Katrina Kish
University of Connecticut
Trust blossoms naturally from caring relationships. We tend to trust those who we think care about us, and who we care about too. Annette Baier’s most insightful contribution to theorizing trust is that it is about care, though this is far from her most influential contribution. Baier’s most influential contribution is her argument distinguishing mere reliance from genuine trust based on the respective differences in our reactive attitudes towards disappointment. While disappointed reliance triggers feelings of frustration or embarrassment, disappointed trust triggers feelings of betrayal. The difference in our reaction belies a difference in our attitudes.
Baier’s focus on trust and its distinctive reactive attitude, betrayal, is often further developed into an account of trust as an attitude of normative expectation. For instance, on Karen Jones’s 2004 account, trust requires that the truster maintain normative expectations that the entrusted person will follow through for them. Betrayal is elicited by failed trust because the truster’s normative expectations were not met. For example, if Julie trusts Raquel not to throw a party, then Julie expects Raquel not to throw a party. Julie’s expectation carries normative force such that Raquel feels she ought not throw a party. Though normative expectations accounts advance our understanding of how norms govern reliance, these accounts fail to attend to Baier’s insight that trust is about care and caretaking. Rather than requiring trusters to believe that those they rely on care about them and that they are motivated by this care, normative expectations accounts require trusters to believe that those they rely on feel obligated to fulfill an entrusted task and that they are motivated by this sense of obligation.
In this paper, I defend a version of Baier’s good will condition on trust as a kind of caring. Along the way, I explore three commonly proposed conditions on trust: trusting only those appropriately motivated, trusting only those who are competent, and trusting only those who we have a disposition to rely on. I conclude by providing a modified analysis of Baier’s account of trust as reliance on another person’s competence and good will, understood as a willingness to take care of the truster’s interests in their place.
Chair: Ugur Yilmazel
Time: September 6th, 15:20-15:50
Location: SR 1.005
SOPhiA 2026 