Trustworthiness is political by Dr Matt Bennett

Please join us for a seminar on 'Trustworthiness is political', by Dr Matt Bennett, Senior Research Officer, School of Philosophy and Art History, University of Essex.

Dr Matt Bennett is delivering a seminar on 'Trustworthiness is political' on 2 March 2023.

It is common for trustworthiness to be treated as a virtue that some public institutions have, and others do not, solely in virtue of other characteristics of the institution. But exclusive attention to the institutional properties that support trustworthiness occludes another significant feature of trustworthiness: trustworthiness is agent-relative, in the sense that whether an institution is trustworthy depends on contingent facts about potential trusters. Sometimes an institution is trustworthy for some but not for others; sometimes changes to a person can alter whether an institution merits their trust. The goal of this paper will be to make the case for thinking that institutional trustworthiness is agent-relative, and that some of its agent-relative features render trustworthiness political. I will argue that the contingencies about trusters that affect an institution’s trustworthiness include whether their values align with those of the institution, and the person’s social status, power, and vulnerability to the institution. I will argue further that these two factors of value-alignment and vulnerability make trustworthiness political, in the sense both that trustworthiness requires sufficient agreement between truster and trusted on what is most important, and that an institution will sometimes fail to be trustworthy because of the social position of the truster, and not because the institution is in some way deficient. 

Biography
Matt is Senior Research Officer on the Leverhulme funded project ‘Competition and Competitiveness’ at the University of Essex. His research covers a range of topics in moral and political philosophy, including conceptual and normative questions about socially-significant competition, and themes in the philosophy of trust. He has published on trust in people, experts, politics, and social institutions, and still writes from time to time about Nietzsche and post-Kantian European philosophy. 

The seminar will take place in person in the Ivor Crewe Seminar Room.  If you would like to join us via Zoom, please email spahpg@essex.ac.uk to ask for the Zoom link.