Hale Demir-Doğuoğlu

What drives the chronic distrust of some men towards women on the topic of gendered sexual violence and harassment? What motivates the persistent distrust of some White people towards Black, Indigenous, and other people of color on the topic of police brutality? I argue that what drives/motivates these cases of ‘top-down’ distrust – at least in part – is an experience of a particular sort of vulnerability: ‘constitutive vulnerability.’ On my account, top-down distrust is often a morally pernicious response to constitutive vulnerability by those who are dominantly situated in a given power relation. This top-down distrust in turn serves to secure – or attempts to secure – the dominant subject’s sense of self against destabilizing identity-threats from ‘below.’ Such a formulation of distrust contributes to existing literature by highlighting not only a possible psychological function or benefit to distrust in the context of power asymmetries, but also offers a new perspective as to why some types of distrust may be especially resistant to counter-evidence.

Feminist philosophers need a theory of distrust that can make sense of the institutional distrust that is common among people who face systemic oppression. Our purpose in this chapter is to lay the groundwork for such a theory. Our strategy is to use feminist insights about institutional distrust to critique the most general and well-developed theory of distrust in philosophy—Katherine Hawley’s commitment account—and to learn from this exercise about what a feminist theory of distrust should be like. Though not designed to explain institutional distrust as we understand it, Hawley’s theory is meant to apply to people’s relationships with institutional representatives as well as to friendships or intimate relationships whose contours are shaped by informal institutional structures. It should therefore be able to explain the institutional distrust that is prevalent among oppressed people. However, we argue that it falls short in this regard. The chapter ends with discussion about what our critique suggests about future directions for the feminist philosophy of distrust.