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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 545 magistrates and other licensed coercers. The good Humean will want to keep a careful check on how such persons (parents, schoolteachers, judges, police, prison guards) are exercising this grave responsibility. Morality must be solemn when it ... endor[ses] society's self-protective coercive activities" (MP 288). So it seems that Baier's Humean morality ascribes much greater value to rationality, justice, "stern imperatives", and just punishment than first appears. To find a genuine alternative to the Kantian Social Contract Theory she deplores, we must turn to Baier's substantive analysis of trust. 5. Baier's Analysis of Trust Appropriate trust, as Baier characterizes it, is centrally connected with the notions of good will, power, and making oneself vulnerable to another. She defines trust as a belief-informed and action-influencing attitude (MP 10, 132) that makes one more vulnerable to harm from another, in the confidence that the other will not use their discretionary power to harm one because there is no reason to do so (MP 11, 133, 152, 187 fn. 9); as reliance on another's good will; and as a vulnerability one accepts to another's possible but not expected ill will (MP 99, 105). Relying on someone is nevertheless different from trusting them, in that the former concerns only their dependable habits, whereas the latter concerns their good will (MP 98). Trust involves allowing others to exercise discretionary powers to take care of something (or someone) one cares about (MP 105). Trust involves the paradox that "in trusting we are always giving up security to get greater security, exposing our throats so that others become accustomed to not biting" (MP 15). Trust becomes pathological when, first, the enterprise whose workings trust improves is evil, as are the trustworthy members of a death squad (MP 131). Second, the enterprise in general may be benign, but its treatment of some of its members unfair. In that case, their trust is equally unhealthy, as is the trust employees may feel toward an employer "whose exploitation of workers is sugar-coated by a paternalistic show of concern for them and the maintenance of a cozy familiar atmosphere of mutual trust" (MP 131). Third, the attitude of trust can be faked, and backed instead by vigilance or threat advantage, as is a wealthy wife's who suspects her husband of adultery (MP 132). Trust may become unhealthy, fourth, when the trustor is too quick to call the trusted to account; and fifth, when the trusted misuses her discretionary powers, perhaps through laxity or risk-taking, or, at the other extreme, through reliance on a rigid rule that excludes discretionary power altogether, as when one's spouse can be trusted to remember one's birthday because he has given his bank a standing order to send flowers every year on that date (MP 136). Sixth, trust may degenerate into mutual predictability, when what should have depended on discerning judgment as to the trustor's best interests becomes merely a reflexive habit of behavior, as when a university © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
