Karen Jones is Associate Professor in philosophy at the University of Melbourne. She has written extensively on trust and trustworthiness: what trust is, when it is justified, how to be trustworthy and whether trustworthiness is a virtue (it isn’t). She takes seriously Annette Baier’s advice never to think too much about trust for too long on pain of becoming paranoid and so she also writes on emotions and rationality and on moral epistemology. Much of her work is a from a feminist perspective.
Abstract: Justified trust is rationally permitted trust; wise trust is excellent trust. Excellent (dis)trust is always justified (dis)trust, but the reverse is not true. You can be justified in distrusting someone and yet it be wise for you to trust. Contrary to folk saying, wisdom does not favour distrust ahead of trust. This paper explores what it takes to be wise in entering, maintaining, modifying, and exiting trust relations. Wisdom cannot be captured in rules or informative high-level generalizations, but must instead be captured in rough general precepts, guidelines, images or stereotypes of the skills and capacities of the wise truster. Wisdom is socially scaffolded including by distributed networks of distrust that make local trust wise.
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