confidence tricksters, amongst others, who understand the essential features of trust and
use them for instrumental purposes. That the confidence trickster uses the good will of
others in exploitative ways may illustrate a problem of principle (that is, it may
demonstrate a need for a guiding principle to help us avoid falling victim to the abuse of
our trust) but it does not of itself render Baier’s definition redundant. In fact it provides
support to the idea that good will is an essential feature of trust, for what Holton
neglects in this example is the trust shown by the victim. The only thing the victim is
guilty of is a misplaced trust; a trust based on the belief that the other has a good will
toward him. The pretence of trustworthiness merely serves to illustrate the confidence
trickster’s ability to use the features of trust, and of trustworthiness, as means for his
own instrumental ends.
To illustrate his second objection Holton notes that a divorced parent may not have
good will toward her ex-partner but may well trust him with their children. But Holton
appears to have fallen into a narrow view of Baier’s conception of the relationship
between trust and good will. For Baier, it is a good will toward whatever it is that we
value when we are thinking about placing trust in another. To trust one’s ex-partner to
care for the children is to place trust in her or his good will towards the children rather
than to one’s self. If there is sufficient doubt about the ex-partner’s good will toward the
children then we might be forced to rely on them to care for the children but this would
not be a matter of trust. This example points to the issue of the context in which trust
occurs. One thing that our everyday understandings of what we mean when we say we
trust have in common is the context bound nature of meaning. It is because we
understand the context in which the term trust is used that we can, generally speaking,
understand whom is being trusted with what, as well as what it is that trust requires of
us, in different situations.
It seems then that good will is an essential feature of trust for as Potter reminds us “An
attitude of indifference to particular persons does not foster a great degree of trust even
if “right actions” are performed” (Potter 2002 p. 6). In this respect Potter has enlarged
upon Baier’s distinction between trust and reliance. In her discussion Potter recognises
that there is a ‘sort of trust’ that accompanies, for example, trusting another not to lie
when one knows that she or he holds it as a matter of principle that lying is wrong. But
for Potter, this sort of trust is unsatisfactory because it lacks any sense in which the one
who can be trusted not to lie needs to have a good will towards any one particular
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