Institutional testimonial injustice: A thickly described case study of Japan’s mass media companies

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Abstract This paper demonstrates that institutional testimonial injustice occurs when an institution commits collective ignorance of a proposition that ought to be believed in light of reliable testimonial evidence due to a vicious institutional ethos, so that some employees who testify the proposition are compromised in their capacity as testifiers. First, I demonstrate that an institution as a group epistemic agent fails to rationally form testimonial belief only if the majority of operative members in the institution fails to believe a proposition based on reliable testimonial evidence and instead accept other propositions as an official position through considerations other than the epistemic considerations. Second, I demonstrate that the operative members’ decision (to accept other propositions) and non-operative members’ conformity to the decision mainly result from a vicious institutional ethos. Third, I argue that due to such a vicious ethos, an institution commits collective ignorance—that is, the operative members are disbelievingly, suspendingly or pre-emptively ignorant of a proposition that ought to be believed in light of evidence, while non-operative members are complicitly ignorant of it in consonance with the operative members’ decision.