Abstract

Danish philosopher K.E. Løgstrup provides a moral theory according to which communal life is for the most part characterized by unthinking and immediate relationships of trust, communication, and compassion. When these are disrupted by our tendency toward self-absorption, the ethical claim then shows up in experience as a demand that we prioritise the other’s needs. Løgstrup argues that this demand contains an implicit “understanding of life”; namely, that it is a gift or gratuitous good for which we can take no credit or claim no ownership, not a possession to which we are entitled. This in turn involves a certain self-understanding of oneself as ‘wicked’ – namely, as tending toward a self-preoccupation that gets in the way of moral goodness. In this essay, I develop what I take to be the most promising version of Løgstrup’s theory and examine what we can learn from it. Since his view does not fit easily into available ethical or meta-ethical theories—though relevant comparisons can be found in the phenomenological tradition (especially Emmanuel Levinas)—this task will require some interpretive work. I will first lay out the basics of Løgstrup’s view before putting it into dialogue with contemporary discussions of trust: analysing the dynamics of symmetry and asymmetry at work in the trust relationship and the different modes of self-relation to which it gives rise. As we will see, Løgstrup’s account of trust is importantly different from the interpersonal trust that is the focus of most of the philosophical literature on trust. According to Løgstrup, a kind of background generalized faith in the goodness of the world – its trustworthiness – is what makes interpersonal trust possible in the first place, and this is what motivates Løgstrup’s claim that belief in life as a gift is a condition for the possibility of moral agency.