Modern liberalism places the autonomy of the individual as a starting point. Therefore, it is not surprising that the year 2020 and the pandemic that marked it revealed significant limits of this view, especially as it concerns the restriction of freedoms that many had taken for granted before. The article deals with two related themes. The first is a proper understanding of the notion of autonomy, where we propose Kant’s understanding of autonomy as opposed to the notion of autonomy as defended by liberalism. The former is much more helpful if we want to understand the times in which we live and find ways out of the frequent impasses that have arisen in connection with the pandemic. The second is the topic of trust, which has also proven to be highly fragile. We offer an understanding of trust as a moral and epistemic virtue while at the same time emphasizing that autonomy, authority, and trust are all relational phenomena. They disprove the understanding of the individual as an independent, isolated and rational agent. They presuppose the other. Moreover, they assume that we as individuals must be in a shared, common space (political, moral, cognitive, …) with others. Virtues, both moral and epistemic, help us to orient and function in such a space. The problem of modern liberalism is that it has led to a lack of such shared spaces and to a lack of emphasis on appropriate virtues that would go beyond the virtues of an ,autonomous, rational, and independent‘ individual.
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