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1. Following the ground-breaking work of feminist and moral theorist Carol Gilligan
in 1982,1
Annette Baier extended Gilligan’s insights about gender distinctions and
research on women’s moral development. Drawing specifically from the work of
British Enlightenment theorist David Hume, Baier argues that reason alone (cel-
ebrated within a traditional male perspective) cannot decide moral action; rather,
a “moral sentiment” (reflecting a feminine perspective) must also be acknowl-
edged in matters pertaining to judgments of value. For Baier, this moral sentiment
was best represented in the concept of trust. She contributed significantly to the
evolving feminist “ethics of care” as a moral philosophy that grew out of this time
period. Over the course of her thirty-year career, Baier became famous as a moral
philosopher, a Hume scholar, and a feminist philosopher, publishing widely on
topics relating to ethics, the psychology of mind, and the essential role of passions
in moral thought and action.2
Baier was born in 1929 in New Zealand and died there in 2012 at the age of
83. She received a Bachelor and Master of Arts in Philosophy at the University of
Otago in New Zealand where, in addition to studying Hume and Plato, she also
learned ancient Greek. She completed her PhD. at Oxford in 1954, working under
the direction of ordinary language philosopher J. L. Austin, and wrote her disser-
tation on precision in poetry. She left Australia for the United States in 1962. She
secured a teaching position at Carnegie Mellon and then joined the philosophy
C H A P T E R 7
Annette Baier
Situated Trust
DEBORAH EICHER-CATT

2. ANNETTE BAIER | 37
department at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1970s. She served as President
of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. She remained
at Pittsburgh until she retired in 1995 at which time she and her husband, Kurt
Baier (also a philosopher) returned to New Zealand. She published four books in
retirement with her last published shortly before her death in 2012.3
She was hon-
ored in 2005 with the publication of an edited collection of essays entitled, Persons
and Passions: Essays in Honor of Annette Baier.4
Baier’s questions or concerns regarding ethics are grounded within a feminist
frame, thus reflecting the philosophical and theoretical momentum of the women’s
movement of the 1960s on various disciplines of thought.
1. Does the traditional male-conceived notion of ethics (based upon justice
and a sense of obligation) accurately represent women’s moral reasoning
and action? Or, are there gender differences that heretofore have gone the-
oretically unrecognized? Baier believes that further development is needed
in moral philosophy in order to understand that moral reasoning is a situ-
ated phenomenon, which is tempered by gender differences.
2. What essential elements are dismissed or neglected in the dominant male
model of moral reasoning that a woman’s perspective might insightfully
provide? Here, Baier advocates the role of “moral sentiments” given our
embodied existence as emotional creatures.
3. How might an alternative, feminine “ethics of care” model complement the
masculinist ethics of justice and obligation? Baier argues that moral rea-
soning should accentuate trust as the fundamental concept of any morality.
4. Is there a theoretical or philosophical bridge that might mediate between
the two gender perspectives, creating a both/and perspective on eth-
ics rather than a gendered either/or? Baier believes that trust fulfills that
mediating role.
5. How does the concept of trust reveal the essential elements of our related-
ness and interdependence as “social animals” striving for our humaneness?
Here we begin to see the communicative implications of Baier’s moral
philosophizing.
Central Themes
Carol Gilligan’s work in the 1980s on women’s moral development sought to
expose what she identified as a male bias in the work of her mentor, Lawrence
Kolberg, who researched the psychological basis of morality. Gilligan claimed that
the “justice perspective” that Kolberg identified in his liberal human rights theory

3. 38 | DEBORAH EICHER-CATT
did not adequately address how women (or feminine ways of thinking) reason
through ethical and moral dilemmas. Challenging a long-standing tradition of
male-dominated moral philosophizing (by the likes of Kant and Rawls), Gilligan
advocated an alternative moral theory known as “the ethics of care,” based upon
the research she had done on feminine moral reasoning. Baier (along with con-
temporary feminist philosophers such as Nel Noddings5
and Joan Tronto6
) rallied
around this idea by claiming that women’s experiences in the world provided a
unique perspective on ethics and morality that the liberal rights theory did not.
Essentially, they argued that this new feminine perspective revealed the moral sig-
nificance of our human relatedness, a sharp contrast to the hallmark of autonomy
and equality that grounded the moral theory of justice.
Baier’s unique contribution to the philosophical movement known as the eth-
ics of care focused upon the essential theoretical elements, which were dismissed
or neglected in the dominant male model. Here she pulled from her extensive
knowledge of Hume, who argued that moral decisions are not decisions based
upon reason alone but are contextualized largely by what he called “moral senti-
ments.” Thus, Baier returned to a “naturalism” perspective (which runs counter to
the rationalistic perspective within traditional moral theorizing) by acknowledg-
ing our embodied existence as social creatures who are uniquely dependent upon
one another throughout our lives. For Baier, the ethics of care thus speaks to this
interdependence, emotionality, and passions for life that she thought undergird all
thought and action, especially in the realm of ethics and morality.
Rather than completely dismiss the significance of the ethics of justice and
obligation, over time the ethics of care philosophers, like Baier, claimed that we
must understand that both models of moral theory are the result of a situated or
hermeneutical understanding of human action and reasoning. The justice model,
concerned as it is with equality and fairness, can be appropriate given social cir-
cumstances that may require an appeal to universal rules or codes of conduct.
Whereas the care model accentuates situations where unequal power relations
(such as parent and child) dictate an on-going negotiation of particular behaviors
that keep vulnerability in check. Above all, an alternative feminist ethics of care
affirms the importance of care/love, emotion for the other, and an embodied sense
of moral reasoning. Hence, Baier appealed to the essential concept of trust as a
much-needed complement to the traditional model of justice.
Because continual reflection on our attitudes, values, and beliefs in particular
circumstances stalls a blind appeal to prescribed rules of conduct, Baier claims
that trust between persons is paramount as we critically weight ethical and moral
dilemmas. She also thinks that the concept of trust provides a possible bridge or
mediating element between the male dominated accounts of a justice morality and

4. ANNETTE BAIER | 39
a feminist morality based upon seeing ethics through a lens of care/love. As she
claims, trust encompasses the cognitive (rational), affective (emotive), and cona-
tive (felt sentiment) functions of thought and action and thus highlights the actual
process of moral reasoning as a relational phenomenon. So, for Baier trust (and
its opposite—distrust) is a “moral prejudice” that undergirds the entire reasoning
process and influences its outcome.
Communicative Ethics Implications
Above all, with her focus on trust as a mediating phenomenon between persons in
moral reasoning, Baier demonstrates the importance of understanding ethics from
a communication perspective. Throughout her career, she argues against a model
of moral reasoning grounded within a perspective of personhood as an autono-
mous being with a capacity to make “objective” evaluative judgments based solely
upon individualized beliefs. Understanding human thought and action requires,
according to Baier, that we first acknowledge our situatedness as embodied social
creatures who operate not independently but within a complex web of emotionally-
charged interdependencies. With trust as a theoretical centerpiece of an ethics of
care, we rightfully see how self and other relations (and the trust or distrust that
ensues) is the communicative and dependent ground from which any ethical or
moral decision ultimately arises.
Notes
1. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
2. See for example, Annette Baier, Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985); A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s
Treatise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Moral Prejudices (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University, 1995); Death and Character: Further Reflections on Hume (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); and Reflections on How We Live (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010).
3. Annette Baier, The Pursuits of Philosophy: An Introduction to the Life and Thought of David
Hume (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
4. Joyce Jenkins, Jennifer Whiting, Christopher Williams, eds., Persons and Passions: Essays in
Honor of Annette Baier (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005).
5. Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984).
6. Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York, NY:
Routledge, 1993).