Partiality and prejudice in trusting

Katherine Hawley

pp. 2029-2045

in: Nikolaj Pedersen, Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij, Klemens Kappel (eds), Rational trust, Synthese 191 (9), 2014.

Abstract

You can trust your friends. You should trust your friends. Not all of your friends all of the time: you can reasonably trust different friends to different degrees, and in different domains. Still, we often trust our friends, and it is often reasonable to do so. Why is this? In this paper I explore how and whether friendship gives us reasons to trust our friends, reasons which may outstrip or conflict with our epistemic reasons. In the final section, I will sketch some related questions concerning trust based on the trustee’s race, gender, or other social identity.