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Show Chapter XIII. Baier's Hume 548 to demand that they be met, possibly to levy sanctions if they are not, and this is to trust persons with very significant coercive power over others. ... the morality of obligation, in as far as it reduces to the morality of coercion, is covered by the morality of proper trust." What obligations we have and what virtues we should cultivate is a matter of what it is reasonable to trust ourselves to demand and expect from one another (MP 12), so not only obligations but virtues as well presuppose the concept of trust. Indeed, virtually all aspects of implementing a moral code within a community, on Baier's view, depend whom we can trust, and how far, to do what jobs, whether parental, political, coercive, or social (MP 14). One reason why the concept of trust is so foundational to moral theory, on Baier's view, is because it is so pervasive. Threats and coercion could not be the main support for a moral code, she argues, for fear of an infinite regress: Either there must always be more coercers to threaten the coercers to do their job of coercing our compliance, or else we must finally trust some such coercers to do so without any such backups (MP 14, 164). Thus trust conditions our relationships not only with friends and family and colleagues, but with strangers and even with enemies (MP 98). In all such cases, we observe conventions of behavior that we trust others not to violate - for example, not to give us false directions when we ask for help in a foreign city, and not to shoot after we have waved the white flag in war. "We trust those we encounter in lonely library stacks to be searching for books, not victims. We sometimes let ourselves fall asleep on trains or planes, trusting neighboring strangers not to take advantage of our defenselessness. We put our bodily safety into the hands of pilots, drivers, and doctors with scarcely any sense of recklessness" (MP 98). In such cases we trust others not to violate our persons, our property, or our autonomy (MP 103). Contract-Theoretic morality traditionally has focused on the very limited form of trust involved in promising and the fulfillment of contract, Baier thinks, because most of the great moral theorists - she cites Hobbes, Butler, Bentham, and Kant - were "a collection of clerics, misogynists, and puritan bachelors ... who had minimal adult dealings with women," and so made central to their moral analyses "cool, distanced relations between more or less free and equal adult strangers, say, the members of an all-male club, with membership rules and rules for dealing with rule breakers and where the form of cooperation was restricted to ensuring that each member could read his Times in peace and have no one step on his gouty toes" (MP 114). By contrast, those who are more engaged socially as lovers, husbands, and fathers with women, the ill, the very young, and the elderly - here she cites Hume, Hegel, Mill, Sidgwick, and maybe Bradley - will have a more complex view of moral relations (MP 114). The reason the great moral theorists did not focus on the forms of trust that embed one in dependent, unequal, noncontractual and nonvoluntary social relationships was that they © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
