PERSON
Onora O’Neill
The Kantian moral philosopher who spent half a century insisting on the distinction between trust and trustworthiness—and whose framework for the conditions of warranted trust has become the sharpest philosophical instrument we have for diagnosing why the AI systems that speak our language with perfect confidence may be the least trustworthy interlocutors we have ever built.
Onora O’Neill has spent her philosophical career asking one question with more precision than anyone else alive: what does it actually take for trust to be warranted? Her answer, grounded in the Kantian tradition of practical reason and refined across decades of work in bioethics, public communication, and institutional design, is both simple and demanding. Trust is not a feeling; it is a judgment—a reasoned assessment that the party being trusted possesses the competence, honesty, and reliability that would justify reliance. Trustworthiness is what institutions and persons must earn; trust is what agents extend only when they have evidence of it. The crisis she identified in her celebrated 2002 Reith Lectures, A Question of Trust—a world awash in demands for trust while the conditions that would warrant it were quietly being dismantled—has been compounded beyond anything she then imagined
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