This paper treats two questions about the relation between trust and the will. One question, about trust, is whether you can trust ‘at will.’ Can you trust despite acknowledging that you lack evidence of the trustee’s worthiness of your trust? Another question, about the will, is whether you can exercise your will at all without trust – at least, in yourself. I treat the second question as a guide to the first, arguing that the role of trust in the will (...) reveals how you can trust at will. The key lies in distinguishing two ways of being responsive to evidence. On the one hand, you cannot trust someone – whether another person or your own earlier self – whom you judge unworthy of your trust. On the other hand, trust does not require a positive assessment of trustworthiness. I thus take issue with Pamela Hieronymi’s analysis of trust as a “commitment-constituted attitude.” Your trust is indeed constrained by your responsiveness to evidence of untrustworthiness, but you need undertake no commitment akin to or involving a judgment that the trustee is trustworthy. We can see why trust is not a commitment-constituted attitude by seeing how trust itself plays a role in forming a commitment. (shrink)

Museum codes of ethics stress the importance of preservation, knowledge and access, but they remain silent on the justificatory framework of the duty of care museums have to the objects in their collections and on museums' obligations towards their public. In this essay I propose a triangular framework for understanding the duty of care museums have, according to which it is shaped by the need to negotiate an object's transit from past to future in such a way as to secure (...) that object's future significance. The account provided of transit to the future is underwritten by a model of trust as entrusting. Hence, museums' duty to care for the objects in their collections is found to be grounded on the demands of the trust relationship, complemented by the respect that is necessary for effective negotiation of the transit from past to future. (shrink)

Trust can be thought of as a three place relation: A trusts B to do X. Trustworthiness has two components: competence (does the trustee have the relevant skills, knowledge and abilities to do X?) and willingness (is the trustee intending or aiming to do X?). This chapter is about the willingness component, and the different motivations that a trustee may have for fulfilling trust. The standard assumption in economics is that agents are self-regarding, maximizing their own consumption of goods and (...) services. This is too restrictive. In particular, people may be concerned with the outcomes of others, and they may be concerned to follow ethical principles. I distinguish weak trustworthiness, which places no restrictions on B’s motivation for doing X, from strong trustworthiness, where the behaviour must have a particular non-selfish motivation, in finance the fiduciary commitment to promote the interests of the truster. I discuss why strong trustworthiness may be more efficient and also normatively preferable to weak. In finance, there is asymmetric information between buyer and seller, which creates a need for trustworthy assessment of products. It also creates an ambiguity about whether the relationship is one of buyer and seller, governed by caveat emptor, or a fiduciary relationship of advisor and client. This means that there are two possible reasons why trust may be breached: because the trustee didn’t realise that the truster framed the relationship as a fiduciary one, or because the trustee did realise but actively sought to take advantage of the trust. Correspondingly, there are two possible types of agent: normal people who are not always self-regarding and who are trust responsive (if they believe that they are being trusted then they are likely to fulfill that trust), and knaves, after Hume’s character who is always motivated by his own private interest. We can increase the trustworthiness of normal people by getting them to re-frame the situation as one of trust, so they will be strongly trustworthy (i.e. change of institutional culture), and by providing non-monetary incentives (the correct choice of incentive will depend on exactly what their non-selfish motivation is). Knaves need sanctions, which can make them weakly trustworthy. However, this is a delicate balance because sanctions can crowd out normative frames. We can also increase the trustworthiness of financiers by making finance less attractive to knaves; changing the mix of types in finance could help support the necessary cultural change. (shrink)

In her paper "(White) Tyranny and the Democratic Value of Distrust," Meena Krishnamurthy argues that distrust has a political value that has often been overlooked by democratic theorists. She pursues this argument by developing an account of distrust from Martin Luther King Jr. and exploring the role that King's distrust played in the Black Civil Rights Movement. In this discussion note, I argue that an alternative account of distrust from recent work by Katherine Hawley can better capture distrust 's democratic (...) value, and moreover might reveal how that value is noninstrumental, in contrast with the contingent and instrumental value granted to distrust on Krishnamurthy's account. (shrink)

Situationists such as John Doris, Gilbert Harman, and Maria Merritt suppose that appeal to reliable behavioral dispositions can be dispensed with without radical revision to morality as we know it. This paper challenges this supposition, arguing that abandoning hope in reliable dispositions rules out genuine trust and forces us to suspend core reactive attitudes of gratitude and resentment, esteem and indignation. By examining situationism through the lens of trust we learn something about situationism (in particular, the radically revisionary moral implications (...) of its adoption) as well as something about trust (in particular, that the conditions necessary for genuine trust include a belief in a capacity for robust dispositions). (shrink)

Fricker has proposed that a hearer’s knowledge that p acquired through trusting a speaker requires the speaker to know that p, and that therefore testimonial knowledge through trust is necessarily second-hand knowledge. In this paper, I argue that Fricker’s view is problematic for four reasons: firstly, Fricker’s dismissal of a central challenge to the second-handedness of testimonial knowledge is based on a significant misrepresentation of this challenge; secondly, on closer scrutiny an important distinction Fricker wants to draw is compromised by (...) her account of trust; thirdly, Fricker’s conception of trust is at odds with our natural understanding of this notion; fourthly, the reasons Fricker cites in support of her view are not sufficient to single out her view as the correct one, since rival views can also accommodate the relevant data. (shrink)

When trust is broken, how should we determine who is at fault? Previous discus- sions of broken trust typically attribute the fault to trusters who place trust foolishly or trustees who act in an untrustworthy manner. These discussions take for granted the ability of the truster and trustee to communicate and understand the boundaries of what is being entrusted, that is, the domain of trust. However, the boundaries of entrusted domains are not always clear to either party which can result (...) in broken trust despite the best efforts of both truster and trustee. In this paper, I argue that deter- mining who to blame when trust is broken is a messy affair in which disagreements over fault regularly arise. I introduce three features of trust domains that take center stage in negotiations regarding who is at fault when trust is broken: scope, rigidity and ordering. (shrink)

Two challenges have faced policymakers during the Covid-19 pandemic: First, they must determine the reliability of expert testimony in the face of uncertainty; second, they must determine the relevance of different kinds of expertise with regard to particular decisions. I argue that both these problems can be fruitfully analyzed through the lens of trust by introducing an in-depth case study of Iceland’s handling of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. I contend that the problem of relevance highlights the limited (...) appeal of a thoroughly technocratic society. Value judgments, best realized through democratic processes, are always lurking in the background. (shrink)

This paper analyses the phenomenology and epistemology of chatbots such as ChatGPT and Bard. The computational architecture underpinning these chatbots are large language models (LLMs), which are generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems trained on a massive dataset of text extracted from the Web. We conceptualise these LLMs as multifunctional computational cognitive artifacts, used for various cognitive tasks such as translating, summarizing, answering questions, information-seeking, and much more. Phenomenologically, LLMs can be experienced as a “quasi-other”; when that happens, users anthropomorphise them. (...) For most users, current LLMs are black boxes, i.e., for the most part, they lack data transparency and algorithmic transparency. They can, however, be phenomenologically and informationally transparent, in which case there is an interactional flow. Anthropomorphising and interactional flow can, in some users, create an attitude of (unwarranted) trust towards the output LLMs generate. We conclude this paper by drawing on the epistemology of trust and testimony to examine the epistemic implications of these dimensions. Whilst LLMs generally generate accurate responses, we observe two epistemic pitfalls. Ideally, users should be able to match the level of trust that they place in LLMs to the degree that LLMs are trustworthy. However, both their data and algorithmic opacity and their phenomenological and informational transparency can make it difficult for users to calibrate their trust correctly. The effects of these limitations are twofold: users may adopt unwarranted attitudes of trust towards the outputs of LLMs (which is particularly problematic when LLMs hallucinate), and the trustworthiness of LLMs may be undermined. (shrink)

Abstract: There are epistemic manipulators in the world. These people are actively attempting to sacrifice epistemic goods for personal gain. In doing so, manipulators have led many competent epistemic agents into believing contrarian theories that go against well-established knowledge. In this paper, I explore one mechanism by which manipulators get epistemic agents to believe contrarian theories. I do so by looking at a prominent empirical model of trustworthiness. This model identifies three major factors that epistemic agents look for when trying (...) to determine who is trustworthy. These are (i) ability, (ii) benevolence, and (iii) moral integrity. I then show how manipulators can manufacture the illusion that they possess these factors. This leads epistemic agents to view manipulators as trustworthy sources of information. Additionally, I argue that fact-checking will be an ineffective – or even harmful – practice when correcting the beliefs of epistemic agents who have been tricked by this illusion of epistemic trustworthiness. I suggest that in such cases we should use an alternative correction, which I call trust undercutting. (shrink)

When philosophers consider factors compromising autonomy in consent, they often focus solely on the consent-giver’s agential capacities, overlooking the impact of the consent-receiver’s conduct on the consensual character of the activity. In this paper, I argue that valid consent requires justified trust in the consent-receiver to act only within the scope of consent. I call this the Trust Condition (TC), drawing on Katherine Hawley’s commitment account of trust. TC constitutes a belief that the consent-receiver is capable and willing to act (...) as we expect from them. If such trust is not warranted, I argue, consent lacks the appropriate normative grounds. After establishing TC, I explore its application in the sexual arena, asserting that due to the non-contractual dimensions of sexual activity — such as the dynamic nature of sexual desires and the absence of external factors effectively binding sexual partners to the terms of consent—trust is warranted in sexual consent by means of care. I define care as a special sensitivity and attention toward the partner’s will and discuss how this approach leads to safer intimate relationships in practice. (shrink)

In this open access book, Timothy Aylsworth and Clinton Castro draw on the deep well of Kantian ethics to argue that we have moral duties, both to ourselves and to others, to protect our autonomy from the threat posed by the problematic use of technology. The problematic use of technologies like smartphones threatens our autonomy in a variety of ways, and critics have only begun to appreciate the vast scope of this problem. In the last decade, we have seen a (...) flurry of books making “self-help” arguments about how we could live happier, more fulfilling lives if we were less addicted to our phones. But none of these authors see this issue as one involving a moral duty to protect our autonomy. (shrink)

Public discourse implicitly appeals to what we call the “Traumatic Untrustworthiness Argument” (TUA). To motivate, articulate, and assess the TUA, we appeal to Hawley’s (2019) commitment account of trust and trustworthiness. On Hawley’s account, being trustworthy consists in the successful avoidance of unfulfilled commitments and involves three components: the actual avoidance of unfulfilled commitments, sincerity in one’s taking on elective commitments, and competence in fulfilling commitments one has incurred. In contexts of testimony, what’s at issue is the speaker’s competence and (...) sincere intention to speak truthfully. The TUA targets trauma victims’ competence rather than their sincerity. According to the TUA, empirical evidence shows that trauma undermines victims’ trustworthiness with regard to speaking truthfully about their trauma by undermining their competence to remember the relevant event. We argue that what the evidence shows is rather that remembering traumatic events involves a distinct “mode of manifesting” the competence to remember particular events from the personal past. Trauma victims are competent to speak truthfully about their trauma and ought to be trusted at least with regard to the central details of the event. By suggesting otherwise, the TUA threatens an insidious form of epistemic injustice which Hawley’s account helps us locate. (shrink)

Philosophical literature has focused on the concept of trust, but often considers distrust merely as an afterthought. Distrust however, because of its pervasive role in our everyday lives, can be quite damaging. Thus, understanding the rationality of distrust is crucial for understanding our testimonial practices. In this paper I analyze whether it is rational or irrational to distrust an informant on the basis of identity bias. My aim is to show that distrust is irrational when based on negative identity bias. (...) First, I adopt Annalisa Coliva’s account of social hinge epistemology where it is rationally required to assume certain basic presuppositions, such that people are generally reliable informants, to obtain propositional justification and participate in the testimonial practice. Secondly, I show how distrust based on negative identity bias can spread across other domains of interaction and jeopardize the testimonial practice as we fail to assume that people are generally reliable informants. Thirdly, I argue that considering bias as a defeater is beneficial to maintain the claim that bias-based distrust is irrational, as it prevents the acquisition of propositional justification. Finally, I show that distrust is rational when based on evidence and reason that the speaker is not reliable or sincere. (shrink)

In the social epistemology of scientific knowledge, it is largely accepted that relationships of trust, not just reliance, are necessary in contemporary collaborative science characterised by relationships of opaque epistemic dependence. Such relationships of trust are taken to be possible only between agents who can be held accountable for their actions. But today, knowledge production in many fields makes use of AI applications that are epistemically opaque in an essential manner. This creates a problem for the social epistemology of scientific (...) knowledge, as scientists are now epistemically dependent on AI applications that are not agents, and therefore not appropriate candidates for trust. (shrink)

Should we be worried that the concept of trust is increasingly used when we assess non-human agents and artefacts, say robots and AI systems? Whilst some authors have developed explanations of the concept of trust with a view to accounting for trust in AI systems and other non-agents, others have rejected the idea that we should extend trust in this way. The article advances this debate by bringing insights from conceptual engineering to bear on this issue. After setting up a (...) target concept of trust in terms of four functional desiderata (trust-reliance distinction, explanatory strength, tracking affective responses, and accounting for distrust), I analyze how agential vs. non-agential accounts can satisfy these. A final section investigates how ‘non-ideal’ circumstances—that is, circumstances where the manifest and operative concept use diverge amongst concept users—affect our choice about which rendering of trust is to be preferred. I suggest that some prominent arguments against extending the language of trust to non-agents are not decisive and reflect on an important oversight in the current debate, namely a failure to address how narrower, agent-centred accounts curtail our ability to distrust non-agents. (shrink)

Previously proposed strategies for tackling hermeneutical injustices take for granted the interests people have in certain things about them being intelligible to them and/or to others, and seek to enable them to satisfy these interests. Strategies of this sort I call interests-as-given strategies. I propose that some hermeneutical injustices can instead be tackled by doing away with certain of these interests, and so with the possibility of their unfair non-satisfaction. Strategies of this sort I call interests-in-question strategies. As a case (...) study in when such an interests-in-question strategy ought to be pursued, I look at how to tackle hermeneutical injustices arising in the context of gender-affirming healthcare as provided to adults by the National Health Service in the UK. I argue that considerations of trust, privacy, and respect all support pursuing such a strategy. One way to do so, I suggest, would be by replacing the existing gatekeeping model with an informed consent model for the provision of gender-affirming healthcare. Considerations of hermeneutical justice can hence be added to the already-impressive case for undertaking this shift. (shrink)

I consider Katherine Hawley's commitment account of interpersonal trustworthiness alongside her sceptical challenge regarding the value of philosophically modelling institutional trustworthiness as distinct from reliability. I argue, pace Hawley's challenge, that there would be significant diagnostic and explanatory loss if we were to content ourselves with ideas of institutional (un)reliability alone; and I offer an illustrative case where institutional unreliability is only the half of it, indicating that when it comes to certain kinds of institutional dysfunction, we do need philosophical (...) models of institutional ‘distrustworthiness’ if we are to achieve a proper diagnosis. (shrink)

In our life with science, we trust experts; we form judgements by inference from past evidence. We conduct ourselves very differently in the aesthetic domain. We avoid deferring to aesthetic experts. We form our judgements through direct perception of particulars rather than through inference. Why the difference? I suggest that we avoid aesthetic testimony and aesthetic inference, not because they’re unusable, but because we have adopted social norms to avoid them. Aesthetic appreciation turns out to be something like a game. (...) We have laid down certain rules and restrictions in order to shape a kind of activity we cherish. And aesthetic properties turn out to be a kind of social construct. Much like the goal of a game, they are constituted in part by our obedience to certain rules. The norms of aesthetic life are different from those of science because our purposes are different. We engage in science to get the right answers; we engage in aesthetic appreciation to be absorbed in the activity of the sensuous perception of particulars. Our aesthetic practices are a constructed shelter from science; they restore to us a small domain where we may once again engage in our own sensuous perception of particulars. (shrink)

When are we obligated to believe someone? To what extent are people authorities about their own experiences? What kind of harm might we enact when we doubt? Questions like these lie at the heart of many debates in social and feminist epistemology, and they’re the driving issue behind a key conceptual framework in these debates—gaslighting. But while the concept of gaslighting has provided fruitful insight, it's also proven somewhat difficult to adjudicate, and seems prone to over-application. In what follows, I (...) argue that Katherine Hawley's theory of trust can provide a useful alternative lens for looking at contested testimony. To do this, I focus on a particularly complex—but increasingly popular—application of gaslighting: the physician/patient relationship, and the idea of ‘medical gaslighting’. I argue that, even though patients can experience harm when they are disbelieved, there are nevertheless good reasons for physicians not to trust patients about at least some of their own narratives. (shrink)

This paper develops an account of trustworthy AI. Its central idea is that whether AIs are trustworthy is a matter of whether they live up to their function-based obligations. We argue that this account serves to advance the literature in a couple of important ways. First, it serves to provide a rationale for why a range of properties that are widely assumed in the scientific literature, as well as in policy, to be required of trustworthy AI, such as safety, justice, (...) and explainability, are properties (often) instantiated by trustworthy AI. Second, we connect the discussion on trustworthy AI in policy, industry, and the sciences with the philosophical discussion of trustworthiness. We argue that extant accounts of trustworthiness in the philosophy literature cannot make proper sense of trustworthy AI and that our account compares favourably with its competitors on this front. (shrink)

Overconfidence is typically damaging to one’s reputation as a trustworthy source of information. Previous research shows that the reputational cost associated with conveying a piece of false information is higher for confident than unconfident speakers. When judging speaker trustworthiness, individuals do not exclusively rely on past accuracy but consider the extent to which speakers expressed a degree of confidence that matched the accuracy of their claims (their “confidence-accuracy calibration”). The present study experimentally examines the interplay between confidence, accuracy and a (...) third factor, namely evidence, in the assessment of speaker trustworthiness. Experiment 1 probes the hypothesis that overconfidence does not backfire when a confident but inaccurate claim is justified: the trustworthiness of a confident speaker who turns out to be wrong is restored if the confidence expressed is based on strong evidence (good confidence-evidence calibration). Experiment 2 investigates the hypothesis that confidence can backfire if a confident and accurate claim is not justified: the trustworthiness of a confident speaker who turns out to be right is damaged if the confidence expressed is based on weak evidence (bad confidence-evidence calibration). Our results support both hypotheses and thus suggest that “confidence-evidence calibration” plays a crucial role in the assessment of speaker trustworthiness. (shrink)

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Katherine Hawley.1Bitcoin was invented to serve as a digital currency that demands no trust in financial institutions, such as commercial and central banks. This paper discusses metaphysical aspects of bitcoin, in particular the view that bitcoin is socially constructed, non-concrete, and genuinely exists. If bitcoin is socially constructed, then one may worry that this reintroduces trust in the communities responsible for the social construction. Although we may have to rely on certain communities, (...) I argue that social construction doesn’t imply a demand for trust because the relevant communities don’t take on any relevant commitments. Bitcoin is indeed trust-free. (shrink)

In her account of scientific objectivity, feminist philosopher of science Helen Longino shows how scientific objectivity is not so much of individual practice, but rather a social commitment practiced by a scientific community, provided by the necessary accommodations for critical discourse. However, is this conception of scientific objectivity truly capable of living up to the social realities of critical discourse and deliberation within a scientific community? Drawing from Dutilh Novaes’ social epistemological account of argumentation, this paper highlights the challenges Longino’s (...) scientific objectivity faces on a prescriptive and descriptive level, specifically in overcoming the various epistemic injustices Longino’s proposed structural accommodations for objectivity are still sensitive to. Dutilh Novaes’ social epistemological model of argumentation illustrates how the realities of critical debate too often don’t consist of true epistemic or knowledge exchange, even though such exchanges are essential to achieve Longino’s primary goal when redefining scientific objectivity: to wield out and address idiosyncratic background assumptions and individual bigotry that possibly influence a researcher’s scientific conduct. (shrink)

This paper develops a novel, bifocal account of trustworthiness according to which both trustworthinesssimpliciter(as in ‘Ann is trustworthy’) and trustworthiness tophi(as in ‘Ann is trustworthy when it comes to keeping your secrets’) are analysed in terms of dispositions to fulfil one's obligations. We also offer a systematic account of the relation between the two types of trustworthiness, an account of degrees of trustworthiness and comparative trustworthiness, as well as a view of permissible trustworthiness attribution.

Spoofing—placing orders on financial exchanges intending to withdraw them prior to execution—is widely legally prohibited. I argue instead on two main grounds that spoofing should be permitted and legalised. The first is that spoofing as a form of bluffing remains within the market practice of making legally binding offers—as opposed to lying or betraying trust—and primarily concerns the spoofer’s personal information. As a form of bluffing spoofing helps prevent financial speculators, in particular high-frequency algorithmic traders, from easily profiting by other (...) market actors reliably revealing their underlying preferences through their market activity. The second is that at the systemic level permitting spoofing would benefit non-speculative actors who place orders to hedge economic risk and whose activities provide the raison d’être for financial exchanges, differentiating them from simple forums for gambling. I also address potential concerns that legalised spoofing would drive speculators out of financial markets entirely and, therefore, undermine market liquidity. This work contributes to the wider debate in business ethics regarding bluffing by illustrating the acceptability of bluffs which do not betray counterparty trust or reliance on testimony by remaining within the framework of market practices. (shrink)

People can have or lack ‘integrity’. But can public institutions? It is common to speak of the ‘integrity’ of such institutions: in popular discourse, legal decisions, law and regulations, and also increasingly, political theory, and proximate disciplines. Such integrity is often said to be at risk of being ‘subverted,’ ‘corroded,’ and ‘corrupted,’ by both forces within and without. Furthermore, the implication is that this is a very worrying thing. The integrity of our institutions, at least, needs to be preserved, supported, (...) and defended; against money, politics, power, and populists. However, despite such common usage, the concept itself has attracted little theoretical reflection. What can it mean, if anything sensible, for an institution itself – instead of a person (or even say, a body, process, territory or a bridge) – to have ‘integrity’? And, why might it be so important? This is the subject of this paper. It puts forward a substantive moral conception of institutional integrity as the robust disposition of an institution to pursue its purpose efficiently, within the constraints of legitimacy, consistent with its commitments. It argues that it is important because it provides the strongest grounding for a ‘duty of support’ owed by citizens to the institution. The strength of such support owed also gives content to a scalar dimension of the institution’s normative legitimacy, that is, the ‘strength’ (or weakness) of such legitimacy. Further, it illustrates how such a conception of institutional integrity will helpfully advance the current debate regarding institutional corruption. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) plays a rapidly increasing role in clinical care. Many of these systems, for instance, deep learning-based applications using multilayered Artificial Neural Nets, exhibit epistemic opacity in the sense that they preclude comprehensive human understanding. In consequence, voices from industry, policymakers, and research have suggested trust as an attitude for engaging with clinical AI systems. Yet, in the philosophical and ethical literature on medical AI, the notion of trust remains fiercely debated. Trust skeptics hold that talking about trust (...) in nonhuman agents constitutes a category error and worry about the concept being misused for ethics washing. Proponents of trust have responded to these worries from various angles, disentangling different concepts and aspects of trust in AI, potentially organized in layers or dimensions. Given the substantial disagreements across these accounts of trust and the important worries about ethics washing, we embrace a diverging strategy here. Instead of aiming for a positive definition of the elements and nature of trust in AI, we proceed ex negativo, that is we look at cases where trust or distrust are misplaced. Comparing these instances with trust expedited in doctor–patient relationships, we systematize these instances and propose a taxonomy of both misplaced trust and distrust. By inverting the perspective and focusing on negative examples, we develop an account that provides useful ethical constraints for decisions in clinical as well as regulatory contexts and that highlights how we should not engage with medical AI. (shrink)

Distrust in scientific experts can be surprisingly stubborn, persisting despite evidence supporting the experts’ views, demonstrations of their competence, or displays of good will. This stubborn distrust is often viewed as a manifestation of irrationality. By contrast, this article proposes a logic of “status distrust”: low-status individuals are objectively vulnerable to collective decision-making, and can justifiably distrust high-status scientific experts if they are not confident that the experts do not have their best interests at heart. In phenomena of status distrust, (...) social status is thus an indicator of distrust, and this has wider implications for the literatures on trust in science and on expert communication. (shrink)

A widespread assumption in debates about trust and trustworthiness is that the evaluative norms of principal interest on the trustor’s side of a cooperative exchange regulate trusting attitudes and performances whereas those on the trustee’s side regulate dispositions to respond to trust. The aim here will be to highlight some unnoticed problems with this asymmetrical picture – and in particular, how it elides certain key evaluative norms on both the trustor’s and trustee’s side the satisfaction of which are critical to (...) successful cooperative exchanges – and to show that a symmetrical, ‘achievement-first’ approach to theorising about trust and trustworthiness (and their relation to each other) has important advantages by comparison. The view I develop is guided by a structural analogy with practical reasoning. Just as practical reasoning is working as it should only when there is realisation (knowledge and action) of states (belief and intention) with reverse directions of fits (mind-to-world and world-to-mind), likewise, cooperation between trustor and trustee is functioning as it should only when there is an analogous kind of realisation on both sides of the cooperative exchange – viz., when the trustor ‘matches’ her achievement in trusting (an achievement in fitting reliance to reciprocity) with the trustee’s achievement in responding to trust (an achievement in fitting reciprocity to reliance). An upshot of viewing cooperation between trustor and trustee as exhibiting achievement-theoretic structure is that we will be better positioned to subsume trustworthiness (and its cognates on the trustee’s side), like trust, under a wider suite of evaluative norms that regulate attempts, dispositions, and achievements symmetrically on both sides of a cooperative exchange, with ‘matching achievements’ as the gold standard. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for a probabilistic theory of trust, and the plausibility of “trustworthy AI” in which we trust (as opposed to mere reliance). I show that the current trust theories cannot accommodate trust pertaining to AI, and I propose an alternative probabilistic theory, which accounts for the four major types of AI-related trust: an AI agent’s trust in another AI agent, a human agent’s trust in an AI agent, an AI agent’s trust in a human agent, and (...) an AI agent’s trust in an object (including mental and complex objects). I draw a broadly neglected distinction between transitive and intransitive senses of trust, each of which calls for a distinctive semantical theory. Based on this distinction, I classify the current theories into the theories of trust and theories of trustworthiness, showing that the current theories fail to model some of the major types of AI-related trust; while the proposed conditional probabilistic theory of trust and theory of trustworthiness, unlike the current trust theories, is scalable, and they would also accommodate major types of trust in non-AI, including interpersonal trust, reciprocal trust, one-sided trust, as well as trust in objects—e.g., thoughts, theories, data, algorithms, systems, and institutions. (shrink)

This paper develops and defends a new account of therapeutic trust, its nature and its constitutive norms. Central to the view advanced is a distinction between two kinds of therapeutic trust – default therapeutic trust and overriding therapeutic trust – each which derives from a distinct kind of trusting competence. The new view is shown to have advantages over extant accounts of therapeutic trust, and its relation to standard (non-therapeutic) trust, as defended by Hieronymi, Frost-Arnold, and Jones.

This collection features comprehensive overviews of the various ethical challenges in organ transplantation. International readings well-grounded in the latest developments in the life sciences are organized into systematic sections and engage with one another, offering complementary views. All core issues in the global ethical debate are covered: donating and procuring organs, allocating and receiving organs, as well as considering alternatives. Due to its systematic structure, the volume provides an excellent orientation for researchers, students, and practitioners alike to enable a deeper (...) understanding of some of the most controversial issues in modern medicine. (shrink)

Readers of Stoic ethics may find ‘benefit’ (ōpheleia) an essential but enigmatic concept. It directly connects to some critical terms of Stoic ethics, such as ‘good’ and ‘virtue,’ but there is no extant discussion of a definition. Beyond the superficial connections, what makes ‘benefit’ beneficial? Why is benefit a good thing? I argue that these essential questions remain unanswerable for a good reason: Stobaeus committed to a specious claim about benefit in his Anthology, which has misguided later commentaries. Either the (...) Stoics themselves made a stronger contrast between sages and inferior people at the cost of coherence, or Stobaeus simply mischaracterized the Stoics’ ideas in his descriptions. This paper aims to clarify Stobaeus’s inaccurate description and reconstruct a coherent and comprehensible interpretation of benefit in the Stoic spirit, with the help of Stoic cosmology. To benefit is to further nature’s agreement. Given the available evidence, I argue that Stoics seem to, or should, be committed to my interpretation. This paper is structured as follows. Section 1 offers a quick background of Stoic ethics. Section 2 discusses two important characteristics of benefit. Section 3 discusses Stobaeus’s description of benefit and inferior people. Section 4 attempts an interpretation of benefit. Finally, Section 5 discusses Inwood and Gerson’s interpretation and argues that it is inadequate. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a systematic account of actions of trust and inquire into their cognitive motivation. I first develop the distinction and relationship between attitudes and actions of trust, and then assess Paul Faulkner's thesis that the Humean model cannot explain the cognitive motivation of some actions of trust under circumstances of uncertainty. While I will accept his diagnosis, I will contend that a weaker version of the Humean model could provide this explanation. My proposal will be an (...) attempt to show why some doxastic characteristics of trust would allow for this analysis. In particular, I will show how the nature of the reliance relation, which constitutes actions of trust, requires that trustors believe in the possibility of accomplishing their intentions by means of the trusted party’s collaboration. I will argue that this means-end belief can cognitively motivate trust even in situations where the trustor is uncertain as to whether the trusted party will prove trustworthy. (shrink)

In this paper, I distinguish three general approaches to public trust in science, which I call the individual approach, the semi-social approach, and the social approach, and critically examine their proposed solutions to what I call the problem of harmful distrust. I argue that, despite their differences, the individual and the semi-social approaches see the solution to the problem of harmful distrust as consisting primarily in trying to persuade individual citizens to trust science and that both approaches face two general (...) problems, which I call the problem of overidealizing science and the problem of overburdening citizens. I then argue that in order to avoid these problems we need to embrace a (thoroughly) social approach to public trust in science, which emphasizes the social dimensions of the reception, transmission, and uptake of scientific knowledge in society and the ways in which social forces influence both positively and negatively the trustworthiness of science. (shrink)

Trust is critical for social life, and yet it is alarmingly fragile. It is easily damaged and difficult to repair. Philosophers studying trust have often noted that basic kind of trust needs to be in place in order for social life to be possible. Although philosophers have suggested that basic trust must exist, they have not tried to describe in explicit terms what this basic trust looks like, or how it comes to be. In this article I will identify and (...) describe a basic form of trust that I call recognition trust. It is a latent expectation we have in others to respect our moral status as persons. By conceptualizing recognition trust, I can explain why trust is not just a useful tool for social cooperation: having our personhood recognized is necessary for living a minimally decent human life, and trust is a necessary element of recognition. First, I motivate the need for conceptualizing a basic form of trust by looking at cases of moral injury and our inherent vulnerability. Such injuries involve the betrayal of an expectation we have in others to recognize us as persons with moral status. Second, I dig deeper into this basic human need of recognition that is thwarted in moral injuries. I argue that fulfilling this basic need requires a particular kind of trust that others will not morally injure us. Third, I give shape to recognition trust by describing its core features, showing why it is a candidate for basic trust. Finally, I defend my concept of recognition trust against a pair of objections. (shrink)

What is epistemic self-trust? There is a tension in the way in which prominent accounts answer this question. Many construe epistemic trust in oneself as no more than reliance on our sub-personal cognitive faculties. Yet many accounts – often the same ones – construe epistemic trust in others as a normatively laden attitude directed at persons whom we expect to care about our epistemic needs. Is epistemic self-trust really so different from epistemic trust in others? I argue that it is (...) not. We certainly do rely on our cognitive faculties to achieve epistemic ends; but I argue that we also have the normatively rich sort of epistemic trust in ourselves. Moreover, there is a theoretical need for this normatively rich notion of epistemic self-trust: positing it yields the best account of how we secure important epistemic goods, including knowledge and recognition as knowers. I argue this by giving an account of epistemic trust in others and showing that it can be generalized to epistemic trust in oneself. (shrink)

In this paper we address the question of how it can be possible for a non-expert to acquire justified true belief from expert testimony. We discuss reductionism and epistemic trust as theoretical approaches to answer this question and present a novel solution that avoids major problems of both theoretical options: Performative Expert Testimony. PET draws on a functional account of expertise insofar as it takes the expert’s visibility as a good informant capable to satisfy informational needs as equally important as (...) her specific skills and knowledge. We explain how PET generates justification for testimonial belief, which is at once assessable for non-experts and maintains the division of epistemic labor between them and the experts. Thereafter we defend PET against two objections. First, we point out that the non-expert’s interest in acquiring widely assertable true beliefs and the expert’s interest in maintaining her status as a good informant counterbalances the relativist account of justification at work in PET. Second, we show that with regard to the interests at work in testimonial exchanges between experts and non-experts, PET yields a better explanation of knowledge-acquisition from expert testimony than externalist accounts of justification such as reliabilism. As our arguments ground in a conception of knowledge, which conceives of belief-justification as a declarative speech act, throughout the rearmost sections of this paper we also indicate to how such a conception is operationalized in PET. (shrink)

Trust is a topic of longstanding philosophical interest. It is indispensable to every kind of coordinated human activity, from sport to scientific research. Even more, trust is necessary for the successful dissemination of knowledge, and by extension, for nearly any form of practical deliberation and planning. Without trust, we could achieve few of our goals and would know very little. Despite trust’s fundamental importance in human life, there is substantial philosophical disagreement about what trust is, and further, how trusting is (...) normatively constrained and best theorized about in relation to other things we value. This entry is divided into three sections, which explore key (and sometimes interconnected) ethical and epistemological themes in the philosophy of trust: (1) The Nature of Trust; (2) The Normativity of Trust, and (3) The Value of Trust. (shrink)

I argue for an account of the vulnerability of trust, as a product of our need for secure social attachments to individuals and to a group. This account seeks to explain why it is true that, when we trust or distrust someone, we are susceptible to being betrayed by them, rather than merely disappointed or frustrated in our goals. What we are concerned about in matters of trust is, at the basic level, whether we matter, in a non-instrumental way, to (...) that individual, or to the group of which they are a member. We have this concern as a result of a drive to form secure social attachments. This makes us vulnerable in the characteristic way of being susceptible to betrayal, because how the other acts in such matters can demonstrate our lack of worth to them, or to the group, thereby threatening the security of our attachment, and eliciting the reactive attitudes characteristic of betrayal. (shrink)

An important moral category—dishonest speech—has been overlooked in theoretical ethics despite its importance in legal, political, and everyday social exchanges. Discussion in this area has instead been fixated on a binary debate over the contrast between lying and ‘merely misleading’. Some see lying as a distinctive wrong; others see it as morally equivalent to deliberately omitting relevant truths, falsely insinuating, or any other species of attempted verbal deception. Parties to this debate have missed the relevance to their disagreement of the (...) notion of communicative dishonesty. Communicative dishonesty need not take the form of a lie, yet its wrongness does not reduce to the wrongness of seeking to deceive. This paper therefore proposes a major shift of attention away from the lying/misleading debate and towards the topic of communicative dishonesty. Dishonesty is not a simple notion to define, however. It presupposes a difficult distinction between what is and is not expressed in a given utterance. This differs from the more familiar distinction between what is and is not said, the distinction at the heart of the lying/misleading debate. This paper uses an idea central to speech act theory to characterize dishonesty in terms of the utterer’s communicative intentions, and applies the resulting definition to a variety of contexts. (shrink)

Where there is trust, there is also vulnerability, and vulnerability can be exploited. Epistemic trust is no exception. This chapter maps the phenomenon of the exploitation of epistemic trust. I start with a discussion of how trust in general can be exploited; a key observation is that trust incurs vulnerabilities not just for the party doing the trusting, but also for the trustee (after all, trust can be burdensome), so either party can exploit the other. I apply these considerations to (...) epistemic trust, specifically in testimonial relationships. There, we standardly think of a hearer trusting a speaker. But we miss an important aspect of this relationship unless we consider too that the speaker standardly trusts the hearer. Given this mutual trust, and given that both trustees and trusters can exploit each other, we have four possibilities for exploitation in epistemic-trust relationships: a speaker exploiting a hearer (a) by accepting his trust or (b) by imposing her trust on him, and a hearer exploiting a speaker (c) by accepting her trust or (d) by imposing his trust on her. One result is that you do not need to betray someone to exploit him – you can exploit him just as easily by doing what he trusts you for. (shrink)

A bi-level account of trust is developed and defended, one with relevance in ethics as well as epistemology. The proposed account of trust—on which trusting is modelled within a virtue-theoretic framework as a performance-type with an aim—distinguishes between two distinct levels of trust, apt and convictive, that take us beyond previous assessments of its nature, value, and relationship to risk assessment. While Ernest Sosa (2009; 2015; 2017), in particular, has shown how a performance normativity model may be fruitfully applied to (...) belief, my objective is to apply this kind of model in a novel and principled way to trust. I conclude by outlining some of the key advantages of the performance-theoretic bi-level account of trust defended over more traditional univocal proposals. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

My claim in this article is that, contra what I take to be the orthodoxy in the wider literature, we do trust inanimate objects – per the example in the title, there are cases where people really do trust a ladder (to hold their weight, for instance), and, perhaps most importantly, that this poses a challenge to that orthodoxy. My argument consists of four parts. In Section 2 I introduce an alleged distinction between trust as mere reliance and trust as (...) a rich, morally loaded notion. In the course of doing so, I briefly sketch some models of trust. This will help us to get a handle on how some of the mainstream models of trust preclude or ignore the trusting of inanimate objects. In Section 3 I introduce cases designed to show that we have reason to think that we do trust inanimate objects. In Section 4 I consider an objection, and in Section 5 I discuss some consequences of this finding, before concluding in Section 6. (shrink)

I challenge the common view that trust is characteristically risky compared to distrust by drawing attention to the moral and epistemic risks of distrust. Distrust that is based in real fear yet fails to target ill will, lack of integrity, or incompetence, serves to marginalize and exclude individuals who have done nothing that would justify their marginalization or exclusion. I begin with a characterization of the suite of behaviors characteristic of trust and distrust. I then survey the epistemic and moral (...) hazards of distrust, in particular, distrust’s propensity to bias interpretation, to perpetuate itself, to confirm itself, to dishonor, and to insult. Taking seriously these moral and epistemic hazards requires taking affirmative measures to respond to them. I elaborate one such response: “humble trust”. The practice of humble trust issues from skepticism about the warrant of one’s own felt attitudes of trust and distrust, curiosity about who might be unexpectedly responsive to trust and in which contexts, and commitment to abjure and to avoid distrust of the trustworthy. Humble trust enables individuals to trust that they will be trusted. (shrink)

In this paper we address the question of how it can be possible for a non-expert to acquire justified true belief from expert testimony. We discuss reductionism and epistemic trust as theoretical approaches to answer this question and present a novel solution that avoids major problems of both theoretical options: Performative Expert Testimony (PET). PET draws on a functional account of expertise insofar as it takes the expert’s visibility as a good informant capable to satisfy informational needs as equally important (...) as her specific skills and knowledge. We explain how PET generates justification for testimonial belief, which is at once assessable for non-experts and maintains the division of epistemic labor between them and the experts. Thereafter we defend PET against two objections. First, we point out that the non-expert’s interest in acquiring widely assertable true beliefs and the expert’s interest in maintaining her status as a good informant counterbalances the relativist account of justification at work in PET. Second, we show that with regard to the interests at work in testimonial exchanges between experts and non-experts, PET yields a better explanation of knowledge-acquisition from expert testimony than externalist accounts of justification such as reliabilism. As our arguments ground in a conception of knowledge, which conceives of belief-justification as a declarative speech act, throughout the rearmost sections of this paper we also indicate to how such a conception is operationalized in PET. (shrink)

It has been alleged that the demands of friendship conflict with the norms of epistemology—in particular, that there are cases in which the moral demands of friendship would require one to give a friend the benefit of the doubt, and thereby come to believe something in violation of ordinary epistemic standards on justified or responsible belief :329–351, 2004; Stroud in Ethics 116:498–524, 2006; Hazlett in A luxury of the understanding: on the value of true belief, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013). (...) The burden of this paper is to explain these appearances away. I contend that the impression of epistemic partiality in friendship dissipates once we acknowledge the sorts of practical and epistemic reasons that are generated by our values: value-reflecting reasons. The present proposal has several virtues: it requires fewer substantial commitments than other proposals seeking to resist the case for epistemic partiality ; it is independently motivated, as it cites a phenomenon—value-reflecting reasons—we have independent reasons to accept; it provides a single, unified account of how various features of friendship bear on belief-formation; and makes clear how it is the very value we place on friendship itself that ensures against epistemic partiality. (shrink)