Trust is a foundational condition of human life. Without it, cooperation falters, relationships unravel, and institutions lose their claim to legitimacy. Yet trust is also fragile and morally complex: it can be misplaced, manipulated, betrayed, or systematically withheld—and its erosion or misdirection carries profound ethical consequences. At a time when public trust in science, governments, and democratic institutions is under pressure across much of the world, and when the rise of artificial intelligence, social media, and algorithmic decision-making is reshaping the very conditions under which trust is formed, maintained, or destroyed, the ethics of trust has become one of the most urgent areas of inquiry in contemporary moral and political philosophy.

Trust raises fundamental conceptual questions. What exactly does it mean to trust someone—or something? How does trust differ from mere reliance, from confidence, or from deference? What is the relationship between trust and distrust, and can distrust be not only rational but morally required? These questions take on particular depth in contexts where trust is structurally asymmetric, historically broken, or subject to exploitation—as in relationships between patients and healthcare professionals, between marginalized communities and the epistemic institutions that have long excluded or misrepresented them, or between citizens and the states that govern them.

Trust also raises urgent normative questions. What obligations do individuals, institutions, and governments bear to cultivate, maintain, justify, or repair trust? How should we respond—individually or collectively—when trust is violated or when distrust is pervasive? What forms of accountability, transparency, or recognition are required to make trust reasonable rather than naïve? And is there such a thing as too much trust—a kind of moral complacency that forecloses critical scrutiny of those to whom we defer?

This transversal flagship theme, cutting across the CRE axes of research, seeks to bring together and deepen the conversations already taking place across its research axes around the many dimensions of trust—conceptual, normative, and practical. The theme was inaugurated at a launch workshop in April 2026, where researchers from across the Centre presented work in progress on questions of trust in a variety of domains. The vitality of that exchange confirmed both the centrality of trust as an ethical concept and the richness of the collaborative possibilities that this theme opens within the Centre.