Katarzyna Żebrowska (Jagiellonian University in Krakow): Rethinking Epistemic Harm: The Case of Laboratory Rats (joint work with Christoph Merdes)

March 25, 2026 @17:00 (CET)
Sala 06, Edificio de Humanidades, UNED

Abstract
The definition of epistemic injustice relies crucially on the concept of epistemic harm (Fricker, 2007). While the previous concept has received widespread attention in recent years, the concept of epistemic harm and hence, patiency, has gathered comparatively little consideration and is not explicitly defined in the literature. This omission becomes apparent in the emerging discussion on the applicability of the theory to non-human animals (Dieterle, 2023a, 2023b; Lopez, 2023; Podosky, 2018, 2023, 2024). Our paper has two goals. The first one is to analyze and refine the concept of epistemic harm. Based on the paradigmatic patient-centered ethical theory: consequentialism, we propose to define epistemic harm as a setback of epistemic interests. By doing so, we avoid both metacognitive prerequisites and the requirement to feel in a particular way to be harmed. Our second goal is to apply the resulting interest-driven concept of epistemic harm to the case of nonhuman animals. Our case study are rats used in biomedical research on Alzheimer disease and depression, who are deprived of their cognitive and metacognitive abilities to mimic the phenotypes of the conditions investigated.

Bio
Katarzyna Żebrowska is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the Doctoral School in the Humanities, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland. She is working in the areas of feminist ethics, philosophy of science and epistemology, focusing on relations between human and nonhuman animals. In her thesis she is working on various kinds of injustice in research on nonhuman animals and the ways to overcome them. In particular, she is focused on problems of vulnerability, exploitation, coercion and epistemic injustice in animal research.

Christoph Merdes is a researcher in the areas of social and formal epistemology, philosophy of science and machine ethics. He is currently working on the application of formal methods to issues in the analysis of epistemic injustice, specifically regarding distributive epistemic justice and the explication of hermeneutical injustice.
He received his doctorate in philosophy from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in 2019. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in philosophy and computer science as well as a Master’s degree in computer science from the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.