Source
Desmond (2022), LIT-158 (Social Epistemology 36(5): 586–600), read in full in NOTE-113 from the author’s accepted manuscript. Page numbers are the manuscript’s.
What was actually shown
The target. “Stubborn” distrust is distrust that resists evidence for the experts’ views, demonstrations of competence and displays of goodwill (p. 3). “Circumscribed” distrust, resting on defeasible suspicion of bias or conflicts of interest, is set aside as not irrational anyway (pp. 2–3). The paper offers an alternative to “irrationality views” of the stubborn kind, both the charitable one (lack of education, misinformation) and the uncharitable one (“post-truth” cynicism) (pp. 3–4).
The definitions. Social status is “the influence over collective decision-making that an individual is given by others” (p. 11). Scientists hold it as prestige, conferred on the expectation of service to the community (pp. 9–10, citing Henrich and Gil-White; Price and Van Vugt). Status distrust is distrust in which status, read as an indicator of distrustworthiness, overrides every other indicator (pp. 11–12).
The scheme (§6, pp. 16–17). Premise 1, status vulnerability: in a conflict of interest, a low-prestige truster will get less support from third parties than the trustee. Premise 2, service doubt: the truster has reason to believe the dominant service-for-prestige ethos “does not integrate their core interests”. With two background definitions (trust entails vulnerability; prestige carries service norms), it follows that the trustee’s norm-governed decisions will conflict with the truster’s core interests, that third parties will not back the truster, and so that the truster has reason to distrust the candidate trustee “in virtue of their high degree of prestige”.
Service doubt is the trigger (p. 18). Status differences alone do not produce status distrust. Past harm, such as Tuskegee, raises the credence that high-status groups do not keep service norms.
What could have come out otherwise. The scheme could have been invalid, or valid only with a premise that assumes the conclusion. NOTE-113 finds it valid as informal argument, with one weakness: the step to “in virtue of prestige” leans on the second background definition, so the operative reasons are the truster’s vulnerability and the content of the ethos, and the “prestige” framing is partly a relabelling.
What this does not say
- That status distrust is ever justified in a liberal democracy. The paper leaves when the premises are true “beyond the scope of this paper” (pp. 15, 18–19). The one case it calls sound is a self-serving totalitarian regime. The abstract’s “justifiably” overstates the body (NOTE-113, Corrections).
- That actual distrusters reason this way. There is no data. The Havasupai case (§5) is illustrative and secondhand, assumes the researchers were well-intentioned, and misdates the lawsuit. Whether status predicts stubborn distrust over education, ideology and past harm is the NOTE’s open question, not a result.
- That it beats the rivals. The author declines an abductive comparison with testimonial injustice and with the empirical predictors of conspiracy belief (p. 6).
- That distrust is widespread. Premise 1 assumes status distrusters are a minority (fn. 9). If they are not, the usual markers of status invert.
- That conspiracy claims are true. §7 reads them as expressions of social position, not descriptions. Taken literally they are unjustified, even where the distruster is right to expect harm. That reading is interpretive and untested.
Connections
- Fricker’s testimonial injustice (THEORY-327) runs the other way, from hearer to speaker: a prejudiced hearer deflates a speaker’s credibility. Desmond’s truster discounts a high-status speaker for structural reasons. The two are compatible, and Desmond names Fricker as a rival explanation he does not assess.
- Keeley’s argument that sweeping distrust undermines itself (LIT-119, LIT-203) is held but unread. Whether status distrust is local enough to escape it is an open question in NOTE-113.