Experiential Deference and Standpoint Authority: A Reason for Optimism About Moral Deference

When, if ever, are we justified in relying on another’s moral judgment? On the one hand, Pessimists about moral testimony think there is something wrong, suspicious, or illegitimate about deferring to moral testimony. On the other hand, Optimists suggest that when the speaker is knowledgeable and trustworthy, their moral testimony can provide us with a reason to believe and make use of that moral proposition. In this paper, I show why we should be optimistic about the permissibility of a subclass of moral deference, “experiential deference,” where the testifier is better positioned, by virtue of her socially-situated standpoint, to recognize and assess harms pertaining to her own marginalization. I argue that socially situated experience can confer a domain-specific and epistemically grounded authority to track and articulate thick harms, such as dismissal, disrespect, and marginalization. Because such harms are at once descriptive and evaluative, recognizing a testifier’s empirical authority in a domain is, in part, to recognize a corresponding, domain-limited moral authority. Drawing on the assurance theory of testimonial justification, I argue that experiential testimony is often high-stakes, in that its dismissal can perpetuate injustice, and thus generates not only epistemic but moral demands on receivers to defer as a condition of appropriate uptake. Experiential assurances generate both a pro tanto epistemic reason for belief and a pro tanto normative reason to accord the testifier the respect her experiential authority warrants. Finally, I argue that experiential deference is especially well justified and avoids the standard objections to moral deference.