PhilSoc Next Week
Matthew Maguire
Hi everyone,
The PhilSoc seminar next week (09/12) will be from Jennifer Munt! Please find the title and abstract below. As always, the seminar will be held in room 6.71 on the top floor of the RSSS from 3-4:30, and the zoom link can be found below the title and abstract.
Kind Regards,
Matt and Corey
Institutional Trustworthiness
In recent years, the ‘crisis of trust’ in institutions has been implicated in vaccine scepticism, declining support for democracy, and the rise of disinformation. Given this explanatory heavy lifting, we surely want our philosophers of trust to meaningfully engage with the debates on institutional trustworthiness unfolding elsewhere. Unfortunately, it seems like philosophers of trust have been caught in an apparent conflict: we might expand our conceptual taxonomy to include the possibility of institutions being trustworthy and join these debates, but in doing so risk stripping our notions of trust and trustworthiness of their interpersonal import.
In this paper, I argue that some institutions could count as trustworthy. On my view, trustworthiness requires the capacity to act in accordance with the normative expectations governing our mutually affirmed relationships, such that we can be held accountable for failing to meet those normative expectations. This seems like a very demanding requirement for institutions to meet. However, I argue that some group agents could be norm-responsive agents.
The result is an analysis that aligns with how institutional trustworthiness is treated in the political, social, and economic sciences: there is nothing conceptually incoherent about extending our notions of trust and trustworthiness to some institutions. However, like others in the philosophical literature, my analysis recognises that trust and trustworthiness are only part of the conceptual toolkit needed to understand institutional behaviour.
Zoom Link:
https://anu.zoom.us/j/82325020132?pwd=EQ32lxjAj5RPh6CkpxedvgTDpjaycJ.1
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