Trusting in order to inspire trustworthiness
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Trusting in order to inspire trustworthiness Michael Pace1 Received: 2 April 2020 / Accepted: 17 August 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This paper explores the epistemology and moral psychology of “therapeutic trust,” in which one trusts with the aim of inspiring greater trust-responsiveness in the trusted. Theorists have appealed to alleged cases of rational therapeutic trust to show that trust can be adopted for broadly moral or practical reasons and to motivate accounts of trust that do not involve belief or confidence in someone’s trustworthiness. Some conclude from the cases that trust consists in having normative expectations and adopting vulnerabilities with respect to the trusted; others that trust involves accepting (without necessarily believing) that someone will prove trustworthy. Although there are, I argue, some genuine cases of rational therapeutic trust, some prominent examples confuse trusting with entrusting and are actually counterexamples to the adopted vulnerabilities and acceptance accounts they have been taken to support. An alternative account, which construes trust in terms of being confident enough to take salient risks on someone’s trustworthiness, makes better sense of therapeutic trust. Keywords Trust · Trustworthiness · Epistemic reasons · Entrusting · Acceptance · Reliance
1 Introduction In a famous scene from Les Misérables, Bishop Myriel gives Jean Valjean a valuable set of silver that Valjean has been caught stealing, trusting him to use the gift to become an honest man. Although Valjean is not, at that time, the sort of person for whom such trust is warranted, Bishop Myriel’s trust inspires him to become the sort of person who is. The scene depicts the way that trust in others can inspire dramatic moral transformations. Powerful non-fiction cases are fairly easy to come by. Consider, for example, the way leaders of non-violent resistance movements, such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., trusted their followers to be capable of acts of extreme self-
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Michael Pace [email protected] Philosophy Department, Chapman University, One University Drive, Orange, CA 92866, USA
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sacrifice, and thereby inspired them to live up to the high expectations embodied in their trust. I suspect many readers can think of personal stories in the same key, when the trust of a parent, teacher, or mentor has inspired them to become the sort of person worthy of the trust given to them. That trust sometimes inspires greater trustworthiness is uncontroversial. More controversially, some philosophers have suggested that there are rational cases of “therapeutic trust,” in which one trusts with the explicit aim of inspiring trustworthiness— harnessing, as reasons for trust, considerations about how one’s own trust might inspire greater trust-responsiveness. Karen Jones suggests the following oft-cited example: [A] mother might trust her teenage daughter to look after the house for the weekend even though the daughter has failed in the past to meet such responsibilities with tru
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