Miranda Fricker on epistemic injustice today", Perspective, France 24 (2026), a television interview on epistemic injustice in an age of misinformation
"Miranda Fricker – Wissen und Macht", Sternstunde Philosophie, SRF (2023), an hour-long interview (in German)
"Epistemic Injustice", Free Thinking, BBC Radio 3 (2021), a discussion with Havi Carel and Constantine Sandis
"Forgiveness", The Philosopher's Zone, ABC Radio National (2018), an interview on blame and forgiveness
"Moral Blame", The Philosopher's Arms, BBC Radio 4 (2013), on blame for historic wrongs
"Hume and the Triumph of Reason", BBC Radio 4 (2011), marking the tercentenary of David Hume
"The Atheist and the Bishop", BBC Radio 4 (2009), a dialogue with Richard Harries on suffering and death
"Miranda Fricker on Epistemic Injustice", Philosophy Bites (2007), a podcast interview with Nigel Warburton
Four editions of In Our Time, BBC Radio 4, on Virtue (2002), Pragmatism (2005), Altruism (2006) and Guilt (2007)