Trusting Experts?

This paper argues against the claim that “expertise requires trust.” It does so by distinguishing between two versions of this claim, one according to which expertise requires trustworthiness and one according to which expertise requires actual trust. The paper then argues that the former version of the claim is obvious and therefore philosophically uninteresting, while the latter version of the claim is, actually, false. Five cases are deployed to defend these arguments, so that along the way we find out more about the nature of expertise, trust and also, incidentally, corruption and even ChatGPT.