Eurozone Justice

Abstract

The philosophical aim of the Anatomy of Systemic Financial Risk project is to develop a principled non-consequentialist approach to the ethics of risk imposition for financial technologies. This foundational paper develops a novel philosophical account of trust that can serve as a basis for the assessment of trust in non-standard cases, including non-human agents and novel technologies. Our account is functionalist: we argue that a particular form of trust—Communicated Interpersonal Trust—is paradigmatic and lay out how trust as a social practice in this form helps to satisfy fundamental practical, deliberative and relational needs in mutually reinforcing ways. We then argue that derivative (non-paradigmatic) forms of trust connect to the paradigm by generating a positive dynamic between trustor and trustee that is geared towards the realisation of these functions. We call this trust’s proleptic potential. Our functionalist approach does not only provide important insights into the practice of trust and its place in the broader web of social life, but also illuminates existing philosophical debates on border-line cases. Finally, it opens up the conceptual space for the evaluation of trust in agents and objects that do not satisfy the conditions present in paradigmatic interpersonal cases, e.g. AI agents, algorithms, and, more generally, new technologies