Mary Wollstonecraft’s divergent attitudes towards trust

Abstract

ABSTRACTMary Wollstonecraft is increasingly being recognized as a philosopher who made a noteworthy contribution to moral and political philosophy. Her work not only encompassed political treatises, such as the now well-known A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, but also fiction. This article demonstrates how Wollstonecraft’s work comprised three main ways of engaging with trust, namely distrust, virtuous trust, and open trust. It puts these three forms of trust into context with Wollstonecraft’s ambivalent relation to the 18th-century culture of sensibility. Moreover, Wollstonecraft’s open form of trust is compared with the 20th-century Danish theologian and philosopher K. E. Løgstrup’s conception of trust. Løgstrup regarded genuine trust as a spontaneous, basic phenomenon that was not rooted in moral reasoning. While there are some similarities between Wollstonecraft’s open trust and Løgstrup’s understanding of trust, Wollstonecraft ultimately reinforced the value of ‘an educated heart’, namely the idea that the feelings of the heart should be cultivated by reason. Accordingly, this article offers some insight into how we may perceive Wollstonecraft’s strong rejection of Edmund Burke’s ‘inbred sentiments’, that is, Burke’s belief in innate, benign moral instincts.