Annette Baier wrote some of the foundational works in the philosophy of trust. She puts it this way: trust is like air. It is so utterly pervasive that we forget it’s there. I hadn’t realised how much I trusted other drivers. And I hadn’t realised how much I was trusting all the physical stuff involved in driving. I was trusting every other car on the road – trusting in an endless line of brakes and belts and power steering cables. I was trusting the traffic lights to stay synchronised and the road to stay in one piece. I had trusted my body and my life to all these things, a thousand times a day, and it had never occurred to me that I was doing it until something went wrong.
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We view much of the world with a healthy suspicion. Should I believe this person, or that advertisement? Should I install this free programme? Yet with other parts of the world, we have suspended our suspicion. When I walk on the pavement, I usually don’t question it with every step. I just walk on it, while thinking of other things. We have settled our mind towards those parts of the world. When I trust a tool, I just use it. When I trust the air, I just breathe it. When I trust an information source, I just believe it.
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Trust sets up open pipelines into your mind, and these unprotected, open gateways are enormously efficient – and dangerous.
This might explain why we reach for the language of betrayal for some objects; it’s not just other people that can betray me. I feel betrayal when my hands stop following my will, when my memory suddenly breaks down. We can feel betrayed by our parts, when they fail to function as smooth and competent parts of the whole. The sense of betrayal, I want to suggest, can arise from an experience of alienation – from discovering that what you thought was a well-integrated part of you is suddenly refusing your commands, and acting with agency of its own.
From the article:
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