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This chapter discusses moral disagreement and moral relativism, and places the long-standing discussion of these issues in the context of recent discussions of the epistemology of disagreement. It argues that it is rational to have a special sort of ‘fundamental trust’ in one's own moral intuitions, but it is not even possible to have the same sort of trust in the intuitions of others. As a result, it can be rational for both parties to a peer disagreement to have more confidence in their own views than in the incompatible views of their peers.

Authentic trust involves moods and emotions. It is based on relationships. It is well aware of the possibility of betrayal. It involves self‐trust as well as the trust of others. It encourages forgiveness. It is the key to successful leadership.

This chapter argues that since self-trust commits us to trust in others (Chap 3), the problem of disagreement with others who have the properties we trust in ourselves is a conflict within self-trust. The argument of Chapter 2 on the resolution of dissonance within the self applies to the problem of disagreement with others, and resolving disagreement in favor of one's community can be supported by principles of conscientious reflection from Chapter 6. But the problem of reasonable disagreement reappears as the problem of reasonable disagreement between communities. The chapter argues that communal epistemic egoism is unsupportable for reasons that parallel my argument against epistemic egoism in Chapter 3. The chapter concludes with principles of rational dialogue between communities that follow from conscientious communal reflection.

Keith Lehrer argues that, after entering into the condition of parity concerning p, one can reasonably continue to accept that p. Being in the condition of parity with respect to p involves disagreements with an interlocutor—judged as trustworthy as oneself—with whom one reasonably believes oneself to share all evidence concerning p except for the belief that p itself. What Lehrer calls the condition of parity is akin to what others call disagreement between epistemic peers. In order to enter the parity condition at all, one mustaccept that one is reasonable in what one accepts. Once one realizes this, it is clear that one can reflectively take oneself to reasonably accept p, thereby providing the evidential support needed to support p over not-p, making accepting p reasonable even after the condition of parity

This chapter argues that epistemic self-trust is more basic than what we take to be reasons for belief, and that consistent self-trust commits us to trust in others. Epistemic self-trust is rationally inescapable, given that the search for reasons leads to epistemic circularity, and the more basic fact that we have no way to tell that there is any connection at all between reasons and truth without trust in ourselves when we are epistemically conscientious. The chapter then argues that when we are conscientious we will inevitably come to believe that other persons have the same quality of conscientiousness in virtue of which we trust ourselves, and so we owe them epistemic trust in advance of reasons for thinking they are reliable. The fact that someone else has a belief gives me a prima facie reason to believe it myself, and the reason is stronger when large numbers of people share the belief. The conclusion is that consistent epistemic self-trust supports common agreement arguments, and in particular, it supports a form of the consensus gentium argument for theism.

A review of Keith Lehrer’s work over more than half a century suggested a system that motivated the present manuscript. He has written about knowledge, autonomy, self-trust, and consciousness. Many books and volumes of journals have collected deeply insightful articles about his work, including Bogdan (1980); Bender (1989); Brandl, Gombocz, and Pillar (1991); Olsson (2003); and Fürst and Melchior (2012). This posed the question of how it could all fit together into one system. Science, art, and practice challenge us to evaluate and reconsider what we desire, what we believe, and how we represent the world, ourselves in the world, and the world in ourselves. We must make ourselves worthy of our trust and the trust of others in our defensible and autonomous quest for truth and evidence. We embody that defensible system of truth, evidence, theory, meaning, and science. The book is the articulation of the Lehrer’s system.

When someone asks you to write a book on trust, you assume that this person has enough trust in your having the capabilities needed to write such a book. The person shows his/her trust by entrusting you with it, but he/she is not sure whether you will accept the task. A task can be self-imposed and not always contracted or entrusted; it raises the question of whether the task can be accomplished. This chapter examines trust and self-confidence, first by looking at Aristotle’s account of two generic types of human activities: poiesis and praxis. It then discusses the question of self-trust and the psychology of trust and distrust, conscience and the self, the possibility of choice, the relationship between trust and dependence, humility and arrogance, and orientation.

This chapter argues that there are two types of epistemic reasons, one irreducibly first personal, and the other third personal. Third personal reasons are facts about the world or our minds. First personal reasons are states of consciousness such as experiences, feelings, or beliefs, not the fact that these states exist. The chapter argues that third person reasons give rise to an epistemic regress. However, a special kind of first personal reason, basic self-trust, ends the regress of third person reasons. Epistemic self-trust is the most basic reason there is. It is more basic than third person reasons and it is more basic than any other first person reasons. The regress problem arises from three assumptions: (a) A belief needs a reason, something on the basis of which I can settle for myself that the belief is true: (b) a reason needs a reason: and (c) the total set of reasons for a given belief form a single structure. The chapter rejects (c), and argues that the nature of self-trust makes it an exception to (b).

This chapter distinguishes between theoretical or third-personal reasons for believing religious propositions (facts that are logically or probabilistically connected to the truth of those propositions, typically communicable) and deliberative or first-personal epistemic reasons (having an essential connection to the person who holds them, including her experiences and—crucially—her self-trust). Attacks on the intellectual virtue of a faith commitment admit of different kinds of defenses depending on the category of reasons impugned and have different consequences if successful. Attempts to undermine a believer’s confidence, for example by showing how evolutionary biology or psychology might explain away belief, should be seen for what they are: attacks on one’s first-personal reasons that should purport to have a pervasive impact on one’s beliefs, yet do not bear on third-personal arguments.

This chapter offers an account of trust and its relation to the intellectual virtues. It argues that trust has both practical and epistemic forms, but both forms include elements of belief, feeling, and behavior. Epistemic self-trust and trust in others is prereflective and rationally inescapable. Epistemic self-trust is not an intellectual virtue, but it is closely connected to a host of such virtues. Many of the intellectual virtues would not be virtues at all were it not for the reasonableness of epistemic self-trust or trust in others. Some virtues are enhancements of epistemic trust and some are constraints on it. The connection also goes in the other direction because there are ways in which intellectual virtues prevent trust from becoming either excessive or deficient.

Some cognitive domains, like the moral, aesthetic, and religious, seem to demand a special kind of intellectual autonomy. We should, it is thought, think for ourselves and not trust others. This call for autonomy seems to support a radical intellectual self-sufficiency. In particular, the fact that our peers disagree with us can be disregarded by the fully intellectually self-sufficient person. I argue against radical intellectual self-sufficiency. I argue, instead, that our basis for self-trust in these domains should also extend to trusting others. So long as we do not have a good account of our own reliability in these domains, our general cognitive similarity to others ought to lead us to weight their testimony, and so weight their disagreement. We should be epistemically humble in the face of disagreement. Furthermore, epistemic humility here is a form of intellectual autonomy, for we discover the evidence of disagreement and think through its consequences for ourselves.

This concluding chapter reviews the central contention of this book, which is that understanding the two faces of spontaneity—its virtues and vices—requires understanding the implicit mind. While alternative interpretations of each of the case studies discussed are available, the shared features of these cases illuminate a pervasive feature of our lives: actions the psychology of which is neither reflexive nor reasoned; actions that reflect upon us as agents but not upon what we know or who we take ourselves to be; and actions the ethical cultivation of which demand not just planning and deliberating but also, centrally, pre-committing to plans, attending to our contexts, and, as Bruce Gemmel—the coach of arguably the best swimmer of all time, Katie Ledecky— said, just doing the damn work. Finally, open questions for future research are discussed.

This chapter begins by distinguishing two kinds of epistemic reasons, one irreducibly first personal, and the other third personal. Here the kinds of reasons that are irreducibly first personal are called “deliberative reasons,” and the kinds of reasons that are third personal are called “theoretical reasons.” The use of the terms “deliberative” and “theoretical” is not essential to the distinction being made, but these terms draw attention to the different functions of the two kinds of reasons in psychology. Epistemic self-trust is an irreducibly first personal epistemic reason, and it is the most basic reason of either kind. Attacks on religious belief are sometimes third personal, but sometimes they are first personal attacks on self-trust or trust in religious communities. Attacks on self-trust require a different kind of response than attacks on third person reasons.

This chapter distinguishes two kinds of reasons for a belief. First person reasons are unique to the person who has them. They include other mental states than beliefs and they do not aggregate with theoretical reason. There are third person reasons that can be laid out on the table for all to consider. Foundationalism, coherentism, and infinitism are all views on the structure of third person (theoretical) reasons. But the chain of theoretical reasons bottoms out in a first person reason, epistemic self-trust, which is also the foundation of other first person reasons. The rationality of epistemic self-trust is a condition for the rationality of everything else.

The vices of superiority and of inferiority comprise evaluations of one’s own intellectual abilities, competencies, and skills for their intellectual worth that track the effectiveness of these qualities in defending the ego or gaining social acceptance rather than appraising them for their epistemic value. There is, therefore, something inherently self-deceptive about these vices. This chapter discusses some of the ways in which vices of inferiority and superiority obstruct effective and responsible inquiry. These vices are shown to distort self-trust, obstruct self-knowledge, and to cause harms to other agents and to the epistemic community as a whole. It is also argued that these vices are causally responsible for numerous moral wrongs.

The chapter is a discussion of value of self-knowledge and the role that reflection plays in its acquisition. It employs the title character in Jane Austen’s Emma as an illustration of the importance of reflection in people understanding themselves and developing self-trust. It argues that appropriate self-trust is a virtue in Aristotle’s sense. The person with the virtue of self-trust employs self-doubt effectively, avoiding both insufficient and excessive confidence in her own judgment. The chapter shows how Emma uses reflection as a way of correcting her own tendency toward overconfidence, enabling her to have greater self-knowledge and hence, greater self-trust. The chapter explains how reflection conducive to self-knowledge and self-trust is a skill and argues that it is a skill worth acquiring.

Communities often respond to traumatic events in their histories by destroying objects that would cue memories of a past they wish to forget and by building artefacts which memorialize a new version of their history. Hence, it would seem, communities cope with change by spreading memory ignorance so to allow new memories to take root. This chapter offers an account of some aspects of this phenomenon and of its epistemological consequences. Specifically, it demonstrates that collective forgetfulness is harmful. Here, the focus is exclusively on the harms caused by its contribution to undermining the intellectual self-trust of some members of the community. Further, since some of these harms are also wrongs, collective amnesia contributes to causing epistemic injustices.

This chapter defends the rationality of basic emotional self-trust, or trust that our emotion dispositions reliably produce emotions that fit their objects when they survive conscientious reflection upon one’s total set of emotions and beliefs. The argument proceeds from the assumption that states of emotion can be fitting or non-fitting, just as beliefs can be true or false, and what we call being justified or rational in an emotion is doing the best we can to make our emotions fit their objects, just as what we call being justified or rational in a belief is doing the best we can to make our beliefs true. Ultimately, the justification of our emotions is circular for the same reason that the justification of our beliefs is circular, and the rational response to both kinds of circularity is self-trust. Many emotions are less trustworthy than many kinds of beliefs, but there are no grounds for general emotion scepticism. The chapter concludes with some brief thoughts on the ethical implications of emotional self-trust.