Trust as a Moral Power

On extant accounts of trust, it is not apt to trust someone who seems or actually is untrustworthy. It also does not seem apt, on such accounts, to morally demand trust and blame people for not trusting. Yet there seem to be cases where it is plausible that trusting the untrustworthy might be apt or where we might aptly demand trust and blame people for not trusting. In this paper, we sketch out an account of trust according to which to trust someone involves exercising a moral power that gives trustees permission or additional reasons to do as trusted. On this account, there can be moral reasons to trust other than the trustee's reliability. This allows our account to better explain these cases than existing accounts of trust.