This chapter asks two questions about the ethics of expectations: one about the nature of expectations, and one about the wrongs of expectations. On the first question, expectations involve a rich constellation of attitudes ranging from beliefs to also include imaginings, hopes, fears, and dreams. As a result, sometimes expectations act like predictions, like your expectation of rain tomorrow, sometimes prescriptions, like the expectation that your students will do the reading, sometimes like proleptic reasons like the hope that your mentee (...) will flourish, and sometimes expectations are peremptory in that they carry the force of moral law. Turning to the second question, given the multiple roles played by expectations it shouldn’t be surprising that there are also multiple ways expectations can be wrong to hold. Sometimes they wrong as beliefs do, e.g., doxastic wronging, and sometimes they result in alienation because of who holds that expectation of us. The upshot of this chapter is that getting clear on these potential ways expectations can wrong not only delivers an ethics of expectations that mirrors familiar discussions of the ethics of belief, but an ethics of expectations further opens the door for taking seriously an ethics of mental attitudes more generally. (shrink)

How may human agents come to trust artificial agents? At present, since the trust involved is non-normative, this would seem to be a slow process, depending on the outcomes of the transactions. Some more options may soon become available though. As debated in the literature, humans may meet bots as they are embedded in an institution. If they happen to trust the institution, they will also trust them to have tried out and tested the machines in their back corridors; as (...) a consequence, they approach the robots involved as being trustworthy. Properly speaking, users rely on the overall accountability of the institution. Besides this option we explore some novel ways for trust development: trust becomes normatively laden and thereby the mechanism of exclusive reliance on the normative force of trust may come into play - the efficacy of which has already been proven for persons meeting face-to-face or over the Internet. For one thing, machines may evolve into moral machines, or machines skilled in the art of deception. While both developments might seem to facilitate proper trust and turn as-if trust into a feasible option, they are hardly to be taken seriously. For another, the new trend in robotics is towards coactivity between human and machine operators in a team. Inside the team trust is a necessity for smooth operations. In support of this, humans in particular need to be able to develop and maintain accurate mental models of their machine counterparts. Nevertheless, the trust involved is bound to remain non-normative. It is argued, though, that excellent opportunities exist to build relations of trust toward outside users who are pondering their reliance on the coactive team. The task of managing this trust has to be allotted to human operators of the team, who operate as linking pin between the outside world and the team. Since the robotic team has now been turned into an anthropomorphic team, users may well develop normative trust towards them; correspondingly, trusting the team in as-if fashion becomes feasible. (shrink)

Open-source communities that focus on content rely squarely on the contributions of invisible strangers in cyberspace. How do such communities handle the problem of trusting that strangers have good intentions and adequate competence? This question is explored in relation to communities in which such trust is a vital issue: peer production of software (FreeBSD and Mozilla in particular) and encyclopaedia entries (Wikipedia in particular). In the context of open-source software, it is argued that trust was inferred from an underlying ‘hacker (...) ethic’, which already existed. The Wikipedian project, by contrast, had to create an appropriate ethic along the way. In the interim, the assumption simply had to be that potential contributors were trustworthy; they were granted ‘substantial trust’. Subsequently, projects from both communities introduced rules and regulations which partly substituted for the need to perceive contributors as trustworthy. They faced a design choice in the continuum between a high-discretion design (granting a large amount of trust to contributors) and a low-discretion design (leaving only a small amount of trust to contributors). It is found that open-source designs for software and encyclopaedias are likely to converge in the future towards a mid-level of discretion. In such a design the anonymous user is no longer invested with unquestioning trust. (shrink)

Open-content communities that focus on co-creation without requirements for entry have to face the issue of institutional trust in contributors. This research investigates the various ways in which these communities manage this issue. It is shown that communities of open-source software—continue to—rely mainly on hierarchy (reserving write-access for higher echelons), which substitutes (the need for) trust. Encyclopedic communities, though, largely avoid this solution. In the particular case of Wikipedia, which is confronted with persistent vandalism, another arrangement has been pioneered instead. (...) Trust (i.e. full write-access) is ‘backgrounded’ by means of a permanent mobilization of Wikipedians to monitor incoming edits. Computational approaches have been developed for the purpose, yielding both sophisticated monitoring tools that are used by human patrollers, and bots that operate autonomously. Measures of reputation are also under investigation within Wikipedia; their incorporation in monitoring efforts, as an indicator of the trustworthiness of editors, is envisaged. These collective monitoring efforts are interpreted as focusing on avoiding possible damage being inflicted on Wikipedian spaces, thereby being allowed to keep the discretionary powers of editing intact for all users. Further, the essential differences between backgrounding and substituting trust are elaborated. Finally it is argued that the Wikipedian monitoring of new edits, especially by its heavy reliance on computational tools, raises a number of moral questions that need to be answered urgently. (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)

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)

Hope is crucial human agency, but its fragility grounds a substantive challenge to Christian belief. It is not clear how a perfectly loving God could permit despairinducing experiences of divine silence. Drawing upon a distinctively Christian psychology of hope, this paper seeks to address this challenge. I contend that divine silence can act as a corrective to misplaced natural hopes. But there are risks in God’s choice to allow a person to lose all natural hope. Thus, if God is perfectly (...) loving, God ought to find a way to demonstrate goodness to those who are tempted by theological despair. I argue that the Church demonstrates God’s goodness through its merciful care and hope for the afflicted. The local community can act to sustain or recover a person’s capacity to remain open to the gift of hope even in the midst of divine silence. (shrink)

Analyses of the theological virtue of hope tend to focus on its interior dispositional structure, shifting attention away from the social dimensions crucial to its formation and exercise. We argue that one can better appreciate the place of hope in Christian thought by attending to communal features that have been peripheral to or excluded from traditional analyses. To this end, we employ resources from the literature on the extended mind and group agency to develop an account of the theological virtue (...) of hope as a socially extended virtue—that is, a virtue scaffolded by and enacted within a community whose practices are ordered toward a shared conception of human flourishing. (shrink)

Hope is a ubiquitous feature of human experience, but there has been relatively little scholarship within contemporary analytic philosophy devoted to the systematic analysis of its nature and value. In the last decade, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in the study of hope and, in particular, its role in human agency. This scholarly attention reflects an ambivalence about hope's effects. While the possession of hope can have salutary consequences, it can also make the agent vulnerable to certain (...) kinds of personal risk. The pervasiveness of hope is not a sign of its quality; only a well‐tuned hope can be a virtue. Recently, Nancy Snow has argued that hope can be an intellectual virtue. Framing her account as a contribution to regulative epistemology, she contends that the intellectual virtue of hope can (i) motivate the pursuit of important epistemic ends, (ii) create dispositions that enable the successful pursuit of these aims, and (iii) generate a method for enduring intellectual projects. In this paper, I provide a critical appraisal of Snow's account of hope as an intellectual virtue. One important implication of this critique is that hope can function as an intellectual virtue only to the extent that it has benefitted from the correcting and perfecting influence of other cognitive excellences. (shrink)

In this paper, I will identify two problems of trust in an AI-relevant context: a theoretical problem and a practical one. I will identify and address a number of skeptical challenges to an AI-relevant theory of trust. In addition, I will identify what I shall term the ‘scope challenge’, which I take to hold for any AI-relevant theory of trust that purports to be representationally adequate to the multifarious forms of trust and AI. Thereafter, I will suggest how trust-engineering, a (...) position that is intermediate between the modified pure rational-choice account and an account that gives rise to trustworthy AI, might allow us to address the practical problem of trust, before identifying and critically evaluating two candidate trust-engineering approaches. (shrink)

Trusting relationships are both valuable and risky. Where the risks are high and the fears of betrayal are also high, it might seem rational to try to mitigate the risks, while still enjoying the benefits of the trusting relationship, by forming a contingency plan. A contingency plan—in the sense I am interested in—involves contingent punishments for defection, which are primarily meant to encourage the trusted partner to act trustworthily. I argue, however, that such contingency plans suffer from an internal tension (...) wherein the contingency planner both seeks and undermines a particular level (or kind) of trust. There are two problems in particular, either of which is sufficient to undermine trusting relationships: one, the planner fails to see the trusted partner as sincerely engaged in the trusting relationship, and two, the planner separates herself out from the trusting relationship by seeing her flourishing as separate from her partner’s (or, even worse, as dependent on her partner’s harm). Continency plans, then, are not just about the future; they cast a moral shadow on what we are doing now. (shrink)

When the odds of achieving world peace seem so long, do hopes for peace amount to anything more than wishful thinking? In this paper, I introduce the idea of meaningful hope, which can help us to u...

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.

It is argued that trust is a performative kind and that the evaluative normativity of trust is a special case of the evaluative normativity of performances generally. The view is shown to have advantages over competitor views, e.g., according to which good trusting is principally a matter of good believing (e.g., Hieronymi, 2008; McMyler, 2011), or good affect (e.g., Baier, 1986; Jones, 1996), or good conation (e.g., Holton, 1994). Moreover, the view can be easily extended to explain good (and bad) (...) distrust, where the latter is understood as aimed (narrow-scoped) forbearance from trusting. The overarching framework—which assimilates the evaluative norms of trusting (and distrusting) to performance-theoretic norms—supplies us with an entirely new lens to view traditional philosophical problems about what is involved in trusting and distrusting well and badly, and thus, places our capacity to make progress on problems in this area on a new footing. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

In this article, I lend support to Miranda Fricker's work in social epistemology from a post-Kantian point of view. In Epistemic Injustice: Power and The Ethics of Knowing, Fricker writes that, at times, social power, rather than the actual possession of knowledge, determines whether a speaker is believed (Fricker, 2007, 1-2). I will develop Miranda Fricker's project in feminist epistemology by examining the post-Kantian linguistic sign with a view to showing how G.W.F. Hegel and Jacques Derrida transform the Kantian analytic/synthetic (...) contrast in their semiologies. Epistemic injustice arises not only from cultural stereotypes and impoverished categories of identity but, also, from the dynamic way that language generates meaning. (shrink)

This paper discusses the prospects of a comprehensive philosophical account of promising that relies centrally on the notion of trust. I lay out the core idea behind the Trust View, showing how it convincingly explains the normative contours and the unique value of our promissory practice. I then sketch three distinct options of how the Trust View can explain the normativity of promises. First, an effect based-view, second, a view drawing on a wider norm demanding respect to those whom one (...) has invited to something, and finally, as a new suggestion, a Normative Interest View. This view holds that promising is a normative power that serves our interest in facilitating or enabling the relationship of trust between promisor and promisee. I argue that only those embracing the third view can fully account for the distinctive obligation that results from the giving of a valid promise in all cases. (shrink)

In most testimonial transactions between adults, the hearer’s obligation is to accord the speaker a level of credibility that matches the evidence that what she is saying is true. When the speaker...

Persuasive design draws on our basic psychological makeup to build products that make our engagement with them habitual. It uses variable rewards, creates Fear of Missing Out, and leverages social approval to incrementally increase and maintain user engagement. Social media and networking platforms, video games, and slot machines are all examples of persuasive technologies. Recent attention has focused on the dangers of PD: It can deceptively prod users into forming habits that help the company’s bottom line but not the user’s (...) wellbeing. But PD is not inherently immoral. We can take advantage of our psychological biases to make beneficial changes in ways that enhance our agency rather than limit it. Knowing that a tool is persuasively designed is a consideration in favor of using it when we are trying to break bad habits, such as smoking. How are we to conceptually distinguish between ethical and unethical uses of PD? In this paper, I argue that unethical uses of PD betray or erode our trust. Annette Baier offers a moral test for trust: If gaining knowledge about what other parties do with our trust in them would lead us to stop trusting, then that trusting relationship is immoral. I apply this test to the case of PD. Using trust as a litmus test for ferreting out unethical PD has several advantages, one of which is that it reveals how the harm of unethical PD extends beyond the individual to her wider social network. I close the paper by investigating these cascading effects. (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 kind of mental state is trust? It seems to have features that can lead one to think that it is a doxastic state but also features that can lead one to think that it is a non-doxastic state. This has even lead some philosophers to think that trust is a unique mental state that has both mind-to-world and world-to-mind direction of fit, or to give up on the idea that there is a univocal analysis of trust to be had. (...) Here, I propose that ‘trust’ is the name we give to mental states that we would think of as beliefs if belief was to be thought of in ‘pragmatist’ terms and belief resists ‘pragmatist’ treatment. Only such an account, I argue, can univocally account for all the diverse features of trust. As such, I also propose that the explanation of trust provides us with a case for understanding the limitations of a comprehensively ‘pragmatist’, or ‘Neo-Wittgensteinian’ conception of the mental. (shrink)

Bioethicists often draw sharp distinctions between hope and states like denial, self-deception, and unrealistic optimism. But what, exactly, is the difference between hope and its more suspect cousins? One common way of drawing the distinction focuses on accuracy of belief about the desired outcome: Hope, though perhaps sometimes misplaced, does not involve inaccuracy in the way that these other states do. Because inaccurate beliefs are thought to compromise informed decision making, bioethicists have considered these states to be ones where intervention (...) is needed either to correct the person’s mental state or to persuade the person to behave differently, or even to deny the person certain options. In this article, we argue that it is difficult to determine whether a patient is really in denial, self-deceived, or unrealistically optimistic. Moreover, even when we are confident that beliefs are unrealistic, they are not always as harmful as critics contend. As a result, we need to be more permissive in our approach to patients who we believe are unrealistically optimistic, in denial, or self-deceived—that is, unless patients significantly misunderstand their situation and thus make decisions that are clearly bad for them, we should not intervene by trying to change their mental states or persuade them to behave differently, or by paternalistically denying them certain options. (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)

Trust, as a philosophical concept in education, seems largely taken for granted, either because it is embedded in other discourses, or is self-evidently assumed to be one on which there is general agreement and understanding. Its associated notions, such as confidence and belief, have counters in such concepts as disappointment and betrayal. These various notions come to the fore in interpersonal relations that require openness and self-critique. Critically reflective practice in professional teaching contexts is one such example, where openness means (...) that people involved may experience vulnerability. I will argue that the development of critically reflective practice is impossible in the absence of trust, and will take the position that trust requires the trustor to be vulnerable to betrayal. I draw on some findings of an ongoing research study in a selection of New Zealand schools, during which I have found that many participants attempt to connect reflective practice to appraisal, a move which, in light of what I present in relation to trust, I argue should be resisted. (shrink)

I propose an account of how our forward-looking moral and epistemic responsibility practices arose, how they related to backward-looking responsibility practices, and what makes them stable. This account differs in several ways from prominent theories already in the literature. Traditionally, forward-looking accounts of responsibility are framed third-personally in terms of social control and neglect the perspective and agency of the responsible person. The account I develop allows that there are third-personal, control-based aspects of our responsibility practices, but it also makes (...) room for the first-personal perspective of the responsible agent and emphasizes the role of partner choice and cooperative planning and action. Whereas existing research focuses on forward-looking accounts of the practice of holding others responsible, I offer an account of forward-looking practices of taking responsibility and assigning responsibility. I hope thereby to provide a richer and more plausible framework in which to think about responsibility and our practices related to it. (shrink)

In Naked, Krista K. Thomason offers a multifaceted account of shame, covering its nature as an emotion, its positive and negative roles in moral life, its association with violence, and its provoca...

An epistemic agent A is a false epistemic authority for others iff they falsely believe A to be in a position to help them accomplish their epistemic ends. A major divide exists between what I call "epistemic quacks", who falsely believe themselves to be relevantly competent, and "epistemic charlatans", i.e., false authorities who believe or even know that they are incompetent. Both types of false authority do not cover what Lackey (2021) calls "predatory experts": experts who systematically misuse their social-epistemic (...) status as a cover for predatory behavior. Qua experts, predatory experts are competent and thus could (and maybe sometimes do) help their clients. But should we count them as genuine epistemic authorities? No, I argue, they are false epistemic authorities because, in addition to their practical and moral misconduct, such experts systematically deceive their clients, thereby thwarting the clients’ epistemic ends. (shrink)

In this paper, I describe some of what I take to be the more interesting features of friendship, then explore the extent to which other virtues can be reconstructed as sharing those features. I use trustworthiness as my example throughout, but I think that other virtues such as generosity & gratitude, pride & respect, and the producer’s & consumer’s sense of humor can also be analyzed with this model. The aim of the paper is not to demonstrate that all moral (...) virtues are exactly like friendship in all important respects, but rather to articulate a fruitful model in which to explore the virtues. Section 2 explores the relational nature of friendship, drawing on Aristotle’s discussion of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics. Section 3 catalogues four motivations for taking seriously the friendship model of virtue. Section 4 applies the friendship model in depth to the virtue of trustworthiness. (shrink)

Justified trust is rationally permitted trust; wise trust is excellent trust. Excellent (dis)trust is always justified (dis)trust, but the reverse is not true. You can be justified in distrusting someone and yet it be wise for you to trust. Contrary to folk saying, wisdom does not favour distrust ahead of trust. This paper explores what it takes to be wise in entering, maintaining, modifying and exiting trust relations. Wisdom is socially scaffolded, including by distributed networks of distrust that make local (...) trust wise. (shrink)

A summary of the philosophical literature on trust.

We explore our role as researchers and witnesses in the context of an emerging partnership with the Penelakut Tribe, the aim of which is to locate the unmarked graves of children who died while attending the notorious Kuper Island Indian Residential School on their territory (southwest British Columbia). This relationship is in the process of taking shape, so we focus on understanding conditions for developing trust, and the interactional expertise necessary to work well together, with a good heart. We suggest (...) that, in some respects, this may be usefully understood as a practice of witnessing on several dimensions. (shrink)

One of the main difficulties in assessing artificial intelligence (AI) is the tendency for people to anthropomorphise it. This becomes particularly problematic when we attach human moral activities to AI. For example, the European Commission’s High-level Expert Group on AI (HLEG) have adopted the position that we should establish a relationship of trust with AI and should cultivate trustworthy AI (HLEG AI Ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI, 2019, p. 35). Trust is one of the most important and defining activities in (...) human relationships, so proposing that AI should be trusted, is a very serious claim. This paper will show that AI cannot be something that has the capacity to be trusted according to the most prevalent definitions of trust because it does not possess emotive states or can be held responsible for their actions—requirements of the affective and normative accounts of trust. While AI meets all of the requirements of the rational account of trust, it will be shown that this is not actually a type of trust at all, but is instead, a form of reliance. Ultimately, even complex machines such as AI should not be viewed as trustworthy as this undermines the value of interpersonal trust, anthropomorphises AI, and diverts responsibility from those developing and using them. (shrink)

Free, open access book from Oxford University Press at link below. Democracy is struggling in America. Citizens increasingly feel cynical about our system and doubt they can influence public policy. Distrustful of other Americans and elected officials, some are even turning to authoritarian alternatives. Hyperpartisanship and recent contentious presidential elections have deepened political despair. While some citizens get swept up in optimism during campaign cycles, they often later find themselves frustrated with elected leaders as they wait for change. This book (...) seeks to revive democracy by teaching citizens how to hope. Hope animates life in a democracy, moving citizens forward through new challenges, new ideas, and new experiments. The form of hope described in this book is more than just a campaign slogan or a self-help program, it is an informed call to citizen engagement that opens new possibilities for our country. Drawing on examples from life in America today and pragmatist philosophy, this book explains how schools can cultivate hope through our habits and how action in our communities can sustain hope. It shows how we can build trust, grow political agency, and shape an improved American identity through hoping together. This book provides guidance for learning how to hope in schools, universities, and civil society. It describes what hope is, why it matters to democracy, and how to teach it. (shrink)

O presente Volume é a primeira obra publicado no Brasil que trata acerca da Epistemologia Social.

Hope takes on a particularly important role in end of life situations. Sustaining hope can have considerable benefits for the quality of life and any prospect of a good death for the dying. However, it has proved difficult to adequately account for hope when dying, particularly in some of the more extreme end of life situations. Standard secular accounts of hope struggle to establish how the fostering of hope may be possible in such situations. This leads to a practical ethical (...) dilemma for those caring for the dying, the ‘paradox of hope’, whereby one can either help maintain the welfare of the dying by generating a misleading ‘false hope’ or maintain truthfulness and concede that hope is not possible. These two problems combine to leave individuals the prospect of dying in terrible circumstances facing only despair. To address this, I argue that we should look beyond standard intentional or dispositional accounts of hope in such cases and treat hope as a cluster concept. Rather than appeal to a unitary conception, what we precisely mean by ‘hope’ may therefore vary depending on the context of use. I outline an account of hope based on Marcel’s account of ‘absolute’ hope but offering an alternative, secular foundation based on solidarity that can explain how hope when dying in extreme circumstances is possible. Hence, where the more familiar accounts break-down in these circumstances, ‘hope talk’ may still be possible if it is seen as relying on this conception of hope. (shrink)

In The Revenge of Gaia, James Lovelock provides a memorable description of what the future might hold for us in a world severely blighted by climate change. In this scenario the human population has been pushed to the high Northern latitudes: Meanwhile in the hot arid world survivors gather for the journey to the new Arctic centres of civilization; I see them in the desert as the dawn breaks and the sun throws its piercing gaze across the horizon at the (...) camp. The cool fresh night air lingers for a while and then, like smoke, dissipates as the heat takes charge. Their camel wakes, blinks and slowly rises on her haunches. The few remaining members of the tribe mount. She belches, and sets off on the long .. (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.

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)

ABSTRACT Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke argue that virtue signalling – saying things in order to improve or protect your moral reputation – has a range of bad consequences and that as such there is a strong moral presumption against engaging in it. I argue that virtue signalling also has a range of good consequences, and that as such there is no default presumption either for or against engaging in it. Following from this, I argue that given that virtue signalling (...) is sometimes bad and sometimes good, we should avoid virtue signalling when we can be confident that the consequences will be bad, and we should press on with signalling when we can be confident that the consequences will be good. For the most part, I focus on three good consequences that are related to trusting dispositions: signalling trustworthiness, avoiding distrust, and scaffolding self-trust. I also highlight some additional positive consequences that are unrelated to trust. (shrink)

I develop an account of the nature and value of being supportive in interpersonal relationships. In particular, I argue that the virtue of being supportive, construed as a modally demanding value, facilitates the autonomy of one's intimate and promotes a sense of unity in one's relationship. Moreover, the practice of being supportive plays an important role with regard to the familiar need to reconcile the normative demands of one's own projects with one's responsibilities to intimates.

When blame is understood to be emotion-based or affective, its emotional tone is standardly identified as one of anger. We argue that this conception of affective blame is overly restrictive. By attending to cases of blame that emerge against a background of a particular kind of hope invested in others, we identify a blaming response characterized not by anger but by sadness: reactive disappointment. We develop an account of reactive disappointment as affective blame, maintaining that while angry blame and disappointed (...) blame are both condemnatory responses, they have distinct evaluative foci and occupy different but complementary roles in our accountability practices. (shrink)

In this article I argue that often propositional knowledge is acquired and retained by extensive reliance on physical and social scaffolds that create an environment or niche conducive to knowledge. It is incumbent on epistemologists to subject these aids to epistemic assessments. I show that several of the activities involved in the creation of niches within which inquiry can thrive are carried out by whole cultures. New generations benefit from inheriting these niches whilst being able to improve upon them to (...) the advantage of their descendants. Finally, I highlight that the growth of human epistemic achievements is often due to increased outsourcing of cognitive effort and epistemic powers onto impersonal physical and social structures so that human beings can succeed more by contributing less to the solution of problems. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to better qualify the problem of online trust. The problem of online trust is that of evaluating whether online environments have the proper design to enable trust. This paper tries to better qualify this problem by showing that there is no unique answer, but only conditional considerations that depend on the conception of trust assumed and the features that are included in the environments themselves. In fact, the major issue concerning traditional debates surrounding online (...) trust is that those debates focus on specific definitions of trust and specific online environments. Ordinarily, a definition of trust is assumed and then environmental conditions necessary for trust are evaluated with respect to such specific definition. However, this _modus operandi_ fails to appreciate that trust is a rich concept, with a multitude of meanings and that there is still no strict consensus on which meaning shall be taken as the proper one. Moreover, the fact that online environments are constantly evolving and that new design features might be implemented in them is completely ignored. In this paper, the richness of the philosophical discussions about trust is brought into the analysis of online trust. I first provide a set of conditions that depend on the definition of trust that can be assumed and then discuss those conditions with respect to the design of online environments in order to determine whether they can enable (and under which circumstances) trust. (shrink)

Despite their many similarities, one apparent difference between the ethics of K.E. Løgstrup and Emmanuel Levinas concerns trust: Levinas does not analyse trust as a morally significant phenomenon, whereas Løgstrup makes it a central component of his moral phenomenology. This paper argues that an analysis of Løgstrupian trust nonetheless reveals at least three important commonalities between Levinas and Løgstrup’s moral projects: an understanding of war and ethics as metaphysical opposites; an emphasis on openness to the other as something that transcends (...) the prudential order of norms and laws; and a view of the ethical as that which breaks into and disrupts the order of human instrumental calculation. (shrink)

A few years ago, it was common for philosophers to begin inquiry into hope by noting that the subject has received little attention in the philosophical literature. But our ability to make this claim is quickly coming to an end; hope has been earning increasing recognition in the discipline, with philosophers exploring important questions related to the nature of hope, what makes hope rational, and how hope is connected to human wellbeing and agency. Despite this recent interest, however, there remains (...) very little discussion of the social and political dimensions of hope. My aim in this paper is to demonstrate the importance of a feminist perspective in bringing these dimensions into fuller view. I argue that feminist insights into the relational nature of the self, which call attention to where selves are socially situated in relation to others, enable a richer understanding of the nature and value of hope. (shrink)

I argue that while every betrayal is a breach of trust, not every breach of trust is a betrayal. I defend a conception of trust as primarily a feature of behaviour (i.e. trusting behaviour) and only secondarily a feature of a mental attitude. So it is possible to have the attitude of distrust towards someone while still trusting them in the way you behave. This makes sense of the possibility of Judas Iscariot breaching Jesus’ trust, and so betraying him, even (...) though Jesus presumably knew that Judas would do just that. This conception of trust may be spelt out in terms of making oneself reliant on somebody in a collaboration with them. Such collaborations include relationships like friendships and love affairs, as well as political activities or defending one’s country against aggression. I argue that only when these collaborations involve a commitment to loyalty is a breach of trust a betrayal. And loyalty is a feature of those collaborations or relationships that exclude others – us/them collaborations. (shrink)