2017-03-02, Lahno, Bernd

Trust as an emotional attitude includes a participant attitude and a feeling of connectedness to the trusted person by shared aims, values, or norms. Starting from an analysis of collective agency as given by the theory of team reasoning, this chapter argues that such trust is an essential element of what it means to act as part of a collective. In particular, ‘trust in integrity’ is vital for the realization of a complex collective project. It is often encapsulated in routines and based on a normative framework that is produced by the group’s social structure and its institutional background. Forming a collective agent may be associated with the problematic form of ‘categorical trust’ when sharing values and norms degenerates to unconditional and blind submission to the group’s rule.