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An acquaintance who works with street teens once said to me, “They live in a completely different world.” She did not mean only that they lived downtown and not in the suburbs, slept under bridges and not in beds, ate in soup kitchens instead of restaurants. She meant that street teens experienced a social reality radically different from the reality of those who have lived most of life in a relatively sheltered and stable middle-class environment. They have a different view of other people, of social authority, of human nature, of political and social institutions. As my acquaintance understood it, this difference resulted from experiences at home and school, experiences with adults who were at best negligent, at worst abusive and hostile. Children were not cared for at home, fared poorly at school, then ran from home to the street. The street teens she knew were hostile and despairing and expected others to be the same. A fundamental difference was in the area of trust: these teens lacked trust in family, teachers, peers, police, even those who sought to help them. And apparently for good reason, given the circumstances from which many of them emerged.

Self‐trust is a necessary condition of personal autonomy and self‐respect. Self‐trust involves a positive sense of the motivations and competence of the trusted person; a willingness to depend on him or her; and an acceptance of vulnerability. It does not preclude trust in others. A person may be rightly said to have too much self‐trust; however core self‐trust is essential for functioning as an autonomous human being.

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Several philosophical works, including a recent essay by Laurence Thomas in this journal, have emphasized the social importance of trust.' Thomas rightly sees basic trust, which he defines as a sense that others, even those who are total strangers, have no intention to harm us, as a necessary condition of a viable social life. This basic trust is, he suggests, threatened by increasing scarcity, competitiveness and anonymity. In response to this problem, Thomas seeks a moral and political philosophy based on a vision of the good society and grounded in a conception of human nature.The present paper explores problems of distrust from a somewhat more practical perspective. Given the existence of distrust-which is in many cases warranted-and given that trust is essential for communication and effective cooperative action, how can we move from warranted distrust to well-founded trust? In this essay I describe this problem and several solutions which have been proposed by philosophers and others. I offer a brief conceptual account of trust and distrust, point to some valid grounds for distrust, and then explore five different approaches to the practical problem of distrust.