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Katherine Hawley ◆ Trust and Distrust
Recent work on trust emphasises its importance to both epistemology and ethics, asking whether
reasons to trust someone must be based on reasons to think her trustworthy, or vice versa. But such
work is built on a mischaracterisation of both trust and trustworthiness: to understand trust, we must
also understand distrust, but distrust is typically neglected or treated as an afterthought. In this paper
I highlight the negative consequences of this neglect, then offer a positive account of both trust and
distrust, based on the notion of commitment: to trust someone is to rely upon that person to fulfil a
commitment, whilst distrust involves an expectation of unfulfilled commitment. ◆
Jan-Christopher Heilinger ◆ Embedded Universalism
The question whether there are basic moral standards that hold for all human beings becomes
ever more important in our globalised world. Is ethics universal or relative to particular cultural
settings? Modern moral philosophy is commonly characterised by the search of one overarching moral
principle that has the necessary authority to make justified and definitive judgements about morally
right or wrong actions. This view has been described as a quest for a single “vaulting structure” which
is meant to be found in the form of a principle like e. g. the categorical imperative in the Kantian
tradition or the consequentialist utility principle. However, this “standard view”, as appealing as
it may be, has faced severe criticism. The critics doubt on the one hand that the generalisations
expressed by principles makes them capable to judge about concrete cases. After all real world
dilemmas are always and necessarily more complex than abstract and general principles can be.
Because of this mismatch between generality and particularity, the critics fear that moral principles
are little helpful in making concrete normative judgements. On the other hand the ontological
assumptions made by those promoting the existence of moral principles are put into question: How
can moral principles, as often claimed within the standard view, be logically prior (independent
of our concrete interaction with the world), stable (immune to change), complete (not in need of
completion by other principles) and directly applicable (sufficient for making moral judgements).
In my paper I will ask the question, if it is possible to defend universalism if one is skeptical of
the criticised standard view. I will discuss the idea of “embedded universalism” that challenges the
border between abstract universal moral theory on the one side and local value communities on the
other. I will attempt to show how universality only makes sense if it is also understood as relative to
a given concrete context. ◆
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