Trusting Overtures: On "Deciding to Trust"

What does it mean to “decide to trust”? What is at stake in such a decision, and is trust the kind of thing that is “up to us”? I offer an account of “deciding trust” as a practice of letting down your guard with the aim of making conspicuous your vulnerability. I argue that this practice is valuable because it functions to disarm, thereby setting the stage for a trusting relationship. The social dynamic of disarmament that I describe suggests a new picture of what trust is and why it is valuable.

Jason D'Cruz
https://www.albany.edu/philosophy/faculty/jason-dcruz
Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy
University of Albany

About the Speaker:

Before joining UAlbany, Cruz taught at Harvard College, the Zhejiang Institute of Science and Technology in Hangzhou, China, and worked as a researcher at the Joint Center for Bioethics at the University of Toronto. He works primarily in ethics and moral psychology on the topics of trust, promises, character, self-deception, and rationalization. He has also done work in bioethics (in particular, trust and consent) and the philosophy of art (in particular, fiction-directed emotion, imaginative resistance, and the autographic/allographic distinction). His recent work appears in academic journals such as Ethics, Analysis, Philosophical Psychology, Ratio, Journal of Business Ethics, the Journal of the American Philosophical Association,, and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

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This is a talk with audience Q&A presented by the University of Toronto's Centre for Ethics that is free to attend and open to the public. Free pizza and refreshments will be provided at the event. The talk will also be streamed online with live chat here [to be posted].

About the Centre for Ethics (http://ethics.utoronto.ca):

The Centre for Ethics is an interdisciplinary centre aimed at advancing research and teaching in the field of ethics, broadly defined. The Centre seeks to bring together the theoretical and practical knowledge of diverse scholars, students, public servants and social leaders in order to increase understanding of the ethical dimensions of individual, social, and political life.

In pursuit of its interdisciplinary mission, the Centre fosters lines of inquiry such as (1) foundations of ethics, which encompasses the history of ethics and core concepts in the philosophical study of ethics; (2) ethics in action, which relates theory to practice in key domains of social life, including bioethics, business ethics, and ethics in the public sphere; and (3) ethics in translation, which draws upon the rich multiculturalism of the City of Toronto and addresses the ethics of multicultural societies, ethical discourse across religious and cultural boundaries, and the ethics of international society.

The Ethics of A.I. Lab at the Centre For Ethics recently appeared on a list of 10 organizations leading the way in ethical A.I.: https://ocean.sagepub.com/blog/10-organizations-leading-the-way-in-ethical-ai