'Trusting-to' and 'trusting-as' : a qualitative account of trustworthiness
Abstract
Philosophical accounts of trustworthiness typically define trustworthiness as an agent being reliable in virtue of a specific motivation such as goodwill. The underlying thought motivating this view is that to be trustworthy is to be more than merely reliable. If motivational accounts are correct, this is a problem for non-motivational accounts of trustworthiness, as motivations are not required for trustworthiness. In this paper, I defend the non-motivational approach to trustworthiness and show that the motivational approach is inadequate. I do this by making a novel distinction between trusting-to and trusting-as relations. A trusting-to relation is a relation in which a trustor ‘X’ trusts the trustee ‘Y’ to do something. Trusting-as relations are an overlooked relation implicit in all trusting-to relations. They describe the social relationship that holds between X and Y. I will argue that trusting-as relations determine whether any specific motivations are required for trustworthiness trusting-to relations. Thus, I show that acknowledging trusting-as relations enables us to provide a satisfactory explanation of the motivation intuition without making specific motivations constitutive features of trust.
Citation
Kelsall , J J C 2022 , ' 'Trusting-to' and 'trusting-as' : a qualitative account of trustworthiness ' , Inquiry - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy , vol. Latest Articles . https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2022.2075456
Publication
Inquiry - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0020-174XType
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
Description
This research was supported by generous funding from the Society for Applied Philosophy’s Doctoral Bursary awards.Collections
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