Annette Baier Quotes

Trust is a notoriously vulnerable good, easily wounded and not at all easily healed. Trust is not always a good, to be preserved. There must be some worthwhile enterprise in which the trusting and trusted parties are involved, some good bread being kneaded, for trust to be a good thing. If the enterprise is evil, a producer of poisons, then the trust that improves its workings will also be evil, and decent people will want to destroy, not to protect, that form of trust. A death squad may consist of wholly trustworthy and, for a while at least, sensibly trusting coworkers. So the first thing to be checked, if our trust is to become self-conscious, is the nature of the enterprise whose workings are smoothed by merited trust.

That any society ought to have philosophers in its midst seems to us an axiom of any possible social philosophy. Probably any society will have some reflective people in it, some Socrates or Mandeville or Wollstonecraft to ask awkward questions, but even if this is to be welcomed, it does not follow that any society should have professional philosophers in its midst, nor, if it does have them, that their activities should the take the form ours assume. The very professionalization of philosophy makes the likelihood more remote that those awkward questions, necessary for a healthy social consciousness, should come from philosophers. It may make for better philosophy and a better society if they come from a social misfit like Diogenes, or from an anathemetized lense-grinder like Spinoza, or from a man of affairs, an unsuccessful aspirant to two chairs of philosophy, like Hume. (Even more conventionally acceptable moral philosophers like Aquinas and Butler earned their living as clerics, not as philosophers.) The questions we need to ask occasionally are, first, why anyone should be a philosopher (in our sense); second, why anyone else should pay one to be a philosopher; third, how many should be paid philosophers; and fourth, what exact form the activity of paid philosophers should take.