The idiocy of 'Epistemic injustice'

I learn from Wikipedia that-

Epistemic injustice is unfairness related to knowledge.

Surely any thing which is epistemic is related to knowledge? But 'unfairness' is not related to knowledge at all. By definition, it arises out of ignorance, prejudice, malice or some other motive wholly unconnected to the pursuit of knowledge or the establishment of truth.

It is absurd to speak of 'epistemic injustice'. There is injustice on the one hand, standing in the ranks of bigotry, ignorance, superstition, or sheer bloody minded cantankerousness shrouding all things in darkness, and, as its polar opposite, there is Sweetness and Light and the pursuit of utile knowledge and the combatting of everything which poisons and renders sterile the Human Spirit and shuts it away, each mind the prisoner of its own nightmare of a world, from Sunshine and Sorrows shared so equitably that, even as shadows, they may know a noontide of momentary non-existence.

To my mind the term 'Feminist misogyny' is an oxymoron. But then, I am not, despite the vanishingly small size of my penis and the quite delectably burgeoning joban of my man-boobs, actually a woman. Indeed, I thank God for this small mercy. My downstairs neighbor is a female,  about half my age, and twice as well academically credentialed. Were I not a large black man, she would not respond to my hysterical screams by running up the stairs to kill the spider which has provoked my fear. If I were a coloured woman, she would feel obliged to teach me how to kill and dispose of the corpses of spiders. She would 'tough love' me into acquiring this necessary life skill. It is only because I iz a large bleck man that she kills spiders for me because, ever since gentrification, such is the 'White Woman's Burden' in our neck of the woods.

My point is that, if I happened to be a woman, my neighbor's refusal to keep killing spiders for me would be an example of 'Feminist misogyny'. Would it also be an example of 'epistemic injustice'? No. Why? The answer is that elderly bleck women, unlike elderly bleck men, are by a Feminist convention operational in these parts, coeval with girls half their age more especially if the girl has a Post Graduate Degree.

The problem here is that David Lewis type 'Conventions' aren't Epistemic at all. They are purely Economic and represent Schelling focal solutions to Coordination Games. Conventions may be unfair- indeed, it is their arbitrary nature which makes them 'focal points'- but they are not epistemic at all.  A change in the information set does not change the Schelling focal point even if Muth rational expectations obtain or 'common knowledge' prevails. Why? Because the thing would use its utility if it wasn't 'robust'- i.e. impervious to perturbations.

The first theory of epistemic injustice was introduced in 2007 by British philosopher Miranda Fricker, who coined the term.[2] According to Fricker, there are two kinds of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice.

This is crazy. Testimony is given in accordance with the prevailing hermeneutic. Anything which is 'testimonial' but not in accordance with the prevailing hermeneutic, requires, by the canons of justice, the appointment of a suitable interpreter. A record may be kept of the testimony and its interpretation so as to guard against a miscarriage of justice.  If the testimony is false it must be rejected- and there may be a penalty for perjury. However, if the hermeneut is faulty by reason of prejudice or ignorance, then the hermeneutics can't be accepted and another interpreter must be found. Rather than their being two kinds of 'epistemic injustice', there is only one type of injustice- viz. a failure by the judge to establish the veracity of a claim by, if necessary, providing a suitable interpreter.

I may say 'I iz full of woe, Man!' You may, if a sufficiently fanatical Feminist of some description, hear 'I iz a full woman' and thus be instigated by prevailing norms of Lesbic epistemic injustice to rape me with a rolled up copy of, not Shulamith Firestone's mercifully paltry collected works, but Judith Butler's unforgivably turgid and voluminous oeuvre, after which you force me to commit suttee and then use Dark Arts to conjure up an eidolon of me which votes again for Trump- why? Jus' coz iz blek, innit?

Testimonial injustice is unfairness related to trusting someone's word.

It is unfair to blame a person for lacking a type of knowledge which they have no means of acquiring. Furthermore, it would be mischievous to castigate a type of behavior which has evolved because it confers survival value. Thus, if you refuse to sleep with me because you doubt my claim to be a big Hollywood producer, you are not guilty of unfairness. The fact that you have a preference for sleeping with very successful people does not mean you have a duty for sleeping with people who appear to be very poor, stupid, and unsuccessful. I may say 'How can you be sure I am not secretly in charge of a big Hollywood Studio? You should give me the benefit of the doubt.' But, that same argument could be used by you for clubbing me to death on the off chance that I am a dangerous suicide bomber.

An injustice of this kind occurs when someone is ignored or not believed because they are a woman, because they are black, or broadly, because of their identity.

Nonsense! The injustice here is that someone is denied a service because of their gender or colour or citizenship or sexuality etc. Belief does not matter. It is simply an excuse. I may say- 'I honestly believed the cake in the office fridge was meant for me though I could clearly see it was inscribed 'Happy Birthday, Marge!' and it is not my birthday nor is my name Marge.' But this is not a case of 'epistemic injustice'. The truth is I am a greedy pig and ate Marge's cake knowing full well that what I was doing was tantamount to theft.

Fricker gives the example of Londoner Duwayne Brooks, who witnessed the murder of his friend Stephen Lawrence. The police officers who arrived at the scene regarded Brooks with suspicion, a response that was widely criticized.

I think the reason Black Londoners were angry was because they thought the police did not want to investigate the murder of a young black boy by (it turned out) young White Criminals connected with a powerful Crime-family. The police were only pretending that they thought Duwayne's testimony was untruthful. It was not a case of 'testimonal injustice' that Black Londoners did not believe the police officers. Their own life-experience told them that the Police did not want to secure justice for young blacks more particularly because there was corruption within the force and some Crime-Families were operating with impunity.

According to an official inquiry, "the officers failed to concentrate upon Mr Brooks and to follow up energetically the information which he gave them. Nobody suggested that he should be used in searches of the area, although he knew where the assailants had last been seen. Nobody appears properly to have tried to calm him, or to accept that what he said was true." That is, the police officers failed to view Brooks as a credible witness, in part due to racial bias.

No. The police wanted to ignore Brooks because he, like the victim, was Black whereas the offenders were White. Moreover, they were associated with a powerful Crime-Family.
Suppose, Mr. Brooks had been a witness of the killing of a White police-man by White hooligans. The police would have taken Brooks's testimony very seriously because they genuinely wanted to catch the bad guys. They may have relocated his family and given them special protection so that Brooks could testify against the criminals.
The racial bias here had no 'epistemic component'. To argue otherwise is a mealy mouthed whitewash. It was 'economic' in that it represented service provision discrimination. Blacks pay the same in taxes as Whites but get a lower level of service. Why? Monopsonists- the police being the 'single seller' of Law enforcement- maximize their surplus by engaging in such discrimination. They don't want to get off their lard-asses to investigate crimes against Blacks, Women, or those without countervailing power- i.e. the ability to get them sacked if they don't do their job.

This is, according to Fricker, a case of testimonial injustice, which "occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word."

We are not committing 'testimonial injustice' when we say Fricker is a stupid liar. She has just provided a 'philosophical' defence for rogue police-officers who refuse to do their duty as required by law. They can say 'we are the victim of our poor schooling. We were taught that blacks were liars. It is not our fault that we disbelieved Brooks. It is the fault of our upbringing and our training and the Media and Society as a whole.'

It is very convenient for the powers that be to claim to have been guilty of mere 'epistemic injustice', caused by lack of training in philosophy, when the truth is that they are corrupt, cruel and are cheating the tax payer.

Testimonial injustice is often accompanied by hermeneutical injustice.

The two things are the one and the same. When testifying we factor in the conventional hermeneutic applicable such that our testimony has the required effect. This may involve 'Code Switching'. Thus, when I say to the restaurant manager 'you have charged me for Champagne. But as you can see, I only had sparkling water.' I am testifying in a way he can comprehend and using a different Cultural Code than the one I normally use. If he is acting in good faith he will say 'Sorry. It was the other table that got the champagne. I will take this item of your bill right away and give you a free dessert next time you come.'

As a matter of fact, my testimony may be more terse and eschew 'Code Switching'. I may say- 'Champers! On my bill! WTF!' Since the good faith hermeneutic governing speech acts in that situation is 'common knowledge', the manager immediately understands what has happened. It may take him a minute or two to verify the facts of the case. This is true even if he does not speak English. Of course, if the guy is acting in bad faith the outcome may be different. But that is not because of any 'testimonial' or 'hermeneutic' injustice. It is because the Restaurant is run by a swindler.

Wikipedia says- Hermeneutical injustice is injustice related to how people interpret their lives.

We don't know how we interpret our lives let alone how others interpret their lives. There is a good reason for this. If this interpretation were knowable then we could be 'hacked'- i.e. we could be turned into robotic meat-machines. Thus Evolution has prevented us gaining a 'Momus window' into our own hearts. Our Acts and Days are a Gospel written in an illegible script. It offers no testimony and is beyond the ken of interpretation.

To understand this kind of injustice, it is useful to think about a concrete example. In the 1970s, the label sexual harassment was introduced to describe something that many people, especially women, had experienced since time immemorial.

Did women not know that they were being pressurised in an unconscionable manner into having sex? No. They weren't that stupid. They could and did band together to protect themselves. Their families and communities might use violence against perpetrators in egregious cases.

But this was pure 'service provision discrimination' associated with wage discrimination. The law may have been somewhat slow to change but there was no problem of an 'epistemic' kind. People knew that this sort of thing was wrong.

 Imagine the year is 1960, before the label was introduced. Consider a woman who experiences sexual harassment in this year. She may have difficulty putting her experience into words.

Nonsense! She would holler 'that creep keeps pinching my bottom and making lewd remarks.' If she could access power, than the creep got his head kicked in and went to prison for lewd behavior or 'mashing' or whatever term was then current. I personally think 'sexual harassment' is too mild a term.

The difficulty that she faces is no accident. It is due (in part) to women's exclusion from full participation in the shaping of the English language.

But the creep who is pestering her was equally excluded, perhaps more so if he is of non-WASP lineage, from 'shaping the English language'. So he did no wrong and the woman suffered no injury because the very concept was excluded from her mental universe. Thus a woman who complained that her boss kept beating and raping her was considered a lunatic who didn't understand that the thing was as inevitable and natural as period pains.

Now imagine it is 1980. The woman who may now better understand what has happened to her. However, she may struggle to explain this experience to someone else, because the concept of sexual harassment is not yet well known.

I was 17 in 1980. I worked in an City of London Office in my Summer Vacations and visited India in Winter. I knew that women of diverse ethnic origin and levels of education did not struggle at all to express their anger at any type of harassment. This was as true of rural India as cosmopolitan London.

It simply isn't true that women are as stupid as shit and that, because they were excluded from the shaping of the English language, or Anglo-American jurisprudence, or various STEM subjects, they are bound perform badly in such fields.

Again, the difficulty that she faces is no accident. It is due (in part) to women's exclusion from equal participation in the institutions and industries devoted to making sense of, describing, and explaining human experiences — such as journalism, publishing, and academia.

This is why we must prohibit immigrants from Africa or Asia from doing anything but 'coolie' jobs. They didn't participate in creating our institutions and industries. Just look at what happened when Pepsi appointed a woman of color as CEO. The poor thing spent all her time scratching her head and trying to puzzle out the meaning of 'Balance Sheet' and 'Profit & Loss'. Thus Pepsi is now bankrupt. It is fake news that its revenues rose by 80 % under Indra Nooyi.

Miranda Fricker argues that women's unequal participation in the shaping of the categories through which we all understand the world makes some women's lives less intelligible — sometimes, less intelligible to the women, and often, less intelligible to everyone.

But Fricker herself is hugely legible to us. She is a moron same as all the other cretins in the worthless University Department where she hangs by her tail eating bananas.

What is true of women here is also true of other marginalized groups.
Hermeneutical injustice happens when someone's experiences are not well understood — by themselves or by others — because these experiences do not fit any concepts known to them (or known to others), due to the historic exclusion of some groups of people from activities, such as scholarship and journalism, that shape which concepts become well known

So, this is Spivak type 'the subaltern can't speak' bullshit. Yet Bengal is now ruled by Mamta Di, an aggressively subaltern figure, who is delighted to shower Spivak with accolades because she came out against the Left in a timely manner.

If there was any truth to the notion that those who are descended from the people who shaped our language and institutions have an epistemic advantage absent any effort of their own, then a 'caste system' would be justified. Misogyny would have a utilitarian excuse.

But this is not what American, or British, or Indian, or any other history actually suggests.

Consider the following essay in Aeon by a PhD candidate about the great English educationist, Mary Astell, who- sadly- was considered too 'Catholic' and thus suffered something of an eclipse as the prospect of a Jacobite Restoration dwindled and a new type of politician, exemplified by Robert Walpole, triumphed and philosophical Tories like Astell appeared retrograde.

A.S Forbes writes in Aeon-

The English philosopher Mary Astell (1666-1731) was a woman ahead of her time.

Sadly, the reverse was the case. The age of the theologically inclined auto-didact was ending. Courtier Poets, plastic in their ideological orientation, were displacing the dishevelled Pamphleteers who mistook themselves for Old Testament prophets. A polished style, acquired at the ancient Universities, was the sine qua non.
In any case, Astell was barking up the wrong tree. Girls should not be educated separately from boys- at least at the College level. Nunneries are all very well in their way- but they represent a historical cul de sac for European womanhood.

She anticipated discoveries in the social dimension of knowledge and explanation that you might have thought were made only in the 21st century.

No 'discoveries in the social dimension of knowledge and explanation' have been made in the 21st century. The one thing students have discovered is that incurring student debt to get a credential in a worthless discipline destroys your life-chances.

She also revealed the existence of a form of epistemic – that is, knowledge- or thinking-related – injustice that’s caused by bad social conditions and fundamentally undermines how we think about ourselves.

This is an argument which could be made, by a selective reading of her oeuvre,  but not as well as an argument for restoring the Stuarts.  Unlike Descartes, Astell held that all minds weren't, at least potentially, equal. The Economia of the World required differences in the capacities of different minds which then meant that human beings had a strong motive to come together in an ordered, hierarchical, manner. This would still leave women and blacks and dissenting Scots Ministers and so forth in a lower position. Kings should rule by 'Divine Right' because even if they were stupid and did things which were disastrous for the Commonweal, still, this was in conformity with God's plan to punish and chastise the people of the country.

Despite being subjected to the very same conditions she identified, Astell managed to cut through the injustice to provide a new way of seeing things.

Sadly, this is not the case for a reason she herself explains 'The Primary Cause of this (i.e. the essential inequality of minds) is that Limitation which all Created Minds are Subject to, which Limitation appears more visible in some than in others, either because some Minds are endow’d by their Creator with a larger Capacity than the rest, or if you are not inclin’d to think so, then by reason of the Indisposition of the Bodily Organs, which cramps and contracts the Operations of the Mind.'
In other words, menstrual cramps make women unfit for any high intellectual calling.

Epistemic injustice is one of the most difficult and important things for us to identify in our daily lives. It is tricky to spot because it operates below our notice – it plays on stereotypes and prejudices that we might not even know we have, or that we might not know are wrong.

Injustice is easy to spot. You are getting less than some other guy who made an equal contribution. You then exercise Hirschman 'Voice' or 'Exit', or else signal a shift in 'Loyalty'.

There are many kinds of epistemic injustice, such as what the philosopher Miranda Fricker in 2007 called ‘testimonial injustice’ (eg, when someone’s claims aren’t taken seriously because the hearer thinks that people with that identity are unreliable) and ‘hermeneutical injustice’ (eg, when someone’s claims aren’t understood because the intellectual resources needed to make sense of them don’t exist since they’ve been left out of the process of creating concepts). It is a testimonial injustice to find black people less credible just because they are black.

A statistical injustice may be perpetrated by a Bayesian, or 'black box', computer algorithm. This could be called 'heuristic' injustice and to that extent it is 'epistemic'. But it certainly is not a 'testimonial injustice'. If you say 'I think black people are more likely to be liars', you are guilty of Racism. You don't like blacks people but do like honest people and justify your dislike of blacks by falsely claiming that they tend to be dishonest. Thus, you are only pretending to have a genuine doubt about the black person's credibility. The truth is your animus against black people is so strong that you lie about them.  Alternatively, you are a lazy, malicious, sod who clings to any excuse not to do the job you are paid to do in accordance with the law.

It is a hermeneutical injustice that the term ‘sexual harassment’ didn’t exist for a long time because women weren’t part of the conversation about what constitutes appropriate behaviour.

But there were plenty of other terms which covered the same ground. Louisa May Alcott wrote an account of the brother of her employer pestering her for sex. Everyone knew what she was talking about. Yet, because female labor was so important- more particularly if it featured wage discrimination, thus permitting the capitalization of rents- it took a century for US law to begin to change. Still, it wasn't till the Anita Hill case that Corporations and Universities started to take the matter seriously. But this has nothing to do with 'epismetics' and everything to do with 'economics'.

Some epistemic injustices, such as testimonial injustice, are based on credibility imbalances,

Nonsense! We believe those whom it is in our interest to believe. We are sceptical of even the greatest expert whose policy recommendation would hurt our bottom line. Of course, you may argue 'Climate deniers', or Racists, or Misogynists, or Homophobes, are the victim of their poor education. Nothing is their fault. We can't bring about even one salutary change until Society itself is transformed such that every single one of its members has a brand, spanking, new Consciousness and Ideological indoctrination.

and some, such as hermeneutical injustice, focus on interpretive resources,

coz, when the lady said 'No!' I interpreted as 'Yes! Yes! Yes!' Nothing is my fault. I should have been taught hermynoooticks at Skool.

but the epistemic injustice that Astell discovered isn’t a kind of testimonial or hermeneutical injustice. For her, it wasn’t that other people fail to take women seriously because they’re women – it is that what she called ‘bad custom’ makes women underestimate their own credibility. And it isn’t that the resources to understand bad custom don’t exist, but that bad custom makes those resources inaccessible to women.

So, the men of the time were as innocent as doves. Women were too stupid to understand that they didn't lack 'credibility'. So they went on perpetrating 'bad customs' coz they were as stupid as shit. Whatever problems women, or slaves, or gays, or Jews, or furriners have had were created by their own stupid beliefs regarding their own credibility. Just suppose a Jewish woman had realized that she did have credibility. Then she would have said to the Nazis- 'I don't want to go to the Gas Chamber. What you are doing is evil. Please stop it.' The Nazis would have started scratching their heads. They would have phoned up Heidegger and asked 'is it credible that a Jewish woman does not want to be killed?' Heidegger would ponder the matter deeply. Finally, he would say 'well, it would be credible if I said it because I genuinely don't want to be killed. Incidentally, is that Jewish Woman's name Hannah Arendt? I found her very credible when she said I was great at philosophy.' The Nazis would make inquiries and discover that all Jewish women, and men, too, if it serves their purpose, are Hannah's Aunt. So they would stop the Shoah.

Think about a time when you joined a new workplace or travelled somewhere for the first time. People probably behaved differently there. Perhaps the members of this group shared a set of values, beliefs, norms and practices that were new to you. Because this set is shared, it is a backdrop to any interaction within that group: it shapes how the group members see things, and it can explain their behaviours.

 So, 'customs' can feature in a Structural Causal Model. However, what is important is to spot arbitrage opportunities on the basis of the Economic substructure of those Customs. Thus, travelling to Moscow in the early Eighties, an Indian gentleman discovered that it was the custom for most Restaurants to close for lunch and dinner so as to ensure that the staff could dine in a leisurely manner. He bribed various Commissars and set up an Indian restaurant which stayed open for lunch and dinner. Furthermore, the staff did not beat the customers or spit in their food. So he made a lot of money.

Explanations are crucial to understanding and navigating the world.

Nonsense! Being able to sell stuff which lets you buy stuff is crucial for navigating the world. You don't need to 'understand' it. Those who claim to do so tend to be credentialized cretins.

As Sally Haslanger, professor of philosophy at MIT, points out, explanations that fail to account for the social structures at work behind the scenes of particular events are deeply unsatisfactory.

This is only true if you aren't bringing something valuable to the table. What matters is your 'threat point' or ability to withhold something the other finds valuable.

In one of Haslanger’s examples, in a world where women make less money than men and childcare is prohibitively expensive, the social structure that makes those facts the case helps to explain why a new mother (rather than a new father) stays at home with their infant.

Very true! Men can lactate same as women can. Indeed, the fact that women, not men, give birth to babies is because of a 'bad custom'.

Like Haslanger, Astell recognised the ways in which background social structures explain behaviours.

Nonsense! We may posit fictional 'background social structures' to classify observed behavior but this has little explanatory value. On the other hand, background biological structures- like DNA- have great explanatory value. That's how you get useful things like the Price equation. Having the correct 'Structural Causal Model' means we can change the world. Unlike Philosophy's Owl of Minerva which only takes wing after darkness has fallen, STEM subjects generate useful technologies which can completely change 'background social structures' while yet it is Morning.

But, unlike Haslanger, Astell focused on cases where the social structure or set of values, beliefs, norms and practices – which she called custom – went bad.

This is a shitty point of view. It is easy to say- 'Misogyny and Homophobia and Slavery and killing Jews were originally very good and salutary customs. But they went bad because of all dem niggerlovin' kikes in Wall Street and Hollywood who are popularizing cunnilingus and causing women to demand Orgasms and other such satanic perversions.'

According to Astell, custom is bad when it prevents us from developing our intellectual capacities as God intended.

But, at the time, a lot of Tory Bishops thought King James II had a Divine Right to wage war on his own people because God intended to punish the Anglicans.

The best way to do this is through education, but in Astell’s time women weren’t formally educated (this practice was itself a part of bad custom).

Few boys were formally educated. The thing was costly. Also, it was somewhat shit. Reading Aristotle makes you stupider than God intended.

Bad custom is a problem because it damages women’s God-given nature – their ability to think properly.

On the other hand, being raped and beaten did not damage them at all. Being deprived of property on marriage was a fantastic boon- because it was law not 'custom'. Indeed, a lot of equitable customs- e.g. 'broomstick marriage' or divorce by mutual agreement pronounced at the Public Fair- were bad precisely because they weren't part of canon law.

It undermines how women think partly because, without education, women are deprived of knowledge, but bad custom also corrupts thinking processes.

Education definitely corrupts thinking processes. Bad customs don't because they can be changed immediately with little hysteresis effects. In 1900, almost all upper class Chinese girls had bound feet. In 1910 hardly anybody was inflicting this horrible practice on their daughters. Society's 'coordination problem' had found a better Schelling focal solution.

It does this by creating prejudices, which are faulty lenses that filter how you see the world and thus what you can know.

Paideia has always been about creating prejudices. You are taught to look down on people who didn't go to College or whose studies were of a more utile nature. In middle age you may realize the folly of perpetuating such 'availability cascades'- but, to pay the rent, you have no choice but to keep up the charade.

The point about 'customs' is that it is 'common knowledge' that they can be changed overnight. Graham Greene told Allende the story of Stowe Public School- which had been created in Greene's youth. One day a notice was put up saying 'From today, the Tradition of the School will be...' This was in answer to Allende telling Greene that Chile had no tradition of Army coups. The whole point about customs and traditions is that they can suddenly change into their opposite. Coordination problems have that feature. There is nothing 'epistemic' about them at all.

During the Second World War, a Nation's alliances could change over the course of an hour. Britain hated both Hitler and Stalin till the former broke their pact. Then, as George Orwell bitterly notes, the unofficial policy was to praise Stalin and heap calumny on Trotsky. That too would change. Labour's Ernie Bevan is remembered by the Americans as their toughest supporter in the Cold War.

Even more concerning is that prejudices are habitual: the more you think in a prejudicial way, the harder it is to see the world differently.

This is because Prejudice can itself be a Paideia. However, your economic behaviour changes in line with incentives. What you rant and rave about when of strong drink taken, in the company of your peers, matters very little. It is merely an outburst of spleen. So unless you twitter your hate-speech, you suffer no ill consequence.

This effect is magnified in groups because there is no one to help you see clearly or just differently.

Thus University Departments and the Journals of various scholarly cliques should receive no subsidy from the taxpayer.

One prejudice that Astell was concerned with is what the philosopher Alice Sowaal in 2007 called the ‘Women’s Defective Nature Prejudice’, which holds that women are intellectually and morally inferior to men by nature. This fits nicely with the dominant 17th-century view that women are valuable only insofar as they are attractive.

Because pots will clean themselves. Anyway, whoever stopped loving Mummy or Granny or Sis, coz they weren't what the world calls pretty?

If the Women’s Defective Nature Prejudice is the lens through which people see the world, it is unsurprising that women think poorly.

This statement has the logical form 'If people are shit then it is unsurprising that some people are shit'.

And if a woman is told that only her appearance matters, why wouldn’t she spend all her energy on that?

This statement is equivalent to 'if a set of people believe what they are told, why wouldn't they chop off their own heads and shove them up their arses if someone suggests this will make their life better?'

Wanting people to like you is a very human trait,

unlike wanting fat people to lick you.  That is why I am not raking in the big bucks by offering this service on Craig's list.

but because 17th-century women lacked knowledge and clear thinking, spending time and energy on their appearance seemed like the best way to be valued by others. This made them less free.

Misogynists- or simple shitheads- have always said- 'women spend too much time making themselves look pretty. Also they insist on using soap and taking baths. My wife has just demanded I get her a new jute sack to wear. She claims that the one I gave her at our wedding thirty years ago has worn so thin that everybody can see her backside. Where am I supposed to get the money to buy a new jute sack? Women shouldn't spend all their time worrying about their appearance. They should just go down a coal mine and earn some money so as to provide me with nice things to eat and lots of beer to wash it down. I tell you women are the slaves to their mirrors! The only way they can gain true freedom is by smashing their mirrors!'

For Astell, we are free in proportion to how much we determine our own values and choices.

So, Astell was rational and sensible in at least one respect. Does the learned author think there were other Seventeenth Century women who thought people are free in proportion to how much they are beaten and incarcerated?

Just as bad custom makes women think in narrow ways, it also narrows the possibilities to achieve what women want – to be valued.

Women don't want to be valued. They want to have a good life. It is not the case that they get down on their knees anytime anyone says to them 'I'd value you more if you gave me a b.j'.

Astell rejects bad custom because something being the case doesn’t mean that it should be: bad custom subordinates women, but that doesn’t mean that’s how society should be.

Why write such a stupid sentence? Does the author think that other women of the period accepted bad customs because they liked being subordinated? Does she think anyone anywhere thought that if Society is bad then it should remain bad? Where in the world are the protestors shouting- 'Things are really shitty for us right now! We demand that things stay shitty for us!'?

Some might try to justify bad custom by appealing to God’s will as revealed by the Bible. In Some Reflections Upon Marriage (1700), Astell observes that these claims tend to be selective: 

For by all that appears in the Text, it is not so much a Law of Nature, that Women shou’d Obey Men, as that Men shou’d not wear long Hair. Now how can a Christian Nation allow Fashions contrary to the Law of Nature, forbidden by an Apostle and declared by him to be a shame to Man? Or if Custom may make an alteration in one Case it may in another, but what then becomes of the Nature and Reason of things?

 So, Astell is merely saying that customs can be changed with no great ill effect.

According to Astell, the Bible spends more time prohibiting men with long hair than it does claiming women’s absolute subordination. Astell is making a cheeky point: unless men are willing to admit that they are either violating God’s will for the sake of their hair, or that they are cherrypicking evidence, then the Bible cannot be used as proof for the rightness of bad custom. If some Biblical claims can be overlooked, then why not others?

Astell was being silly. A Nazirite could have long hair. After Archbishop Laud made short hair obligatory for priests, some Puritans- like Cromwell- grew their hair long. But then so did some 'Cavaliers' to distinguish themselves from 'Roundheads'. However, no one was saying that women didn't have yet longer and thicker hair. In any case, it was settled in Law that England could be ruled by a Queen. Thus, this is a bad argument because we are speaking of fashion, not custom.

This account of bad custom is helpful because it illustrates how background social phenomena can explain the ways that people think and act.

No it can't. You actually have to know a little about English history to understand what an English writer of a particular period is saying. The relevant background is political, not social.

In exerting this influence over women, it harms their intellectual capacities.

This is silly. Thinking is costly. It is rational to think more about things which it is remunerative for us to do. Astell herself thought about things which were directly related to her material well-being. Customs don't matter. Economics does.

Because bad custom perpetuates the Women’s Defective Nature Prejudice,

But what perpetuates bad custom? Economic forces. Thus it is only the Economic 'substructure' of a Society which can perpetuate 'Defective Nature' type arguments regarding 'proletarians' (the word means those who serve the state only by making babies). Economics is rooted in the material world. Customs and fashions can come and go with bewildering rapidity. But Phusis and Economia are 'anti-fragile'.

it shapes the way that women interpret the world – it predetermines not only what women think but how they are able to think. Through bad custom, it becomes difficult to see how a woman would be able to trust her own knowledge if someone with ‘greater intellectual ability’ (ie, a man) tells her that she is mistaken.

If such is the case then women should reject, for an a priori, instrumentalist, reason any and every theory of 'epistemic injustice'. Why? Because the central premise of these theories is that a historically oppressed group, through no fault of its own, is subject to 'inherent vice'.

Bad people made a bad argument for an evil end- viz. the oppression and exploitation of highly productive segments of society. Good people can't use that bad argument for a good purpose. Why? Because the argument is bad. It says the historically oppressed have been so badly damaged that they would be worse off if that oppression ceases. You should not open the cage of a bird or an animal which can no longer fend for itself. Good people who accept this bad argument may say 'we will make a nicer cage for the historically oppressed. Send us your women and blacks and homosexuals. We will create a safe space for them. Because their brains have been buggered to buggery by 'background social phenomena', we will give everyone a nice PhD so they will come to believe they are smart. The Wizard of Oz, it will be remembered, gives the Straw-man, who desires a brain, a 'Certificate of Thinkology' instead. Oh brave new world that has such thinkologists in it!

Astell also shows how social structures such as bad custom lead to epistemic internalisation injustice or, rather, how bad custom makes women internalise claims about their inherent intellectual inferiority – so much so that they perpetuate their own oppression.

One may certainly dismiss Astell as ending her days on the wrong side of history. But, it is foolish for a woman writing in the 21st century to assert that Astell 'shows' anything at all. Why? Times have changed in a manner which shows Astell, like other savants of the period, was barking up the wrong tree. I suppose one could point to Gershom Carmichael, Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith and David Hume etc. as representing the one branch of Seventeenth Century thought which prevailed albeit as the 'unthought known' for Nineteenth Century epistemology as represented by the polymath William Whewell.

It is like gaslighting, a kind of psychological abuse where someone forcefully asserts a different (and often false) reality.

But 'gaslighting' is the stock-in-trade of the author's own branch of 'Grievance Studies'. She is saying that we can't trust the evidence of our own senses. There is some sinister 'epistemic violence' which has rendered our life-world occult to us.

Because we are inclined to trust others, gaslighting undermines someone’s grasp on what is real and true, and what they can know.

We know that Astell did not greatly matter- Wikipedia explains why. Why should we believe this PhD candidate who is talking up her own dissertation which will soon be published and available on Amazon to purchase?

In Astell’s account, bad custom anticipates 21st-century thinking – eg, Haslanger’s social structural explanations – and shows us how insidious social structures can be.

Smoking enough dope can show anybody not just how 'insidious' social structures can be, it can also allow them to watch in appalled fascination as little green men from the Fifth Dimension enter the ears and other orifices of people you are getting high with causing them to go back to the dorm to get some sleep coz they have 'classes' in the morning. Wake up sheeple! Collidge isn't real! It's all an illusion created by little green men!

As Astell’s own life’s work proved, if we can understand similar harmful contemporary phenomena, then perhaps we can defeat them.

What did Astell defeat? Nothing at all. Her life work proved that gassing on about 'bad custom' or 'epistemic injustice' or 'gender perfomativity' or 'strategic essentialism' or whatever is utterly useless. True, pedagogues may be obliged to keep their nose to that unlovely gridstone just to pay the rent. But they would have been better advised to study a STEM subject or simply run an actual PONZI scheme. Money talks, Bullshit walks- but not very far coz of all those little green men from the Fifth Dimension who keep entering its every orifice.