Abstract: Philosophers sometimes identify betrayal as a reactive attitude specifically associated with broken trust. While there has been relatively little sustained analysis of this attitude in the relevant literature, extant views often treat betrayal as (something like) a species of resentment, the paradigmatic form of attitudinal blame that we experience toward agents who wrong us. In this talk, I aim to show that our understanding of betrayal can profit from putting it into dialogue with a different attitude with which it is intimately connected – namely, grief. As I will argue, interrogating the relationship between betrayal and grief can help to illuminate betrayal’s peculiar normative architecture and certain often obscured respects in which it can reflect and constitute damage to the self.
