From trust to trustworthiness: why information is not enough in the food sector

ABSTRACT. The many well-publicized food scandals in recent years have resulted in a general state of vulnerable trust. As a result, building consumer trust has become an important goal in agri-food policy. In their efforts to protect trust in the agricultural and food sector, governments and industries have tended to consider the problem of trust as merely a matter of informing consumers on risks. In this article, we argue that the food sector better addresses the problem of trust from the perspective of the trustworthiness of the food sector itself. This broad idea for changing the focus of trust is the assumption that if you want to be trusted, you should be trustworthy. To provide a clear understanding of what being trustworthy means within the food sector, we elaborate on both the concept of trust and of responsibility. In this way we show that policy focused on enhancing transparency and providing information to consumers is crucial, but not sufficient for dealing with the problem of consumer trust in the current agri-food context

Sacrifices of self are prudential harms: A reply to Carbonell

Vanessa Carbonell argues that sacrifices of self, unlike most other sacrifices, cannot be analyzed entirely in terms of wellbeing. For this reason, Car- bonell considers sacrifices of self as posing a problem for the wellbeing theory of sacrifice and for discussions about the demandingness of morality. In this paper I take issue with Carbonell 19s claim that sacrifices of self cannot be captured as prudential harms. First, I explain why Carbonell considers sacrifices of self par- ticularly problematic. In order to determine whether some state of affairs is (or would be) harmful for someone, it is necessary to assume a particular account of welfare. In this paper, I assume the self-fulfillment account of welfare (Haybron 2008). I introduce this theory and show that it can account for the harm of sacrifices of self