Session 10b: Friendship and Trust
Chair: Momoyo Mitsuno

Animals: Friendship and Love
Chad Wolf
Sarah Lawrence College, New York, USA

In accordance with our ever day language, we make a whole variety of statements regarding our relationships with animals and their relationships with each other. One speaks of two pair-bonded swans as being in love or perhaps two playful puppies as being friends. A man walking a dog tells a neighbor of their friendship or how much he and the dog love each other. But what exactly do we mean when we say these things?
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “Love is not a feeling. Love is put to the test…” (Zettel 504), and here he points out the depth of our concept of love; more than a feeling, love has criteria for its recognition, and one would say the same thing about friendship. Considering this, it becomes clear that one cannot so easily assign these concepts to animals, regardless of our close relationships with them or each other.
This paper investigates our ordinary language and how it shapes our views of animal behavior. Can an animal love? Can an animal have friends? Do our terms confuse us or do we mean something different altogether? The paper will explore all of these questions through a Wittgensteinian framework and the benefits of investigating language to uncover facts and mistakes involving our talk of these concepts.

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I'll Look after You if you Look After Me: Friendship, Family and Intimacy in a Hostel for Homeless People
Becky C. Brown
Informatics Collaboratory of the Social Sciences (ICoSS), Sheffield, United Kingdom

This paper is from the research project (No) family (No) food – An oral history project with homeless people and service providers (NFNF), which is a component part of ‘Changing Families, Changing Food’ an inter-disciplinary research programme funded by The Leverhulme Trust at the University of Sheffield.   
NFNF uses oral history interviewing with staff and service users in a large hostel for homeless people which is managed by a national charity, providing accommodation for homeless men and women aged 18 upwards. This project is currently in progress running for 18 months between February 2006 and August 2007. 
Recent years have witnessed a change in the provision of accommodation for homeless people, moving from dormitory style accommodation providing the basics of a meal and a bed aimed primarily at single homeless men, to supported housing with an emphasis on the provision of packages of support and resettlement. 
In light of these developments this paper will explore relationships of care within a supported housing setting.  It seeks to explore the carer/cared for interplay between staff and residents and amongst residents, and how bonds, friendships and intimate relationships are formed and maintained through a mutual exchange of support. This paper will also address the frequency and intensity of which these bonds occur and the importance of the formation of a fictive family within these bonds

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Building Trust in Intimate Relationships: A Philosophical Analysis
Floora Ruokonen
Department of Social and Moral Philosophy, University of Helsinki, Finland

Love and frienship need trust in order to thrive. Yet it seems that we cannot trust at will even in relationships we want to maintain. How then is a trustful relatationship built?
I will present an analysis of trust which is meant to answer this question in a philosophically illuminating as well as in an intuitively compelling way. According to the analysis, part of trusting someone is to hold that person responsible. Holding someone responsible is in turn analysed as being liable to reactive attitudes should the expectations one holds the person to be breached. I argue that this analysis can explain such features of trust as the tendency of both trust and mistrust to spread and the possibility of creating trust in a relationship even if fullblown trusting attitudes as such cannot be adapted at will.
I will use my analysis to discuss the process of building trust in a relationship. I argue that holding someone responsible is to expect that the person shares one’s perspective to the extent that she is able to see one’s interests as reasons for her own choices. The extension of the sphere of interests that the trustee is expected to take as reasons varies with the degree of intimacy in a relationship. I suggest that a relationship crows more trustful by way of extending the shared perspective of the parties. I also argue that within this perspective there is no room for excuses when it comes to breaching expectations. This is not to say that forgiveness is not needed. Rather, it is a condition of a trustful relationship that  the parties relate to each other as to responsible agents,  as persons whom one can hold to expectations and, should these expectations be breached, perhaps forgive.