engleski

Ethics of Belief: To whom we should trust?

Traditionally, the fundamental question of the ethics of belief is: what we should believe? When adapted for the domain of the epistemology of testimony, this question would be: In whom we should we trust? Concerning this point, the epistemologists are divided into two groups: those who hold that we should trust almost anybody, and those who hold that we have to be very cautious. In other words, whilst the first holds that trust is a kind of credulity without evidence, the second group holds that we should not trust without the appropriate evidence. In the first part of this paper, I briefly register the evidentialist’ s position about trust, or the stance that epistemically responsible trust is a matter of evidence. In the second part, I consider what kind of evidence would be appropriate to make trusting epistemically responsible. Then, by contrasting two opposite psychological theories – personality theory and a situational approach to explaining a person’ s behaviour – I, finally, offer a contextual approach as a position that could theoretically harmonize these opposing stances about what evidential support could ensure epistemically responsible trust.

ethics of belief, testimony, trust, evidence, personality theory, situational approach

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