Gründe für Vertrauen, Vertrauenswürdigkeit und Kompetenz

One reason that trust is interesting for philosophers is that there are reasons for trust. We want to know when it is appropriate to trust other people, because trusting foolishly can be dangerous. The paper argues that there are two competing ways of understanding reasons of trust – a non-voluntarist and a voluntarist way. On the non-voluntarist picture, reasons for trust are associated with the trustworthiness of another person. On the voluntarist picture, you can appropriately trust another person without judging her to be trustworthy. In the paper a case is made against the voluntarist interpretation. At the same time it is argued that non-voluntarist theories of trust are faced with a particular problem. This problem has to do with the assumption that in order to appropriately trust another person you have to judge her competent in the relevant area of interaction. It is argued that this competence assumption should not be understood as a necessary condition for trustworthiness but rather as a necessary condition for mere reliability. Doing so helps to solve problems associated with trust in medicine ethics and political philosophy, and it opens up new perspectives for theories of trust.