Importance Of Trustworthiness

In this paper, Pamela Hieronymi argues that trustworthiness is the most important reason that we trust in a person, not any other practical reasons about the importance of the act of trust itself, or any evidential reasons to trust in that person. She tries to show that we might trust for many reasons such as value or importance of trust, but these are secondary reasons that we trust someone; we trust a person because we find her/him trustworthy.

When we talk about trust in this context, we focus on a three-place formulation i.e. ‘to trust someone to do something.’ Another important assumption is that trustworthiness and trusting action are distinct concepts.

In some cases, we trust someone to do a particular thing, but we don’t think that person is trustworthy in general. Parents, who try to teach

At this stage, she suggests using a ‘purist notion of trust’ in which you should trust someone to do something, only if you believe she will do that thing. In the presence of any doubt, a purist wouldn’t trust in a full-fledged sense; she just entrusts that person expecting the risk of betrayal.

Hieronymi puts this purist notion of trust as opposed to the liberal notion of trust that involves the vulnerability to betrayal. So purist should suggest another relation between trust and betrayal, such as the idea that the magnitude of betrayal reflects the magnitude of trust and also the trusting belief. This seems to be a right intuition; when a long-life trusted friend betrays my trust, the damage is hugely greater than the case of mere entrusting a colleague with expected risk of betrayal. So, on the purist’s notion one trusts only to the extent that one trustingly believes.

So Hieronymi concludes that trust in a pure sense always involves a trusting belief. The belief that the person we relied on is