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)

J. M. Bernstein argues that to capture the depths of the harm of torture, we need to do away with the idea that we possess intrinsic and inviolable worth. If personhood is inviolable, then torture can inflict only apparent harm on our standing as persons. Bernstein claims that torture is a paradigm of moral injury because it causes what he calls “devastation”: The victim experiences an actual degradation of his or her personhood. Bernstein argues that our value is given to (...) us through mutual recognition and hence can be lost. In this paper, I argue that if our human value can be lost, then it first must be built up. If it must be built up, then the question of our status before the building begins must be answered. Bernstein faces a problem of human beings who fall outside relations of mutual recognition and hence are valueless. His best option for answering this problem is to point to the centrality of the body in his account of recognition, but doing so reveals a notion of intrinsic worth implicit in his account. I call for a revision of Bernstein's account that can hold on to devastation without eschewing intrinsic worth. (shrink)

(2002). Normativity as the Key to Objectivity: An Exploration of Robert Brandom's Articulating Reasons. Inquiry: Vol. 45, No. 3, pp. 373-391.

Following the lead of Annette Baier, this essay argues that trust relations provide the ethical substance of everyday living. When A trusts B, A unreflectively allows B to approach sufficiently close so as to be able to harm A. In order for this to be possible, A practically presupposes that B perceives A as a person and will hence act accordingly. Trust relations are relations of mutual recognition in which we acknowledge our mutual standing and vulnerability with respect to one (...) another. A robust account of trust assumes: first, trust relations are primary and practical, and while monitored by reason, they are not rationally constituted; second, trust can sustain its practical primacy over moral reason because it is developmentally prior to reason; and third, trust relations can be the bearers of our worth and vulnerability because they are the developmental products of first love. (shrink)

It is common in popular depictions to portray the attitude of trusting and the norms associated with rationality as standing in some kind of tension. In this article, we suggest a way of capturing this tension, and explore some recent attempts at resolving it.

This dissertation is a philosophical contribution to the theories on trust and on risk communication. The importance of trust in risk communication has been argued for and empirically studied since the 80s. However, there is little agreement on the notion of trust and the precise function of trust. This thesis sets out to study both aspects from a philosophical point of view. The dissertation consists of five essays and an introduction. Essay I is a comment on risk perception theory and (...) the psychometric model in particular. The essay argues that sometimes individuals take risks simply because they are in a vulnerable position and have no other choice. Four factors are identified as crucial in risks from vulnerability: poor outset conditions, lack of reasonable options, hope and liability to disinformation. Essay II addresses the democratic approach to risk communication and the ideal of risk communication as a dialogue between more or less equal stakeholders. The essay develops a typology of different risk communication practices and influence distributions and concludes that the form of risk communication most commonly referred to in the literature is of the most imbalanced kind where all three types of influence falls to the same party. Essay III argues that trust can be understood as comfortable defocusing. Trust as comfortable defocusing means that when a person trusts, he or she is comfortable with letting certain things be in the hands or in the control of the trusted other. Departing from this idea a definition of trust is proposed consisting of three elements: the truster’s comfortable defocusing from the trusted person’s part of caring for X, based on a belief about the trusted person’s care for X, concerning something of concern to the truster. Essay IV explores the concept of trustworthiness and under which conditions trust can be betrayed in a morally justified way. It is argued that two aspects are essential for every reasonable notion of trustworthiness: reliability in terms of commitment to trust and predictability in terms of compliance with norms. In order to be untrustworthy in a morally justified way two major conditions need to be fulfilled: first, what is expected from the trustee needs to be either immoral or part of an ongoing immoral or unjust relationship between truster and trustee and, secondly, the trustee must not be in a position to explicitly reject trust. Essay V examines two of the most employed distinctions within the trust literature, that of trust/confidence and of trust/reliance. These distinctions are evaluated against a set of five criteria. It is argued that both these distinctions are employed to cover several distinguishing properties, thus adding to conceptual confusion. (shrink)

Article Title: ‘Being and Becoming in the Theory of Group Agency’This paper explores a bootstrapping puzzle which appears to afflict Philip Pettit’s theory of group agency. Pettit claims that the corporate persons recognised by his theory come about when a set of individuals ‘gets its act together’ by undertaking to reason at the collective level. But this is puzzling, because it is hard to see how the step such a collective must take to become a group agent – the collectivisation (...) of reason – can be taken without them already being an agent. I explore this puzzle by recounting Pettit’s account of the emergence of group agents. According to Pettit this process has two stages: a first stage in which a collective incurs the distinctive pressure exemplified by the Doctrinal Paradox, and a second in which the collective responds to that pressure by instituting decision-making mechanisms designed to secure collective rationality. After arguing that this second, response stage in Pettit’s account is not coherent, I conclude with the tentative suggestion that the personhood of groups should be seen as depending not only on the efforts of group members but also on the recognitive attitudes of other persons in a wider discursive community. (shrink)