What does it mean to “decide to trust”? What is at stake in such a decision, and is trust the kind of thing that is “up to us”?  I offer an account of  “deciding trust” as a practice of letting down your guard with the aim of making conspicuous your vulnerability. I argue that this practice is valuable because it functions to disarm, thereby setting the stage for a trusting relationship. The social dynamic of disarmament that I describe suggests a new picture of what trust is and why it is valuable.

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A diffuse harm hurts many people a little; a concentrated harm hurts one person a lot. Other things equal, diffuse harm seems less bad than its concentrated counterpart. For example, shortening a billion happy lives by a second each seems less bad than shortening one happy life by a billion seconds (~thirty years). But this attractive thought is surprisingly difficult to maintain. Although many problems for such a view are known, a particularly vivid difficulty arises in cases that involve a sequence of social positions, each very similar to the last, such as the Fortuna’s Wheel scenario. In such cases, it follows, from rather minimal assumptions, that diffuse harm is just as bad as its relevantly similar concentrated counterpart. In response, some may wonder whether the parity of diffuse and concentrated harms holds only in these special sequential cases. But it can be argued that the approximate parity of diffuse and concentrated harms extends well beyond such cases. Specifically, it can be argued that in many realistic cases, a diffuse harm will bring about an outcome approximately as bad as a relevantly similar concentrated harm. Diffuse harm is easily underestimated.

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