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I present and defend an account of three-place trustworthiness according to which B is trustworthy with respect to A in domain of interaction D, if and only if she is competent with respect to that domain, and she would take the fact that A is counting on her, were A to do so in this domain, to be a compelling reason for acting as counted on. This is not the whole story of trustworthiness, however, for we want those we can (...) count on to identify themselves so that we can place our trust wisely. (shrink)
Just as testimony is affected by unjust social relations, so too is intellectual self-trust. I defend an account of intellectual self-trust that explains both why it is properly thought of as trust and why it is directed at the self, and explore its relationship to social power. Intellectual self-trust is neither a matter of having dispositions to rely on one?s epistemic methods and mechanisms, nor having a set of beliefs about which ones are reliable. Instead, it is a stance that (...) an agent takes towards her own cognitive methods and mechanisms, comprising both cognitive and affective elements. Our intellectual self-trust is created and sustained socially and is thus porous to social power. Unjust social relations cause epistemic injustice, which undermines self-trust among the underprivileged; unjust social relations cause excessive self-trust among the privileged, which perpetuates epistemic injustice, which further undermines the self-trust of the disadvantaged in a vicious feedback loop. I conclude by exploring ways in which socially distorted intellectual self-trust can become better calibrated. (shrink)
Prinz claims that empirical work on emotions and moral judgement can help us resolve longstanding metaethical disputes in favour of simple sentimentalism. I argue that the empirical evidence he marshals does not have the metaethical implications he claims: the studies purporting to show that having an emotion is sufficient for making a moral judgement are tendentiously described. We are entitled to ascribe competence with moral concepts to experimental subjects only if we suppose that they would withdraw their moral judgement on (...) learning that they were fully explained by hypnotically induced disgust. Genuine moral judgements must be reason-responsive. To capture the reason-responsiveness of moral judgement, we must turn to either neo-sentimentalism or to a non-sentimentalist metaethics, either of which is fully compatible with the empirical evidence Prinz cites. (shrink)
Karen Jones (2004). Trust and Terror. In Peggy DesAutels & Margaret Urban Walker (eds.), Moral Psychology: Feminist Ethics and Social Theory. Rowman & Littlefield.
This paper considers the relationship between scientific rationality and emotional value in determining ideas about canine biology in North America. While science has been assumed to be objective, unassailable and devoid of value judgments, esoteric theories concerning wild predators have changed radically over time. Biologists acted as important agents in the campaign to eradicate Canis lupus from the USA during the late 1800s and early 1900s. From the 1920s onwards, scientists promulgated ecological ideas in order to redeem native carnivores. This (...) paper suggests that, in extermination and rehabilitation phases, biologists formed their opinions of resident lupines using scientific dogma and moral precepts. By delineating the process of wolf rehabilitation in the USA, this paper situates science as a shifting body of knowledge, a way of comprehending the environment that cannot be viewed apart from cultural conceptions of biology, ethics and aesthetics. (shrink)
