Hidden Costs of Inquiry: Exploitation, World-Travelling and Marginalized Lives.

Abstract

There are many good reasons to learn about the lives of people who have less social privilege than we do. We might want to understand their circumstances in order to have informed opinions on social policy, or to make our institutions more inclusive. Or we might want to cultivate empathy for its own sake. Much of this knowledge needs to be gained through social scientific or humanistic research into their lives. The entitlement to theorize about or study the lives of marginalized others is often granted under the framework of freedom of inquiry or academic freedom. I will not question, in this paper, whether academic freedom licenses us to do so in the first place (see XXX this issue, for consideration of those questions); instead, I will highlight tensions between the moral-epistemic imperative to learn about the lives and circumstances of people who are relatively marginalized, and the cost to marginalized people and communities of making that learning possible. This list of considerations is not intended to be exhaustive, but will illustrate a range of ways in which good intentions on the part of researchers is insufficient to mitigate harm.