Trust requires a real possibility of revising one’s beliefs, which infants and Abraham lack

Evidence

A standard example of such trust without grounds is the infant. The infant, who is not yet able to trust or not to trust, depends on the actions of parents and others and merely lives with those actions. From this early relation, arguably, “there gradually evolve attitudes which may be called trustful” (Hertzberg 1988, 316). If, on the other hand, that early relation is very bad or capricious, the child may develop an utter incapacity to trust. Because the infant has no choice but to depend on its parents, there is no point in saying the infant trusts them. Indeed, it is not sensible to say that Abraham trusts his god, given his beliefs. He might have failed to follow that god’s orders because of weakness of will, or he might have revised his view of the goodness of his god and the rightness of following his orders. If Abraham could not revise his beliefs, however, then there would be no question of choice for him of whether to sacrifice Isaac, any more than if his son had been taken from him by disease. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 351

Categorization

• DEFINE: Nails down the definitional core: trust presupposes revisable belief, distinguishing genuine trust from mere dependence. This is pivotally relevant to the wife in Blindness who retains sight and judgment.
• XREF: The infant’s non-revisable dependence directly parallels the blind in Saramago’s novel — stripped of sight they lose the informational grounds to revise beliefs about others’ trustworthiness.