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Show Chapter XIII. Baier's Hume 550 not have (MP 110). This means that such an account cannot project or "reconstruct" trust in terms of voluntary acts, consciously acknowledged risks, or deliberately imposed controls on the damage done by potential violations of trust (MP 110-111). Rather, the initial assumption must be of automatic or unconscious or unchosen mutual trust. And "[w]hat will need explanation will be the ceasings to trust, the transfers of trust, the restriction or enlargements in the fields of what is trusted, when, and to whom, rather than any abrupt switches from distrust to trust" (MP 111). This is why Baier's analysis of trust is silent on matters of choice and deliberation, and why she doubts the ability of Social Contract Theory, which relies on such assumptions, to explain it. "[T]rust," she observes, "in those who have given us promises is a complex and sophisticated moral achievement" that takes for granted less artificial and less voluntary forms of trust, for example, in friends and family, and in others sufficient to engage with confidence at least in minimal simultaneous transactions and exchanges (MP 112). 6. An Assessment of Baier's Analysis of Trust In this brief summary I have not done justice to the subtlety and scope of Baier's treatment of the topic of trust, nor to the range of significant and complex moral phenomena she brings to our attention. Baier maintains that a women's (normative) moral theory, of which she thinks there are none, "will need not to ignore the partial truths of previous theories. It must therefore accommodate both the insights men have more easily than women and those women have more easily than men. It should swallow up previous theories" (MP 4). In her vehement rejection of Kantian Social Contract Theory, it cannot be said that her analysis attempts to meet these criteria, though I have already suggested that it might to a greater extent than she would prefer. On the other hand, Baier's analysis does seem to satisfy her description of "paradigm examples of moral theories." These, she claims, have a "broad brushstroke" comprehensiveness and coherence, a fairly tight systematic account of a large area of morality, with a keystone supporting all the rest," which are, she thinks, the antithesis of the "mosaic method" of "assembling a lot of smaller-scale works until one [has] built up a complete account" (MP 3). This distinction certainly will not work to classify Rawls, our quintessential moral theorist, in the right way, since his theory of justice has both sets of features, the first with regard to structure, the second with regard to temporal 16 process of construction. 16 The early "building blocks" of Rawls's Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971) include "Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics," The Philosophical Review 56 (1951), 177-197; "Justice as Fairness," The Philosophical Review 57 (1958); "The Sense of Justice," The Philosophical Review 62 (1963); "Constitutional Liberty and the Concept of Justice," Nomos VI: Justice, Ed. C. J. Friedrich and John Chapman © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
