Trust is crucial for much of what we know and do. As Annette Baier ( Moral Prejudices , 1994) remarks, trust is like air—something both essential and taken for granted in social living. Yet, consensus about how best to understand trust remains elusive. Amidst competing predictive, affective, and normative accounts of trust, some trust scholars accept pluralism, viz., the thesis that trust comes in different forms. Pluralism remains underdeveloped, however. In this paper, after motivating pluralism, I examine plausible candidates for developing the view according to the attitudes, aims, and justification conditions in trust relationships. I argue that pluralism, especially through justification conditions, addresses counterexample problems for accounts of trust. However, I show that pluralism fails to address a second problem, namely how trust can explain social cooperation. After suggesting two routes for supplementing pluralism to address this explanatory problem, I conclude with reflections about pluralism’s impact on evaluations of well-placed trust.
Michal Bajcsy (2026) studied this question.