How does trust relate to faith? We do not know of a theory-neutral way to answer our question. So, we begin with what we regard as a plausible theory of faith according to which, in slogan form, faith is resilient reliance. Next, we turn to contemporary theories of trust. They are not of one voice. Still, we can use them to indicate ways in which trust and faith might both differ from and resemble each other. This is what we do. (...) Along the way, we evaluate substantive issues related to these possible differences and similarities. (shrink)

Does it make sense to say that certain evaluative outlooks and political ideologies are essentially negative or oppositional in structure? Intuitively, it seems so: there is a difference between outlooks and ideologies that are expressive of hatred, resentment, and contempt, on the one hand, and those expressive of more affirmative emotions. But drawing this distinction is more difficult than it seems. It requires that we find a way of maintaining the following claim, which I call Negative Orientation: although you claim (...) to value X, you are more accurately described as disvaluing Y. I argue that we cannot make sense of Negative Orientation at the level of evaluative judgments, for nothing about the etiology, content, or justification of evaluative judgments will support the Negative Orientation claim. But we can make sense of it by attending to the psychology of valuing. Using spiteful hatred as a paradigm case, I explain how certain outlooks and ideologies induce and sustain spiteful hatred in their adherents and thereby render the Negative Orientation claim true. (shrink)

In this paper, I address a fundamental challenge in the philosophy of trust: how to account for trustee discretion in scenarios that fall outside explicitly defined expectations. I argue that this challenge reveals vagueness as an inherent feature of trusting relationships, often leading to disagreements between trustors and trustees. To resolve this, I propose a novel account of trust grounded in rule-following, shifting the object of trust from particular actions to adherence to rules constitutive of relationships. By focusing on relationships (...) and their constitutive rules, I provide here a framework for understanding and minimizing disagreements through communication and engaged practice. Furthermore, I argue this framework sheds light on the dynamics of trust-related reactive attitudes, in particular, distinguishing between betrayal and mere disappointment. (shrink)

In our interactions with science, we are often vulnerable; we do not have complete control of the situation and there is a risk that we, or those we love, might be harmed. This is not an emotionall...

​I evaluate a suggestion, floated by Kimberly Ferzan (this volume), that the twitter hashtag campaign #BelieveWomen is best accommodated by non-reductionist views of testimonial justification. I argue that the issue is ultimately one about the ethical obligation to trust women, rather than a question of what grounds testimonial justification. I also suggest that the hashtag campaign does not simply assert that ‘we should trust women’, but also militates against a pernicious striking-property generic (roughly: ‘women make false sexual assault accusations’), that (...) distorts our evaluation of women’s testimony concerning sexual assault. I conclude #BelieveWomen does not demand that we believe against the evidence, or uncritically, or be more trusting than we have evidential justification to be. Rather, it aims to bring our trust closer to what is merited by the base-rate of reliable testimony from women concerning sexual assault. (shrink)

Social epistemologists often operationalize the task of indirectly assessing experts’ trustworthiness to identifying whose beliefs are more reliably true on matters in an area of expertise. Not only does this neglect the philosophically rich space between belief formation and testimonial utterances, it also reduces trustworthiness to reliability. In ethics of trust, by contrast, explicitly relational views of trust include things like good will and responsiveness. One might think that relational aspects can be safely set aside for social epistemology of trust (...) in experts, that such considerations may be relevant for personal relationships but not for expert trustworthiness. Against these claims I argue for the social-epistemic relevance of relational aspects of trust in experts, and to that end I discuss three sorts of considerations – responsively positive, neutral, and negative factors – that can make a difference for expert trustworthiness. (shrink)

This article offers a functionalist account of trust. It argues that a particular form of trust—Communicated Interpersonal Trust—is paradigmatic and lays out how trust as a social practice in this form helps to satisfy fundamental practical, deliberative, and relational human needs in mutually reinforcing ways. We then argue that derivative (non-paradigmatic) forms of trust connect to the paradigm by generating a positive dynamic between trustor and trustee that is geared towards the realization of these functions. We call this trust’s proleptic (...) potential. Our functionalist approach does not only provide important insights into the practice of trust and its place in the broader web of social life, but also illuminates existing philosophical debates. First, pointing out how opposing theoretical accounts of trust each capitalise on only one of its functions, our paradigm-based approach reveals why they each contain a kernel of truth but are also deficient: the optimal realization of each function is tied to the existence of the other functions as well. Second, we show how a functionalist re-orientation can illuminate two recent disputes regarding (i) the question whether trust is explanatorily two- or three-place and (ii) whether (and to what extent) we can decide to trust others. (shrink)

Felt necessity, or the phenomenon of experiencing some person or object as a felt need, plays important roles in structuring human agency. Philosophical treatments of the relationship between agency and felt necessity have tended to focus on appetitive needs and necessities arising from a particular type of care. I argue that we have much to gain by considering a third underexplored variety of felt necessity that I call “attachment necessity.” Attachment necessity has its own distinct parts to play in structuring (...) agency, and like its more familiar relatives, it can also illuminate important aspects of addiction and love. (shrink)

While some trust theorists have adverted to the vulnerabilities involved in trust, especially vulnerability to betrayal, the literature on trust has not engaged with recent work on the ethics of vulnerability. This paper initiates a dialogue between these literatures, and in doing so begins to explore the complex interrelations between vulnerability and trust. More specifically, it aims to show how trust can both mitigate and compound vulnerability. Through a discussion of two examples drawn from literary sources, the paper also investigates (...) the effects of pathogenic vulnerability on the psychic economies of trust and distrust. (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)

This paper proposes freedom as the condition of possibility for the construction of trust in human relationships. The methodology used is a review of the scientific literature of the most recent moral and political philosophy. As a result of the dialogue between different positions, it is discovered that freedom, despite being present in the act of trust, is forgotten in the discussion around trust, a forgetfulness that has as its main causes the assumption that trust is natural and the confusion (...) between the propensity to trust and the act of trusting. All this leads to proposing an approach of the act of trusting that starts from the freedom of the trustee and the trustor. (shrink)

Does it make sense to say that certain evaluative outlooks and political ideologies are essentially negative or oppositional in structure? Intuitively, it seems so: there is a difference between outlooks and ideologies that are expressive of hatred, resentment, and contempt, on the one hand, and those expressive of more affirmative emotions. But drawing this distinction is more difficult than it seems. It requires that we find a way of maintaining the following claim, which I call Negative Orientation: although you claim (...) to value X, you are more accurately described as disvaluing Y. I argue that we cannot make sense of Negative Orientation at the level of evaluative judgments, for nothing about the etiology, content, or justification of evaluative judgments will support the Negative Orientation claim. we can make sense of it by attending to the psychology of valuing. Using spiteful hatred as a paradigm case, I explain how certain outlooks and ideologies induce and sustain spiteful hatred in their adherents and thereby render the Negative Orientation claim true. (shrink)

How does trust operate under conditions of oppression? Little attention has been paid to how distrust may be both necessary and costly to its bearer. Distrust is clearly warranted under certain conditions, but do those conditions contribute to a reduction in one's overall well-being? More importantly, is there something about distrust itself (rather than the conditions that warrant it) that contributes to this reduction in well-being? In this essay, I explore these questions in depth. I explain what the costs of (...) distrust are and how they impede our well-being. I argue that the weakened development of trust through oppression has some important downstream consequences: namely, it requires the cultivation of skepticism as a virtue of distrust, which I argue should be included as one of Lisa Tessman's burdened virtues—those that are required for survival but that do not necessarily lead to the agent's flourishing. (shrink)

Background Trust is an essential phenomenon of relationship between patients and healthcare professionals and can be described as an accepted vulnerability to the power of another person over something that one cares about in virtue of goodwill toward the trustor. This characterization of interpersonal trust appears to be adequate for patients suffering from chronic illness. Trust is especially important in the context of chronic cardiovascular diseases as one of the main global health problems. Research Aim The purpose of the qualitative (...) study was to gain a deeper understanding of how people with chronic cardiovascular disease experience and make sense of trust in healthcare professionals. Research Design Eleven semi-structured interviews with participants analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis to explore in detail their lived experience of trust as a relational phenomenon. Participants and Research Context Participants with chronic cardiovascular disease were purposively recruited from inpatients on the cardiology ward of the university hospital located in central Slovakia. Ethical Considerations The study was approved by the faculty ethics committee. Participants gave their written informed consent. Findings Four Interrelated Group Experiential Themes Sense of co-existence; Belief in competence; Will to help; Ontological security with eight subthemes were identified. The findings describe the participants' experience with trust in healthcare professionals as a phenomenon of close co-existence, which is rooted in the participants’ vulnerability and dependence on the goodwill and competence of health professionals to help with the consequence of (re)establishing a sense of ontological security in the situation of chronic illness. Conclusion Findings will contribute to an in-depth understanding of trust as an existential dimension of human co-existence and an ethical requirement of healthcare practice, inspire patient empowerment interventions, support adherence to treatment, and person-centred care. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the concept of corrective trust as a pathway to mitigate biases, and potentially build or restore mutual trust in relationships characterized by power imbalances, particularly within the context of healthcare. Corrective trust takes place when we actively choose to trust others when our initial mistrust or hesitation to trust is due to biases. However, existing accounts of trust as a special form of reliance present challenges to practicing corrective trust. I propose a non-reductive account that (...) construes trust as a basic (i.e. irreducible to more basic concepts such as reliance) but complex (i.e. consists of cognitive, affective, and normative components) attitude, disentangling it from reliance and thus addressing associated challenges. This redefinition enables a deeper understanding of trust and facilitates the application of corrective trust to mitigate biases in healthcare and beyond. (shrink)

Despite an immense amount of literature on the topic of trust, there is still no account that offers a plausible epistemological framework for the phenomenon of reasonable trust. The main claim of this article is that reasonable trust and distrust are phenomena based upon practical knowledge, while non-reasonable trust and distrust result from dislocation of trust into different epistemic regimes. This dislocation can be observed in some of the influential theories such as cognitive and emotional accounts of trust and in (...) the accounts understanding trust as a form of faith. Added to that, theoretical approaches introducing a strong idea of basic trust preclude observing the difference between reasonable and non-reasonable trust. In this article, I argue that reasonable trust is founded upon practical knowledge which includes knowledge of integrity of the trusted person and knowledge about a similarity of worldviews of the trust giver and the trust receiver. Furthermore, I elaborate on the ways reasonable trust and distrust are being transformed and disfigured in other epistemic regimes. Drawing mainly upon Aristotelian understanding of practical knowledge, I want to show how non-reasonable trust and distrust are manifested in the phenomena of blind trust, unconditional trust and absolute doubt and explain why non-reasonable trust and distrust can hardly be distinguished from loyalty, subordination, infatuation or calculation. (shrink)

Demokratien geraten zunehmend unter Druck. Dabei wird die Bedeutung von Demokratie selbst zum Gegenstand der Auseinandersetzung. Diese Auseinandersetzungen nimmt der vorliegende Band zum Anlass, die Bedeutung von Demokratie grundsätzlich zu untersuchen. Mit dem Begriff der Konstituenzien sind dabei jene wesentlichen Bedingungen gemeint, die Demokratie ausmachen. Die meisten dieser Bedingungen sind normativ. Was Demokratie ist, wird auch und gerade dadurch bestimmt, was Demokratie sein sollte. Damit geht es um jene Normen, deren Verwirklichung politische Praktiken zu demokratischen Praktiken macht. Sind diese Normen (...) nur eingeschränkt verwirklicht, mindert sich der demokratische Gehalt von Politik. Inwieweit ist dann nun aber eigentlich der Fall? Und was können wir dagegen tun? Antworten auf diese Fragen geben einschlägige Vertreterinnen und Vertreter aus Philosophie, Politik- und Rechtswissenschaft. (shrink)