Empowering canaries: Sustainability, vulnerability, and the ethics of epistemology

Research ethics has typically been shaped by a conception of science as intrinsically ethics-free. I argue, instead, for a conception of research ethics grounded in an ethics of epistemology, specifically for a norm of epistemic sustainability: research methods and practices that cultivate, rather than undermine, the ground on which especially less privileged others can successfully pursue knowledge, meeting their epistemic needs as they define them. I further argue that objects of knowledge are constituted relationally and are knowable through the relationships in which they are embedded, and that taking vulnerability as an epistemic standpoint can help to ground sustainable inquiry.