On Baier’s account, trust is an extension of the infant’s relation to its parent, especially its mother. Yet, she notes, a “constraint on an account of trust which postulates infant trust as its essential seed is that it not make essential to trusting the use of concepts or abilities which a child cannot be reasonably believed to possess” (Baier 1986, 244). If this is so, then the encapsulated-interest view of trust is inherently wrong because assessments of trustworthiness could only be based on an infant’s instinctive, behavioral learning.

XREF: Connects to Baier's philosophy of trust and to developmental psychology debates about whether infant behavior reveals genuine trust or mere conditioned learning.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 352