Friendship and Epistemic Injustice: A Reply to Warman

What, if anything, can be morally objectionable about the practice of epistemic partiality commonly associated with personal friendship? Recently, Jack Warman has argued that it may lead us to insult non-friends and perpetuate testimonial injustice against them by refusing their relevant testimony about our friends. In this article, we challenge Warman’s view on three grounds. First, we show that it underspecifies the conditions under which refusal of non-friends’ testimony counts as insulting. Second, we argue that epistemic partiality, as discussed in the literature, does not in fact require or lead individuals to refuse non-friends’ testimony in an insulting way. Third, we show that Warman’s two arguments concerning the moral wrongness of epistemic partiality assign such wrongness in two competing ways and thus turn out to be incompatible with each other. Finally, we go beyond Warman’s proposal to consider whether epistemic partiality may generate epistemic injustice in another way, by bestowing friends with credibility excesses.