Eli Benjamin Israel

In this dissertation, I explore the nature of trust and how relationships are not only the environment where trust arises and flourishes, but more importantly, they provide its normative content. Relationships, I argue following Joseph Raz, are constituted by norms—ways in which we are committed to acting with each other as fellow participants. Trust, thus, implies a belief that our trustees will follow through with such norms, rather than aiming at particular actions. This framework grants participants agency in both shaping their relationships and determining appropriate actions within them, illuminating central aspects of trust's phenomenology, including its characteristic second-personal character. Each chapter of this dissertation focuses on a different puzzle in the trust literature, demonstrating the advantages of thinking of trust through a relational lens: In the first chapter, "Navigating Vagueness: Rule-Following and The Scope of Trust," I account for trustee discretion when explicitly defined expectations cannot be met. In the second chapter, "'I Trust You!' Sure, But With What? Understanding Broad Trust," I examine the phenomenon of broad trust—instances where we trust someone in open-ended ways that seem unconditional yet clearly have implicit terms and limits. Finally, in the third chapter, "Breaking Trust and Relocating Reactive Feelings," I aim to understand why trust violations typically represent not merely local practical failures but disregard for the relationship as a whole.

In this paper, I argue that reactive feelings such as betrayal and personal disappointment are not inherent to the attitude of trust. Instead, such feelings are better understood as responses to impairments in relationships. Trust, I propose, is a fully doxastic mechanism that fundamentally consists of the belief that the trustee will follow through the norms constitutive of the relationship, such that a breach of trust directly calls only for an epistemic reassessment of the trustee’s trustworthiness. I further show that what warrants reactive feelings is not the mere fact of trust being broken, but whether through the violation of trust, the person reveals a disregard for the relationship.

In this commentary, I argue that Jonathan Ichikawa's framing of positive epistemic norms exclusively in deontic terms in "Epistemic Courage" (OUP, 2024) overlooks an important distinction between beliefs we are required to hold and those that would be good but not required. Through examining his discussion of testimonies of sexual violence, I show how epistemic courage as a virtue must accommodate both what justice requires us to believe and what goes beyond duty. This work shows how believing victims' testimonies involves not just obligatory responses, but also supererogatory epistemic virtues when engaging with distant testimonies that nonetheless contribute to combating rape culture.

In this paper, I offer a novel interpretation of Kant's postulate of immortality from the Critique of Practical Reason, arguing that immortality should be understood as an atemporal state in which the moral agent, freed from sensibility, is purely rational. Drawing on Kant's discussion in “The End of All Things,” I contend that the eschatological depiction Kant presents in this text is consistent with the postulate's aspirations for establishing the possibility of moral perfection, rather than signaling a change in his view. This account addresses both a philosophical and historical gap, providing content to the postulate of immortality that coheres with its moral aims and demonstrates Kant's consistent understanding of the afterlife across his works.

In this paper, I address a fundamental challenge in the philosophy of trust: how to account for trustee discretion in scenarios that fall outside explicitly defined expectations. I argue that this challenge reveals vagueness as an inherent feature of trusting relationships, often leading to disagreements between trustors and trustees. To resolve this, I propose a novel account of trust grounded in rule-following, shifting the object of trust from particular actions to adherence to rules constitutive of relationships. By focusing on relationships and their constitutive rules, I provide here a framework for understanding and minimizing disagreements through communication and engaged practice. Furthermore, I argue this framework sheds light on the dynamics of trust-related reactive attitudes, in particular, distinguishing between betrayal and mere disappointment.

In this paper, I propose a Kantian framework for moral trust—trust in another person to only act with us in morally permissible ways. First, I derive an understanding of trustworthiness from Kant's second formulation of the categorical imperative. I argue that trustworthiness embodies a moral imperative, guiding us to act in ways that are reliable and recognizable as conducive to engaging in trusting relations. However, this alone is not enough, as it doesn't provide a means to assess whether someone is truly committed to the moral law and thus morally trustworthy. Therefore, in the second part, I explore a basis for assessing their moral conduct found in a local version of the Kingdom of Ends: given an ideal or archetype of a morally perfect interpersonal relationship, an archetype of the morally trustworthy agent allows us to comparatively assess the moral disposition of fellow agents.

In this paper, I discuss a subset of preferences in which a person desires the fulfillment of a choice they have made, even if it involves the violation of their desires, as in rape fantasies. I argue that such cases provide us with a unique insight into personal autonomy from a proceduralist standpoint. In its first part, I analyze some examples in light of Frankfurt's endorsement theory and argue that even when we cannot endorse a practical decision that involves being violated, we nonetheless regard those cases as instances of autonomy. Therefore, autonomy does not necessarily require endorsement. Instead, I propose that the nature of the relevant highest-order volition dictates the procedure that should be established in one’s desire structure for its fulfillment. In the second part, I discuss how an agent may effectively consent to the violation of their decision by another person. Ordinary consent typically refers to actions but fails to communicate one's higher-order desires or commitments. To address this limitation, I propose a practical tool that accomplishes this by signaling shifts in the normative context where the agents are interacting.

When philosophers consider factors compromising autonomy in consent, they often focus solely on the consent-giver’s agential capacities, overlooking the impact of the consent-receiver’s conduct on the consensual character of the activity. In this paper, I argue that valid consent requires justified trust in the consent-receiver to act only within the scope of consent. I call this the Trust Condition (TC), drawing on Katherine Hawley’s commitment account of trust. TC constitutes a belief that the consent-receiver is capable and willing to act as we expect from them. If such trust is not warranted, I argue, consent lacks the appropriate normative grounds. After establishing TC, I explore its application in the sexual arena, asserting that due to the non-contractual dimensions of sexual activity — such as the dynamic nature of sexual desires and the absence of external factors effectively binding sexual partners to the terms of consent—trust is warranted in sexual consent by means of care. I define care as a special sensitivity and attention toward the partner’s will and discuss how this approach leads to safer intimate relationships in practice.