Philosophy is often seen as a bit of an airy fairy head in the clouds useless endeavour, mostly being engaged in by people with more time than sense. And rightly so - a lot of it is! But in these times right now, with the onset of the pandemic, the introduction of the vaccine, one branch of philosophy is actually at the forefront of public life now: epistemology, and more specifically, how do we decide who to trust?
Trust is of course a fundamental pillar of human life. We have to trust others to survive. Communicating with words wouldn’t be very useful if there wasn’t an implicit trust between the two people speaking, so trust in others underlies literally everything that we do in society.
Normally that trust is pretty mundane. I trust the company who made my sandwich for lunch today not to have poisoned my food, I trust the people in cars not to run me over, I trust my co-workers to give me true information about clients and tasks.
But when it comes to covid, of course the trust is much less mundane. Do I trust government and health organizations who are begging me to take the vaccine, or do I trust these sources I’m finding online that are telling me the government wants to poison me?
If we could each individually test the vaccine for ourselves, of course there would be no need for trust. But it’s obvious that that’s not a possibility, in regards to this vaccine or in general - we don’t have the time, expertise or resources to test everything.
And usually this dilemma about who to trust, like I said, is so mundane, but in this case it’s actually much more pressing and immediate. If you trust the wrong person, you risk illness or death, but you also don’t have the option to “withhold judgement” for free, because withholding judgement itself comes with the risk of illness or death! You can of course withhold judgement, but it’s not a free choice anymore.
And I think that’s quite interesting. The virus and the vaccine have forced our hands to make an epistemic judgement about who to trust.
I have made my own personal decision about who I trust in this case. I’m curious about your guys reasoning, though. Most of you I suspect have chosen to trust the health officials that the vaccine is the right choice. A small number of you have likely chosen not to trust those people. I’m curious about your reasoning. Both groups.