James Laing

Many philosophers of trust endorse the idea that trust is inherently risky. This raises the question of how exactly we ought to understand the relevant notion of risk. Should we understand it in objectivist or evidentialist terms? I argue that neither of these two ways of unpacking things holds up in light of number of clear examples of trust where there is no associated risk. In view of this failure to make sense of what it could mean for trust to inherently involve risk, I propose an alternative account that takes vulnerability, rather than risk, to be necessary for trust. I suggest that philosophers of trust have hitherto failed to be sensitive to this distinction, leading to widespread acceptance of the falsehood that trust essentially entails risk. I provide a range of examples of “mere” vulnerability with no associated risk and then argue that vulnerability is the better notion to help us capture what is essentially involved in placing our trust in others.

There seems to be a difference between drinking coffee alone at home and drinking coffee in a café. Yet, drinking coffee in a café is not a joint action. It is an individual action done in a social environment. The café, with each person minding their own business next to others, is what I call a gregarious state of affairs. Gregariousness refers to the warmth of the social world. It is the difference between studying alone at home and studying in the library. This light form of sociality is precisely what we were deprived of during the coronavirus lockdowns. Gregariousness cannot be explained as interaction or coordination, and neither can it be grasped solely as a normative aspect of the environment. This is why gregariousness cannot be explained using the concepts of strategic equilibrium, shared planning agency, joint commitment, we-intention, or second-person standpoint. In this paper, I will also provide a prospective theory of gregariousness. The aim of this paper is not to provide a definitive theory of gregariousness, nor to demonstrate that other theories of joint action are incorrect, but rather to draw attention to this aspect of the social world that has been largely neglected.