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On Trust and Trustworthiness
Sophie Vivian
A dissertation presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
6 December 2019
School of Humanities and Languages
The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia
Abstract There has been a long-standing tendency in both the philosophical and non-
philosophical literature in the English-speaking world to view trust and trustworthiness
primarily as three-place relations. Trust is: A trusts B to do X, and trustworthiness is: B
doing X for A. This three-place schematic reflects English language use regarding the
word “trust” as well as the widely-held beliefs that: 1) cooperation and knowledge
acquisition are normally underpinned by trust and trustworthiness, 2) trust is a
ubiquitous cognitive expectation classifiable as a distinct kind of reliance, and 3)
trustworthiness is the ubiquitous fulfilment of that expectation classifiable as a distinct
kind of reliability (often moralised-reliability). In this dissertation, it is argued that trust
and trustworthiness are not three-place relations, and that thinking of them in this
manner distorts the role they play in our lives. Instead, this dissertation proposes that
trust and trustworthiness are each one-half of a two-place relation, and emphasises the
special, private, complex, and interactive nature of this relation, rather than the
behaviours (cooperation/reliance etc.) and expectations (belief/obligation etc.) often
associated with it. The classification of trust and trustworthiness as being non-cognitive
and non-moralised is essential, since a definitive feature of trust and trustworthiness is
their remarkable capacity for non-conformity when it comes to the rules governing
areas of our lives such as: social-communication, normative-behaviour, moral reasoning
and moral action, truth, knowledge, rationality and agency. Acknowledging this
anomalous rule-breaking facet of our humanity, which is similar to love, facilitates a
better understanding of human behaviour and it allows us to divorce important
questions about trust and trustworthiness from other distinct questions in epistemology
and ethics.
iv
Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to acknowledge my supervisor Michaelis Michael, for providing
sound advice and considered guidance throughout my candidature. I would also like to
thank the supportive staff in the Philosophy department at UNSW Sydney. In particular,
my co-supervisor Melissa Merritt for introducing me to Iris Murdoch, and Markos
Valaris for his role in sparking my initial interest in philosophy. I am grateful for the
instruction provided by Professor Tony Attwood from Griffith University Queensland,
who generously took the time to share his expertise in Theory of Mind with me. Both
Paul Faulkner of The University of Sheffield and Richard Holton of Cambridge
University kindly spared their time to answer my emails, and for this, I thank them. I am
indebted to Dr. Kirsty McKenzie, my non-philosopher mentor; our conversations over
the years were invaluable. Lastly, a (quiet) shout-out to the autistic community. In
particular, the autistic academics: Dr Damian Milton, Dr Melanie Yergeau, and Dr
Elena Chandler, as well as the advocates: Shona Davis, Kieran Rose, and Sara Harvey,
and authors: Yenn Perkis, Laura James, and Katherine May. Along with countless
others, these individuals gently but determinedly give their time to share knowledge and
resources with anyone willing to listen and learn.
On a personal note, the irreplaceable individuals who supported all the other aspects
of my life as I undertook this dissertation – my parents Lainie and Tony, my children
Margaret and Hume, my dear friend Hamish, and my David – provided me with the
love and trust, and so the expertise, that it really took to write this dissertation. Thank
you all so very, very much.
Thesis/Dissertation Sheet
v
Abstract 350 words maximum:
There has been a long-standing tendency in both the philosophical and nonphilosophical literature in the English-speaking world
to view trust and trustworthiness primarily as three-place relations. Trust is: A trusts B to do X, and trustworthiness is: B doing
X for A. This three-place schematic reflects English language use regarding the word “trust” as well as the widely-held beliefs
that: 1) cooperation and knowledge acquisition are normally underpinned by trust and trustworthiness, 2) trust is a ubiquitous
cognitive expectation classifiable as a distinct kind of reliance, and 3) trustworthiness is the ubiquitous fulfilment of that
expectation classifiable as a distinct kind of reliability (often moralised-reliability). In this dissertation, it is argued that trust and
trustworthiness are not three-place relations, and that thinking of them in this manner distorts the role they play in our lives.
Instead, this dissertation proposes that trust and trustworthiness are each one-half of a two-place relation, and emphasises the
special, private, complex, and interactive nature of this relation, rather than the behaviours (cooperation/reliance etc.) and
expectations (belief/obligation etc.) often associated with it. The classification of trust and trustworthiness as being non-cognitive
and non-moralised is essential, since a definitive feature of trust and trustworthiness is their remarkable capacity for non-
conformity when it comes to the rules governing areas of our lives such as: social-communication, normative-behaviour, moral
reasoning and moral action, truth, knowledge, rationality and agency. Acknowledging this anomalous rule-breaking facet of our
humanity, which is similar to love, facilitates a better understanding of human behaviour and it allows us to divorce important
questions about trust and trustworthiness from other distinct questions in epistemology and ethics.
Declaration relating to disposition of project thesis/dissertation
I hereby grant to the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole
or in part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain
all property rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or
dissertation. I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstracts International.
………………………….………………… Signature
………………………….…………………. Witness Signature
06/12/2019 …………………………………………… Date
The University recognises that there may be exceptional circumstances requiring restrictions on copying or conditions on use. Requests for
restriction for a period of up to 2 years must be made in writing. Requests for a longer period of restriction may be considered in exceptional
circumstances and require the approval of the Dean of Graduate Research.
Surname/Family Name : Vivian
Given Name/s : Sophie
Abbreviation for degree as give in the University calendar : PhD (Philosophy)
Faculty : Arts & Social Sciences
School : Humanities & Languages
Thesis Title : On Trust and Trustworthiness
FOR OFFICE USE ONLY Date of completion of requirements for Award:
vi
Inclusion of Publications Statement UNSW is supportive of candidates publishing their research results during their candidature as detailed in the UNSW Thesis
Examination Procedure.
Publications can be used in their thesis in lieu of a Chapter if:
• The student contributed greater than 50% of the content in the publication and is the “primary author”, ie. the student was
responsible primarily for the planning, execution and preparation of the work for publication
• The student has approval to include the publication in their thesis in lieu of a Chapter from their supervisor and Postgraduate
Coordinator.
• The publication is not subject to any obligations or contractual agreements with a third party that would constrain its inclusion
in the thesis
Please indicate whether this thesis contains published material or not.
☒ This thesis contains no publications, either published or submitted for publication
☐Some of the work described in this thesis has been published and it has been documented in the relevant Chapters with
acknowledgement
☐This thesis has publications (either published or submitted for publication) incorporated into it in lieu of a chapter
and the details are presented below
CANDIDATE’S DECLARATION
I declare that I have complied with the Thesis Examination Procedure where I have used a publication in lieu of a Chapter, the
listed publication(s) below meet(s) the requirements to be included in the thesis.
Name
Sophie Vivian
Signature Date (dd/mm/yy)
06/12/2019
Postgraduate Coordinator’s Declaration
I declare that the information below is accurate where listed publication(s) have been used in lieu of Chapter(s), their use complies
with the Thesis Examination Procedure the minimum requirements for the format of the thesis have been met.
PGC’s Name PGC’s Signature Date (dd/mm/yy)
vii
Originality Statement ‘I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge
it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial
proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or
diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due
acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by
others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in
the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my
own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and
conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.’
Signed ………………………………………………… Date ………………...…… 06/12/2019
viii
Copyright Statement ‘I hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and
to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or part in the university libraries in
all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright
Act 1968. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to
use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation.
I also authorise university Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in
Dissertation Abstract International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only). I have
either used no substantial portions of copyright material in my thesis or I have obtained
permission to use copyright material; where permission has not been granted I have
applied/will apply for a partial restriction of the digital copy of my thesis or
dissertation.'
Signed …………………………………………………. Date ………………...……
Authenticity Statement ‘I certify that the Library deposit digital copy is a direct equivalent of the final officially
approved version of my thesis. No emendation of content has occurred and if there are
any minor variations in formatting, they are the result of the con conversion to digital
format.’
Signed …………………………………………………… Date ………………...…
06/12/2019
06/12/2019
ix
Contents
On Trust and Trustworthiness iAbstract ii Acknowledgements iv Inclusion of Publications Statement vi Originality Statement vii Copyright Statement viii Authenticity Statement viii Contents ix
Introduction 1Primer: On Trust and Trustworthiness 1
Outline: On Trust and Trustworthiness 7
10On Trust 10
Overview of Part I, On Trust 10
I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical Literature 12 I.1.1 One-place trust 13 I.1.2 Three-place trust 20 I.1.3 Trust and rationality 25 I.1.4 Voluntariness of trust 33 I.1.5 Summary of Trust: in the Philosophical Literature 37
I.2 Dominant Views on Trust: Problems 39 I.2.1 Three-place trust: logic 39 I.2.2 Three-place trust: simplistic 41 I.2.3 Three-place trust: plus 49 I.2.4 Three-place trust explained 52 I.2.5 Summary of Dominant Views on Trust: Problems 58
I.3 The Object of Trust 60 I.3.1 The object of three-place trust: X 61 I.3.2 The object of three-place trust: B 65 I.3.3 The proper object of trust 71
I.4 Trust 84 I.4.1 Middlemarch 85 I.4.2 Trust and love 92 I.4.3 Trust in language 100 I.4.4 Trusting and monitoring 106 I.4.5 Self-trust 110 I.4.6 Deciding to trust 114
Summary of Part I, On Trust 118
Contents x
120On Trustworthiness 120
Overview of Part II, On Trustworthiness 121
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 123 II.1.1 Symmetricity of trust and trustworthiness 124 II.1.2 One-place trustworthiness 127 II.1.3 Three-place trustworthiness 136 II.1.4 Motives and trustworthiness 146 II.1.5 Summary of the literature on trustworthiness 155
II.2 Dominant Views on Trustworthiness: Problems 157 II.2.1 One-place trustworthiness: virtue 157 II.2.2 Three-place trustworthiness: scenarios 165 II.2.3 Three-place scenarios: discussion 172 II.2.4 Summary of dominant views on trustworthiness: problems 180
II.3 Rich Trustworthiness or Poor Trustworthiness? 181 II.3.1 Jones’ rich trustworthiness (rich reliability) 182 II.3.2 The ethical problem with rich trustworthiness 187 II.3.3 Summary of rich trustworthiness 200
II.4 Trustworthiness 201 II.4.1 The Invention of Lying 202 II.4.2 Mindreading and deception 208 II.4.3 A potential charge of hypocrisy 212 II.4.4 Løgstrup and trust/worthiness 215 II.4.5 The freedom to look again 222
Summary of Part II, On Trustworthiness 230
Conclusion 231Summary: On Trust and Trustworthiness 231
Further Research: On Trust and Trustworthiness 234
Closing Remarks: On Trust and Trustworthiness 235
Bibliography 238
xi
Love… faith… whatever word you want to use, we have to see that when we meet, we
meet on a narrow ridge, and on one side is an abyss called individuality and if you fall
into that abyss everyone you meet is only either useful to you, or, makes you feel better.
And the other abyss on the other side is what I would call ‘collectivity’. It looks like
community, but it’s really based on ‘we hate those people’ so it’s quite deceptive. And I
think of the two, the collectivity is more lonely even than the individuality. But you
know, on this narrow ridge we meet one another and that’s how love works. That’s how
trust works…
–Graham Long
Wayside Chapel, Kings Cross Sydney
1
Introduction … fashion still demands that the real complexity shall go unexamined
–Mary Midgely
This dissertation is a philosophical exploration of trust and trustworthiness as they exist
in human relationships. It is in two symmetrical parts: Part I: On Trust and Part II: On
Trustworthiness. The primary aim of this dissertation is to overthrow the current
dominant views of trust and trustworthiness in philosophy: namely, that trust is a
ubiquitous three-place epistemic relation that enhances our agency (similar to reliance
or belief) and trustworthiness is its one/three-place ethical counterpart (similar to
reliability or virtue). Instead, this dissertation suggests that trust and trustworthiness are
best seen as two-place relations. A secondary aim of this research project is to
characterise this two-place relation, by emphasising its inherent complexity and
resistance to exacting definition. This introduction proceeds with a brief Primer on
Trust and Trustworthiness to set out the historical and contemporary significance of The
Problem of Trust, followed by an Outline on Trust and Trustworthiness, which sets out
the structure of this dissertation proceeding.
Primer: On Trust and Trustworthiness
Discussion of trust in philosophy is not new. Plato, in his dialogue Charmides, asks us
to consider how a layperson can determine the experts from the charlatans (380BC:
153a-76d). Famously, Plato was not optimistic, and the dialogue ends in aporia. Today,
Plato’s concern with how non-experts could be fit to judge the assertions of experts has
become widely regarded as ‘The Problem of Trust’ and discussion of “the problem”
appears in many disparate areas of philosophical inquiry, in the context of a wider
epistemological project of accounting for the transfer of knowledge. The conceptual
link between trust and testimony as it exists in philosophy today, for example, is
apparent in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which in 2006 included for the
first time both an entry on Trust, and an entry on the Epistemological Problems of
Introduction Primer: On Trust and Trustworthiness 2
Testimony, each citing over 100 contemporary philosophers. Putting the bibliographies
for these entries side-by-side, one is struck by the close commonality.
The consequences of treating trust as a form of reliance on another person, or
acceptance of their testimony, i.e. I trust you to show me the way, I trust you to tell me
the truth etc., have been significant. The view is now common, for example, that it is
not only knowledge gained from others (testimony) that requires trust, but that all
knowledge (including self-knowledge) requires trust. ‘Trust’, in this sense, is as Niklas
Luhmann describes:
confidence in one’s expectations... In many situations, of course, man can choose in certain
respects whether or not to bestow trust. But a complete absence of trust would prevent him
even from getting up in the morning. He would be prey to a vague sense of dread, to
paralyzing fears. He would not even be capable of formulating distrust and making that a
basis for precautionary measures, since this would presuppose trust in other directions.
Anything and everything would be possible. Such abrupt confrontation with the complexity
of the world at its most extreme is beyond human endurance. (1979: 4)
The view Luhmann is describing – trust as a phenomenon that is part of all our daily
actions and interactions, so ubiquitous that its absence is “beyond human endurance”
and would entirely incapacitate us – is present in the writings of many philosophers.
According to Derrida:
elementary trust … is involved … in every address of the other. From the very first instant it
is co-extensive with this other and thus conditions every “social bond”, every questioning,
all knowledge. [my emphasis] (1998: 63)
As a ubiquitous pervasive cognitive expectation, trust functions as both a cause of, and
potential solution to, what is problematic about all knowledge, and so agency, and so
any attempt at collective agency. It is involved in every part of our epistemic and
practical decision-making. Trust, in this sense, is what makes us agents in the first place
and what enables us to extend our agency, and so in philosophy today it is as David
Owens summarises:
Introduction Primer: On Trust and Trustworthiness 3
for Hume the psychological cement of human society was sympathy; for Hobbes it was
fear. For many recent writers, both popular and philosophical, trust plays this foundational
role. (2017: 214)
As a current example of trust playing this foundational role, Bernd Lahno (2017) claims
that trust is what makes collective agency possible, because it is what allows us to
overcome the inherent risk involved in being collective agents. To make this claim is to
make trust an action that we take – an inherently risky action – that is rational only if
one is in possession of certain knowledge:
Trusting behaviour is characterised by the risk that another person may act in undesired
ways. A rational individual willingly incurs such risk only if she has reason to believe that
others will respond cooperatively. (2017: 113)
For Lahno, trust is a cognitive rational expectation that the trustee will behave
cooperatively, and so trustworthiness is behaving cooperatively in line with expectations
(2017: 113-29). This conception leads trust to be regarded as a response to uncertainty
about other people’s behaviour, and so rational only when we have reason to believe
that others are worthy of our trust (i.e. will behave as expected). This important feature
of collective agency is taken to be trust in many areas of academic inquiry that seek to
understand and explain collective agency, i.e. social and political science, as Katherine
Hawley describes:
trust and trustworthiness in collective contexts are widely discussed by social scientists. For
example, in international relations there is debate about trust and distrust between states,
other organizations or groups, and individual representatives of those collectives (e.g. Booth
and Wheeler 2008). And ‘organizational trust’ is a recognized research topic in
management studies, taking in not only corporations, but also non-governmental
organizations and other complex group agents. Such research investigates both the influence
of organizational contexts on our trust in individuals, and the ways in which trust is invested
in organizations themselves (e.g. Saunders, Skinner, et al. 2010). (2017: 230)
Trusting governments and financial institutions, trusting experts and cyber technology;
in some areas of academia, the concepts of trust and trustworthiness are being used to
talk about issues of national, environmental, and technological security. In other areas –
Introduction Primer: On Trust and Trustworthiness 4
such as science – the concepts of trust and trustworthiness function differently, for
example, when talking about the transfer of scientific knowledge and the process of
scientific inquiry. In economics, trust and trustworthiness are about prediction and risk.
These disparate senses of trust have the bare schematics in common: they take trust to
involve three elements, 1) a truster, 2) a trustee, and 3) that which is entrusted (in many
cases ‘truster’ and ‘trustee’ are to be given a broad interpretation so as to include non-
human entities). Reflecting this, in philosophy today, the version of trust that has
become dominant is three-place trust:
It has become normal, at least in Anglophone analytic philosophy, to think of it [trust] as
fundamentally a three-place relation with an infinitival component: A trusts B to do C.
(Domenicucci and Holton 2017: 149)
This strict simple three-place definition of trust, known here as: (A trusts B to do X),
seems able to accommodate the ideas we have been exploring: namely, that: 1) trust is
ubiquitous (since we depend on other human beings, systems, and entities to do things
for us all the time), 2) trust is a kind of expectation that others will do things for us
(behave in desired ways), and 3) trust is characterised by risk (since B might not do C
for A). It is also apposite, according to many authors, because it is a distillation of the
way we commonly use the word ‘trust’ in English (e.g. I trust you to return to me in one
piece), and some, such as Philip Nickel, embrace the wide-scope ‘explanatory power’ of
three-place trust, applicable as it is to a wide range of phenomena:
Trust should be able to explain cooperation, and its failure should help explain the
emergence of cooperation-enabling institutions… What follows is the superiority of
unrestricted views of trust, which take trust to be no more than the disposition to rely on
others, over restrictive views, which require the trusting person to have some further
attitude in addition to this disposition. (2017: 195)
This dissertation, in essence, categorically rejects this picture of trust and
trustworthiness, arguing that the historical construal in English-speaking academia of
trust as a feature of our cognitive/epistemic lives facilitating and implicating our
knowledge, agency, risk, and rationality is mistaken. On the trust side, it is proposed
that trust need not be able to explain cooperation in every instance, since not all
Introduction Primer: On Trust and Trustworthiness 5
instances of cooperation are instances of trust, and failures of trust do not always
explain the emergence of cooperation-enabling institutions. Trust is more than a
disposition to cooperate with others, rely on others, and expect them to do what we ask.
It is more, even, than a disposition to react with resentment and betrayal when others
fail to do what we expect of them. On the trustworthiness side, trustworthiness is more
than being cooperative, honest, or compliant, and it is more than being these things with
an attitude of goodwill or altruism. Trust and trustworthiness are not ubiquitous, but
special. They take time to come into existence, doing so only in our close interpersonal
relationships, and – even in those relationships – trust and trustworthiness do not
involve a cognitive expectation (or risk) that others will do or be (or fail to do or be)
anything in particular.
Perhaps the most succinct way to capture what is to come in this dissertation is by
quoting an exchange between a holographic Commander C. ‘Trip’ Tucker and
Commander William T. Riker, characters beloved by fans of that fertile font of
philosophical exchanges, the TV show Star Trek: Enterprise (Berman 2005):
Trip: I can count on one hand the number of people I trust. I don't mean trust like... 'I
trust you aren't lying to me' or, 'I trust you won't steal my money'. I'm talking about the
kind of trust where... you know someone's not gonna hurt you, no matter what; where
you know they'll always be there for you, no matter how bad things get. You ever
know anybody like that?
Riker: Yeah. One or two.
Unlike three-place accounts, the two-place account presented in this dissertation (A
trusts B) and (A is trustworthy regarding B) is able to clearly differentiate trust and
trustworthiness from the phenomena with which they are often confused: phenomena
with which trust and trustworthiness no doubt interact in interesting ways but from
which they are nonetheless distinct. This is essential, since – though we often use the
terms interchangeably – that which often coincides with trust (i.e. reliance, belief,
cooperation, expectation, hope etc.) and trustworthiness (i.e. fairness, honesty,
cooperativeness, predictability, etc.) are not interchangeable with trust and
trustworthiness, nor with one another. Given the prominent role trust has come to play
in – as Domenicucci and Holton (2017) put it – “Anglophone analytic philosophy”,
Introduction Primer: On Trust and Trustworthiness 6
there is a pressing need to provide an account of trust and trustworthiness that instead
captures their distinct and important role in our lives, as clear differentiating features of
our anomalous rule-breaking special relationships; i.e. the ‘one or two’.
As a final example to set the tone for what follows, I turn to an interview by
Australian radio personality Richard Fidler with Graham Long (2017). Reverend Long
is the Pastor and CEO of Wayside Chapel in Sydney’s King’s Cross– a refuge for
domestic violence victims, the homeless, addicted, and otherwise desperate and
abandoned. A sanctuary to receive second, and subsequent chances, Wayside is a place
where trust and trustworthiness are at their most vital, most vulnerable. Though not
religious myself, when I heard this interview on the radio around the middle of my
candidature my ears pricked up. Like anyone who has lived in that part of Sydney for
any length of time, I was familiar with Reverend Long and had seen him about from
time to time as he met with Sydney's least lucky. Long was brought up by a
fundamentalist preacher, and I knew already of his opinion that when it comes to human
beings “any attempt to formularise is bullshit”. Having wrestled with his own
trustworthiness in the public eye (the preacher who had an affair!) his humanism and
not his religiosity had made him a local hero. Long sees his role as one of meeting
people where they are, seeing them not saving them, and on this occasion, in answer to
a question about the qualifications one needs to be effective (as he is) at the job that he
does, Long remarked:
One of the sad things about the culture we live in, is we think things like trust, things like
love… things like resilience, all kinds of so-called ‘personal qualities’ reside inside me.
And it’s profoundly misunderstood because the truth is there’s no such thing as a single
human being. There’s no such thing. The word ‘I’ could only ever describe half of
something. The truth is I am not complete until there is at least two of us. My centre is not
in here… it isn’t in here– it’s between you and me. And, while I live as an individual, I
never know who I am. I can’t know who I am. It is only when I truly engage with you that I
begin to find out who I really am. You might say, in a certain sense, you complete me.
People who fall in love say that, but it’s true in every relationship. When we meet, you
know, we are completed by the other. And you learn who you are through the other. We
discover that my humanity is made by yours… and yours by mine.
Introduction Outline: On Trust and Trustworthiness 7
Trust and trustworthiness are each one-half of a two-place relation. They do not exist
until there are two of us, and we make them, and break them, together. They are
complex, veiled, full of contradiction, and they contribute to our sense of a shared
humanity. At heart, this is what I spend the next hundred thousand words or so
considering in this thesis On Trust and Trustworthiness.
Outline: On Trust and Trustworthiness
the life of one person is interwoven with the life of another. (Løgstrup 1956) translated
(1997: 10)
Part I of this research project, On Trust, addresses the nature of trust. Section I.1 Trust
in the Philosophical Literature begins by examining how trust has been understood in
the contemporary philosophical literature. The picture that emerges is one in which
three-place trust is – and has historically been – dominant. This reflects the questions
philosophers have considered with regard to trust, i.e. various epistemic questions to do
with agency, risk, knowledge, and rationality. Section I.1 thus makes a contribution in
its original organisation of the seminal literature to highlight how trust has been framed
as both a risk to, and solution to, an epistemic problem within the discipline of
philosophy.
Section I.2, Dominant Views on Trust: Problems, elaborates on the various versions
of three-place trust, and highlights their limitations. I.2 makes its primary contribution
in its exposition of these limitations. A secondary contribution of this section lies in the
presentation and consideration of three explanations as to why philosophers have
preferred not to abandon three-place trust despite its limitations. The aim of providing
such explanations is to better understand the continued dominance of three-place trust in
philosophy.
Section I.3, The Object of Trust, contains the most significant contribution of Part I.
In this section, I argue that it is essential to view three-place trust not as a kind of trust
(let alone the dominant kind) but as a kind of reliance. The argument this dissertation
makes for this shift in understanding relies on revealing an ambiguity regarding the
object of trust that is inherent to the three-place trust logic. This section thus achieves
Introduction Outline: On Trust and Trustworthiness 8
the primary aim of Part I, which is to establish that three-place trust is not a kind of
trust. This dissertation then offers some recommendations as to what sorts of things
count as the proper objects of trust and trustworthiness. Accordingly, I.3 also
contributes to the ongoing debate in the literature concerning what sorts of things can
trust (and be trusted) i.e. persons, institutions, governments, systems, animals, etc.
The final section of Part I, Trust I.4 presents an original discussion that emphasises
the intricate private two-place nature of trust. Drawing on an example from George
Eliot’s novel Middlemarch – the same example Victoria McGeer has used to make a
related point – it is argued that trust is a complex experience that one person (the
truster) has of another (the trustee). This section thus satisfies the secondary aim of Part
I, which is not to provide anything like a definition or formula of trust, but to develop
some novel ideas that make a small contribution to our understanding of the nature of
trust. This section ends with a relaxed discussion that aims to anticipate and address
some objections to the shift from a three-place understanding to a two-place
understanding.
Part II, On Trustworthiness, addresses the nature of trustworthiness. Section II.1
Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature, begins as in I.1, by presenting how
trustworthiness has been understood in the contemporary philosophical literature. Here,
a distinct picture emerges. In the case of trustworthiness, various one-place conceptions
are also widely adopted that view trustworthiness not as an epistemic notion, but as an
ethical notion. Despite this underlying difference though, II.1 confirms that most
philosophers still consider trustworthiness to be – at least in part – a three-place relation,
notwithstanding any additional one-place moral requirements. Section II.1 demonstrates
that this research project makes an original contribution in its proposal that
trustworthiness is one-half of a two-place relation.
Section II.2, Dominant Views on Trustworthiness: Problems, addresses the
limitations of both one-place and three-place conceptions of trustworthiness. II.2 thus
makes a substantial contribution to our current understanding of trustworthiness in its
exposition of these limitations and satisfies the primary aim of Part II of this research
project, which is to establish that trustworthiness is neither a one-place, nor a three-
place relation.
Introduction Outline: On Trust and Trustworthiness 9
Section II.3, Rich Trustworthiness or Poor Trustworthiness, instead of rehearsing all
the same epistemic arguments in relation to trustworthiness, shifts to focus instead on
the views of one philosopher: Karen Jones. The primary aim of this section is to draw
attention to the worrying ethical implications of her influential view (rich
trustworthiness), implications that will extend to any view which is similar to hers in
the relevant respects. This section thus contributes to a tertiary aim of Part II to
demonstrate the potential ethical pitfalls of providing narrow behavioural definitions of
concepts like trust and trustworthiness, which have historically been used to demarcate
and establish our very personhood and place in a shared humanity.
Finally, in symmetry with Section I.4 Trust, Section II.4 Trustworthiness makes use
of another fictional example – the film The Invention of Lying – to develop our
understanding of trustworthiness. The surprising link between trustworthiness and
“mind-blindness” is expounded, improving our understanding of the nature of
trustworthiness.
In summary, Part I: On Trust and Part II: On Trustworthiness share parallel
structures, primary and secondary aims, and make parallel primary and secondary
contributions. The primary aim of both parts is to provide good reasons for thinking that
we must shift our understanding from the dominant views. The secondary aim of both
parts is to make a contribution to our understanding of trust and trustworthiness.
10
On Trust
The inner self who engages in these judgements – the essential person, the active self who
really matters – was somehow being ignored and forgotten.
–Iris Murdoch (2013: xi)
Currently, the dominant view in philosophy is that trust is a three-place relation (A
trusts B to do X), or – less strongly – that there is a kind of trust which is three-place. It
is the principal concern of Part I of this thesis to argue against the three-place
conception of trust, on the grounds that it leads us to think of trust as an epistemically
grounded, publicly observable phenomenon rooted in behaviour, which it is not.
Instead, Part I suggests that there are more compelling reasons for thinking of trust as a
private complex and variable experience that the truster has of their trustee, integrating
a range of phenomena including our attitudes, beliefs, desires, intentions, memories,
reactions, reasoning, emotions and so on, and manifesting – at times – in behaviours,
though such behaviours are not to be identified with trust. So-called “three-placed trust”
is better understood not as a kind of trust, but as a kind of reliance.
Overview of Part I, On Trust
Part I has four substantial sections. Section I.1 Trust in the Philosophical Literature
reviews current philosophical literature on trust. As my aim in this research project is to
reject wholly the view of trust that is dominant in the philosophical literature, this
review is vitally important to setting up what follows. Section I.1 demonstrates that
three-place trust is almost universally adopted, even among those who recognise other
I Overview of Part I, On Trust 11
elements to trust – such as an emotional or attitudinal element. I.1 also reveals that
three-place trust has led to the “problem of trust” being largely understood to be an
epistemic problem, concerning the transfer of knowledge. Section I.2, Dominant View
on Trust: Problems provides further detail and examples of three-place trust and
explores various problems with it, while observing some reasons why philosophers have
chosen to adopt it in spite of its limitations. Section I.3 The Object of Trust moves on to
critically examine the internal logic of three-place trust, concluding that three-place
trust is actually a kind of reliance. Section I.4 Trust puts forward an alternative two-
place account, making use of an analogy between trust and love, and an excerpt from
George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch – which has previously been used by Victoria
McGeer to highlight trust’s link to hope. Finally, Section I.4 also discusses some of the
outcomes of the switch from three-place trust to two-place trust and anticipates and
addresses some objections that may be raised.
I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical Literature 12
I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical Literature
Currently, there is no definite consensus either within or outside of philosophy
regarding the nature of trust. While this is true of many similar phenomena, such as love
(Helm 2017b), forgiveness (Hughes and Warmke 2017), loyalty (Kleinig 2017), and
friendship (Helm 2017a), trust – unlike these other concepts – is used as a theoretical or
technical term in a number of academic disciplines, most notably in biology,
psychology, economics, and political and social science. As these disciplines often rely
on theory and evidence external to their discipline (e.g. psychologists and political
theorists use empirical data and theory from economics and vice versa) there is a
worrying scope for confusion and error if what is meant by ‘trust’ in one discipline does
not translate to another.
In philosophy, as there is also no clear definition or consensus, organising the
relevant literature on trust is inherently challenging and could potentially be done
successfully in any number of different ways. This section identifies three broad themes
that emerge – trust as an emotion, trust as an attitude, and trust as an epistemic state.
Yet because one may coherently hold the view for example, that trust is an attitude
which involves either an affective component, a cognitive component (such as beliefs),
or both, neat lines simply cannot be drawn. This is further complicated by the fact that
many philosophers writing on trust do not explicitly spell out their position regarding its
nature.
That said, it is often possible to glean a philosopher’s thinking from the specific
problem they pay attention to. For example, if the philosopher is concerned with the
rationality of trust, then it is likely they conceive of trust as an epistemic state. If a
philosopher is concerned with our ability to decide to trust, then they may worry that
trust is a non-voluntary emotion, or belief. Revealing a philosopher’s stance on the
nature of trust often involves examining that philosopher’s question of interest vis-à-vis
trust. Most philosophers discussing trust have been interested in the so-called risk of
trust, and the question of when our trust is warranted or justified, with a smaller number
paying attention to ethical questions that arise in relation to trust. What this shows is
that most philosophers view trust as a cognitive/epistemic notion, similar to belief.
I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical Literature 13
Given these complicating factors, this dissertation organises the literature according
to the bare schematics. Subsection I.1.1 One-place trust presents literature that
conceives of trust as a one-place relation, and also literature which takes trust to be an
attitude, connected to betrayal. Subsection I.1.2 presents literature on three-place trust,
acknowledging that the many accounts which fit under this banner are diverse in their
details. As paying attention to the question a philosopher is interested in can be so
illuminating when it comes to saying what exactly they understand trust to be, I.1.3
Trust and Rationality and I.1.4 Voluntariness of Trust present two main questions of
interest for philosophers, which serve to turn this messy history into a more coherent
narrative.
I.1.1 One-place trust
When trust is conceived of as a virtue, emotion, character or personality trait, this
locates the trust solely in the truster, making it a property or one-place relation. As a
side note, it must be acknowledged that while some philosophical accounts of emotion
view emotion as a two-place relation, for example Kenny (1963) and de Sousa (1987).
Others have argued that many emotions – notably love – lack any propositional object
(Kraut 1987; Rorty 1987). For simplicity here, emotions are treated as one-place
relations, lacking any propositional object. If this turns out to be wrong, it will not force
the conclusion that trust is an emotion, since various two-place emotions may be
features of trust without trust being an emotion.
Sometimes, accounts of trust as an attitude are one-place as well, but this is not true
of every attitudinal account of trust. To be clear on the difference between one-, two-
and three-place accounts, contrast:
1. A trusts (is a trusting person)
2. A trusts B
3. A trusts B to do X
In simple examples:
4. Rasmus is a very trusting boy.
5. Rasmus trusts Iris.
6. Rasmus trusts Iris to look after his dinosaur while he is at school.
I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical Literature 14
1 and 4 are examples of one-place trust, 2 and 5 are examples of two-place trust, and 3
and 6 are examples of three-place trust. This subsection discusses literature in which
trust is understood in the one-place sense captured in 1 and 4.
Almost all philosophers who endorse the idea that we have one-place elements to
our trust still embrace a three-place conception, where trust is a one-place response – a
reaction – to what the trustee does. Purely one-place views, where trust is just an
emotion, attitude, virtue, character or personality trait, are actually very rare. While a
number of philosophers do mention a sense in which trust is a personality or character
trait – for example Potter (2002: 8) – most qualify that this is not the sense of trust they
are interested in. Indeed, while the view is more common in the literature on
trustworthiness as we shall see in II.1, almost no philosophers write as though trust were
a virtue for example, and it is usually only trustworthiness and not trust that is taken to
be a moral notion. Notable exceptions to this are Nickel (2007), and Cohen and
Dienhart (2013) who have suggested that the duty to be trustworthy can only be
ascribed to a trustee by the very act of trusting, hence trust might be a moral notion, and
McGeer, who has observed that being able to forgive is a “functional virtue” that
trusters require to sustain trusting relationships (2008: 247).
So, while the idea of trust as a virtue is rare, a number of philosophers do endorse
the idea that trust is an emotion or that it contains an affective element. Though the idea
that trust is an emotion is the least popular stance found in the literature, indications that
trust does seem to have features similar to emotions appear in influential accounts of
emotion, such as those of de Sousa (1990), Calhoun and Solomon (1984), Rorty (1980),
and Lahno (2001). For example, Karen Jones has stated that trust – like other emotions
– narrows our perception to certain “fields of evidence” i.e., those fields that support
that emotion (Jones 1996: 11). For similar discussions, see also Baker (1987) and Webb
(1992). Likewise, Carolyn McLeod (2015) has pointed out that if it is true that trust
makes us blind to certain evidence – such as evidence of untrustworthiness – then the
emotional account of trust holds some sway in its ability to account for this apparent
“blindness-to-evidence” feature of trust. That said, Keren (2014) has provided an
argument to show that a belief-based account of trust is able to accommodate this
apparent feature, and so, again as Carolyn McLeod says, it is not clear why – on this
I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical Literature 15
basis – one should endorse a purely emotional account of trust. She says that while the
idea holds some attraction, there does seem to be an undeniable distinction between
trust and other more readily identifiable “typical” emotions, such as anger or joy
(McLeod 2015).
The reluctance to embrace a completely one-place account of trust reflects the
current trend in philosophy to see trust as playing a role in an epistemic problem to do
with testimony, as discussed already in Primer on Trust and Trustworthiness. The one-
place account simply does not raise these epistemic questions, which philosophers are
so interested in, such as: ‘How can trust in expert testimony be justified?’ and ‘How can
it be rational to trust when trust requires us to overlook evidence?’ etc. Despite this, the
pull of the emotional element to trust is strong, hence, it is not surprising to find the idea
that trust is an emotion plus some other element explored in the literature. The term
adopted in this dissertation for such views is hybrid, as they are schematically
one/three-place in nature. As we shall see, hybrid views are popular as they allow
philosophers to explore their epistemic questions while acknowledging other intuitive
‘non-cognitive’ elements to trust and trustworthiness.
One example of hybrid thinking is evident in Stephen Darwall’s comment that even
in epistemic three-place trust, where we “trust what others tell us”, we invariably “take
it to heart”, putting our own personal feelings at stake (2017: 47). Another is in Bernd
Lahno’s detailed argument for trust as an emotion, using an Aristotelian conception of
emotion, which places the affective element of trust at the centre of his explanation,
while also acknowledging that trust is an attitude “Trust does in fact possess emotional
character in some important respects. It is an emotional attitude” (2001: 173). Similarly,
Jones (1996) speaks of trust as an “affective attitude”.
Like the emotional element, the attitudinal element of trust has likewise been
acknowledged. Many philosophers speak of the “attitude of trust” as though to have an
attitude of trust is to have one-place trust ( see, for example, Faulkner (2017: 20). While
his is not a one-place view, Richard Holton (1994) no doubt provided the most
influential ‘attitudinal account’ of trust. Particularly influential among those
philosophers who show at least some concern with the metaphysical question regarding
the nature of trust are Hieronymi (2008b), McGeer (2008), Walker (2006: 79), Faulkner
I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical Literature 16
(2007a, 2007b, 2015), Govier (1993, 1998), and Jones (2012). Indeed, the impact of
Holton’s ‘reactive attitude trust’ on the metaphysics of trust is so significant that the
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy section on ‘The Nature of Trust and
Trustworthiness’ now boldly asserts: “Trust is an attitude we have towards people we
hope will be trustworthy, where trustworthiness is a property not an attitude.” (McLeod
2015).
Yet among those who agree with Holton that trust “is an attitude” there remains
disagreement about what sort of attitude trust is. Is it an emotional attitude as Lahno and
Jones suggest, or a moral attitude (Mullin 2005), or even a belief-attitude (Hieronymi
2008b, 2008a; Wright 2010: 618)? Holton’s own view – the reactive attitude view –
uses the concept of the participant stance first introduced by P.F. Strawson (1962) and
involves a readiness on the part of the truster to feel betrayal. Trust occurs – according
to Holton (1994) – whenever the truster stands ready to feel betrayal should the trustee
fail to do what they have been entrusted to do. This view is complicated, as it allows
that trust can have both an affective element, as well as involve beliefs (i.e. that the
trustee is trustworthy) but maintains that it is nevertheless best explicated in terms of the
reactions we have to the actions of the trustee. Holton (1994) provides what is
ultimately a view of trust that is schematically three-place in nature; he acknowledges as
much in Trust as a Two-Place Relation (Domenicucci and Holton 2017: Footnote 1).
Significantly, the notion of betrayal is central to Holton’s 1994 discussion of trust
and this proposal has provided a flashpoint of disagreement. Colin O’Neil, for one,
agrees with Holton, but takes things further, arguing that a betrayal of trust cannot occur
unless one is trusted. He says, “it is always a defence to a charge of having betrayed
someone’s trust that there was no trust to betray” (2017: 71). O’Neil also claims that it
is essential for a betrayal of trust to occur that the trustee be aware of the trust “the
trusted person cannot betray trust that he or she is unaware of” (2017: 80). Against this,
Thomas Simpson T. W. Simpson (2012: 553) has argued that in some cases the reactive
attitude view does not do any distinctive work, because, as Philip Nickel similarly
argues; merely saying so (that trust makes us stand ready to experience betrayal) cannot
explain why the truster stands ready to feel betrayal, rather than just disappointment.
Nickel says:
I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical Literature 17
Without an account of what attitudes comprise the moral attitude of trust in the first place, it
is impossible to say what justifies a person in feeling disappointed or betrayed when trust
fails. (2007: 318)
How people typically react, and whether they are justified in so reacting, are two
separate questions not entirely made distinct in Nickel’s objection. However, if trust is
conceived of as a three-place reactive attitude that necessarily causes betrayal when the
trustee fails to do what they have been entrusted to do (otherwise it was never really
trust in the first place), then Nickel and Simpson are right in pointing out that
sometimes, this just isn’t so. As this dissertation suggests (II.1, II.2, II.3) the failures of
trustees to do what they have been entrusted to do can cause any number of various
actions and reactions, and philosophers do not get to say which ones are and which are
not legitimate.
Yet while Simpson and Nickel’s objection holds some sway, it does not do away
entirely with the idea that trust might involve betrayal. That we do not always react to
betrayals in the ways one might expect does not show that the notion of betrayal is not
connected to trust and trustworthiness in some important way. As it stands, there is a
notable hole in the literature when it comes to the notion of betrayal. Until this situation
is rectified, betrayal cannot stand as a theoretical construct upon which trust is defined.
Though some preliminary accounts can now be found on betrayal (Cogley 2012;
Harding 2011; O’Neil 2017), the tendency has been for philosophers to deliver accounts
that fit with a three-place conception of trust that they have already accepted. The
accounts of betrayal on offer are invariably three-place as well– because trust is (A
trusts B to do X) betrayal is (B failing to do X for A). Such descriptions of what it is to
betray do not fit with the two-place account of trust offered in this dissertation.
Moreover, a three-place account of betrayal does not fit with empirical research on
betrayal (detailed in II.4), which shows that betrayal – of which infidelity is the prime
example – consists not in our behaviour, but in something much more complex about
the particular relationship two people share. One might say that the betrayal is in the
promise, the history, the reason, the motive, the emotion… in the person, not in the act.
Clarity on this is vital, since so many philosophers endorse the idea that what trusters
risk (specifically) in trusting is betrayal: Baier (1994, Chapters 6-9), Holton (1994),
I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical Literature 18
Jones (2004), Walker (2006, Chapter 3), Hieronymi (2008), McGeer (2008), McMyler
(2011, Chapter 4), and Hawley (2014).
Recently, Paul Faulkner has explicitly endorsed the idea that the attitude of one-
place trust is fundamental, with an argument based on language use:
If X trusts, there must be some Y that X trusts, but that X trusts Y does not in any way
imply that X trusts more generally. So, of the two predicates, the one place one is arguably
more fundamental. Thus, the heart of our notion of trust seems to be simply an attitude of
trust, which may, but need not, take specific persons as its object, and which can support,
but need not, the act of relying on persons. (2017: 120)
Personally, I do not share with Faulkner the intuition that (X trusts Y) does not imply
that (X trusts) more generally. Surely, to trust Y, X must in some sense ‘have trust’.
Analogously, to love anything is to have love, to hate anything is to have hate. While
the idea of possessing a one-place ‘attitude of trust’ is not logically incoherent as
Faulkner says, such a thing could only ever be – this dissertation argues in I.4 – one part
of trust. The idea of trust as an emotion, virtue, character trait or attitude can only ever
capture something about what it sometimes means to trust, since many elements of trust
are only brought about in our interactions/relations with others.
On this point, the notion of self-trust is sometimes characterised as one-place, since
it involves only one individual. Philosophers who discuss self-trust include Foley
(2005), Govier (1993), McLeod (2002), and Lehrer (1997). Though the thought that we
can and do trust ourselves is well and truly alive in our folk-psychology, the question
regarding the possibility (or perhaps even necessity) of self-trust in philosophy has not
been settled. Indeed, it cannot be settled without first having settled the questions what
it is to trust, what it is to have a self, and perhaps also what it is to possess knowledge.
Yet answering such questions is not the primary focus of those who discuss self-trust.
This is because – while it is often spoken of as though it were one-place – the notion of
self-trust in play is actually a three-place epistemic notion – (A trusts A to do X). The
questions that interest those discussing self-trust in the literature are invariably identical
to the ones discussed by those who adopt three-place trust – questions to do with risk,
agency and rationality.
I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical Literature 19
For example, Edward Hinchman (2003: 25-51) has argued that self-trust runs the
same risks as trust in others, in the sense that reasonable trust presupposes
trustworthiness in the trusted in both cases and so it can only be rational to trust
ourselves if we have good reason to believe that we ourselves are trustworthy.
Hinchman thus sees self-trust as a diachronic exercise of practical reason. Trudy Govier
(1993: 101-20) argues that self-trust is a necessary condition for personal autonomy.
She says:
to lack general confidence in one’s own ability to observe and interpret events, to remember
and recount, to deliberate and act generally, is a handicap so serious as to threaten one’s
status as an individual moral agent. (1993: 108).
Govier takes self-trust to involve “having a positive sense of one’s own motivation,
competence, and integrity.” (1993: 110). Her view of trust is often difficult to
distinguish from the process of having and developing confidence in oneself. She says
“one may have more confidence in one’s own character and capacities than past
experience and evidence would warrant, thus having too much self-trust in an epistemic
sense” (1993: 115).
Carolyn McLeod also develops a link between self-trust and agency, arguing that to
be motivated to choose and act in accordance with our own values, we need to trust
ourselves to do so:
Although some self-trust might be better than none at all as far as knowledge and autonomy
go (for no self-trust would leave us incapacitated and with no opportunity to learn from our
mistakes), justified self-trust is best overall. Without being justified in trusting ourselves to
be good epistemic or autonomous agents, we cannot be either. (McLeod 2002: Section 3)
Similarly, Keith Lehrer (1997) argues that to be rational, we must first be worthy of
self-trust, which he takes to involve a capacity to evaluate our own beliefs and desires.
Lastly, Richard Foley (2005) contends that it is a necessary requirement of knowledge
possession, that we be able to trust ourselves. These examples demonstrate that in the
literature, self-trust is a matter of being able to rely on oneself to do something: to be
honest with oneself, follow through on one’s own intentions, uphold one’s own
I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical Literature 20
promises to oneself, etc. Although it is often characterised as such, self-trust is not a
one-place relation, but a three-place relation, involving – in a more accurate sense – two
individuals (A at T1) and (A at T2) who have to rely on “one another” in their planning
and deliberation. Self-trust is: (A at T1) trusts (A at T2) to do X.
In summary, this subsection has shown that among those who endorse a logically
one-place view, there are a number of characterisations: trust as an attitude, emotion,
virtue, character or personality trait. Yet most philosophers that speak in terms of trust
as one of these, on closer inspection actually endorse a hybrid one/three place view,
which acknowledges some stable one-place element to trust while still speaking of trust
as involving reliance, and so, as a three-place relation. This is also true of the notion of
self-trust: the notion of self-trust in play in the literature, on closer inspection, is
actually about our reliance on ourselves (practical or epistemic) and so, addresses trust
as a three-place relation.
I.1.2 Three-place trust
To get a sense of the primacy of the three-place schematic in modern Anglophone
analytic philosophy – the schematic I shall be arguing against – observe the following
quotations, from leading philosophers on trust:
Trust is generally a three-part relation: A trusts B to do X. (Hardin 2002: 9)
Almost without exception, philosophical discussion of trust focusses on the three-place
predicate: X trusts Y to φ. (Faulkner 2015: 424)
We usually trust people to do certain things—for example, to look after our children, to give
us advice, or to be honest with us. (McLeod 2015: Section 1)
Take a stock example of trust. Jack asks his friend Jill if she will lend him her first edition
volumes of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, promising to return it to her within a week. (T. W.
Simpson 2017: 178)
The clear majority of philosophers writing on trust take trust to be a three-place relation.
Though their views differ considerably in detail, those adopting a logically three-place
account of trust include Baier (1986, 1991a, 1991b, 1994, 2004), Baker (1987),
I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical Literature 21
Blackburn (1998), Cogley (2012), Coady (1992), Foley (2001), Daukas (2006),
Dasgupta (2000), Faulkner (2007b, 2011), E. Fricker (1995), M. Fricker (1998),
Fukuyama (1995), (Gambetta 1988), Goldman (2001), Govier (1993), Hardin (1996,
2002), Hardwig (1991), Hawley (2017), Hertzberg (1988), Hieronymi (2008b),
Hinchman (2003, 2017), Holton (1994), Jones (1996, 1999, 2012, 2017), Keren (2014),
Koenig and Harris (2007), Lahno (2001, 2017), Longworth (2017), McGeer (2008);
McGeer and Pettit (2017), McLeod (2002), McMyler (2011, 2017), Mullin (2005),
Nickel (2007, 2017), O’Neil (2012, 2017), Oshana (2014), Owens (2017), Pettit (1995),
Potter (2002, 2013), Rorty (1980), Skyrms (2008), Silvers and Francis (2005), T. W.
Simpson (2012, 2017), Smith M. N. Smith (2008), Eric M Uslaner (2000), Warren
(1999), Webb (1992, 1993), and Zagzebski (2012).
Most of the accounts provided by the above philosophers are very similar in their
underlying structure, as well as in the illustrative examples provided in their
discussions. For a more detailed sense of things, the following three examples should
suffice: Stephen Wright’s necessary and sufficient conditions for three-place trust,
Victoria McGeer and Philip Pettit’s necessary conditions for trust, and Philip Pettit’s
illustrative descriptions of three-place trust.
These are what I think are the necessary and sufficient conditions for the statement ‘P trusts
Q with something’ to be true: 1. P requires/requests something of Q. 2. P takes the
participant stance described by Holton (1994: 67). 3. P believes that Q’s response will
influence the situation. 4. P believes that Q is freely capable of choosing to do or not do as P
would like. 5. P believes that Q believes they are being trusted or has access to evidence
permitting them to reasonably form the belief. (Wright 2010: 618)
I will count as trusting you to do something X just insofar as three conditions are met. First,
I manifestly rely on you to do X: I make clear to you my assumption that you will prove
reliable in doing X. 2 Second, I assume that the manifest fact of my reliance will weigh with
you as a reason for choosing voluntarily to X. And third, this assumption helps to explain or
reinforce my relying on you. (McGeer and Pettit 2017: 15)
Think of the new resident who asks a neighbor to look after her home or pets or plants while
she is away and gives them a key to her house. Think of the passenger who admits to not
I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical Literature 22
knowing the town and asks a taxi driver to get him to his destination by the quickest route
available. Think of the person who asks a perfect stranger for directions on how to get
somewhere and then follows these meticulously. Think of the customer who, finding that
one store does not have something he wants, asks the salesperson for advice on where else
to search. Or think of the visitor who asks a newsagent to recommend a good evening's read
or asks a cinema attendant's opinion of the film showing. (Pettit 1995: 218)
As the above passages demonstrate, necessary and sufficient conditions, and illustrative
examples using things like lending and borrowing, accepting testimony, or asking for
assistance. Among those who endorse a three-place view, one or two-place conceptions
of trust are occasionally briefly acknowledged. Jones, for example, displays recognition
of two-placed trust when she says “I can find your trust burdensome, even when you
have not entrusted anything in particular to me” (2017: 95). Stephen Wright explicitly
recognises the distinction between two-place and three-place trust (2010: 616). Others
who do this to some extent include: Hinchman (2003), Govier (1993), Foley (2001),
McLeod (2002), Goering (2009), Jones (2012), and Potter (2013). Yet most find the
notion of three-place trust to be the philosophically interesting one, with only a handful
speaking in any real detail of either the one-place or two-place conceptions.
Recently, others have made explicit arguments in favour of reversing the order of
importance from three-place in favour of a one-place (Faulkner 2017), or two-place
(Domenicucci and Holton 2017) conception. Faulkner’s position appears in stark
contrast to his earlier work, in which he spoke of trust in the three-place manner, of
“trusting speakers for the truth” (Faulkner 2007b, 2011). A similar transformation
occurs with the views of Richard Holton. In his highly influential 1994 paper “Deciding
to Trust, Coming to Believe”, Holton used a number of thought experiments when
considering the nature of trust that were categorically three-place. In the main example,
we are asked to imagine a situation in which we (the truster) have entrusted someone
(the trustee) to catch us as we allow ourselves to lean backwards and fall. Now
however, he endorses the view that the three-place notion is not the primary kind of
trust at issue:
How should we think of trust? It has become normal, at least in Anglophone analytic
philosophy, to think of it as fundamentally a three-place relation with an infinitival
I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical Literature 23
component; A trusts B to do C. Here we aim to question that idea… in giving an account of
trust, this three-place relation provides us with the wrong place to start, and that we should
start instead with the two-place relation, A trusts B, and work from there. (Domenicucci and
Holton 2017: 149)
While both Faulkner’s and Domenicucci and Holton’s positions signal a critical
reversal of the status quo, both take the three-placed notion of trust to be – at the very
least – a legitimate kind of trust “we don’t deny the three-place relation exists,
expressed in a perfectly natural English idiom, with a useful role to play” (Domenicucci
and Holton 2017: 149). And more strongly, Paul Faulkner writes “Trust can be three-
place, we trust one another to act in various ways–not to read our diary, to give a fair
quote, and so on” (2017: 118). His newer account thus coheres with his earlier work in
which he asserts “There is no question that three-place trust is central to our
engagement with others.” (2015: 424). Hence, while these contributions signify an
explicit recognition of the importance of other previously neglected forms of trust,
neither of them explicitly rejects three-place trust, instead adopting it as a “kind of
trust”. While such developments are in line with this dissertation, by leaving a place for
three-place trust, and by not emphasising the complex private nature of trust, the ideas
developed by both Faulkner and Domenicucci and Holton can certainly be differentiated
from what is said in this dissertation. In contrast, I shall argue that trust properly
understood cannot be regarded as a three-place relation at all since it leads to a quite
different cluster of affective and cognitive phenomena not just in its relationality but
also in its character.
Aside from these two new exceptions, which both still endorse three-place trust as a
‘kind of trust’, the idea that trust is a three-place relation has been almost unanimously
accepted by philosophers, even among those that identify strong moral or emotional
elements to trust as we saw in the previous section. This is, as Thomas Simpson
explains in his own take on the current state of affairs in the philosophy on trust, an
effect of the seemingly intractable reality that trust involves cognitive elements, such as
belief:
I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical Literature 24
It is unsurprising that those who observe the responsiveness of trust to moral and other non-
epistemic reasons should construe trust as a non-cognitive mental state. What is surprising
is a related but distinct family of views that are now current, on which trust is taken to be
both cognitive and responsive to moral reasons. So distinguish non-cognitive non-
evidentialism from cognitive non-evidentialism. What is the motivation for this latter view?
Exponents are, I think, impressed by the need for belief that trust often seems to involve. It
is not just that the truster acts as if she believes that the trusted will be trustworthy; rather,
she actually believes that he is. It is that belief which constitutes the trust. They are also
impressed by the moral dimensions of trust, such that interpersonal relationships ground the
resulting belief, and this not merely through the epistemically uncontroversial process of
giving privileged access to evidence. Cognitive non-evidentialism thus seeks to endorse
both claims simultaneously. (2017: 182)
This passage demonstrates how views of trust have become considerably more refined
and complicated in recent years, creating many hybrid accounts which acknowledge
that we have both epistemic and non-epistemic reasons to trust. Simpson himself
endorses a “Scope-restricted evidentialist constraint” that says that in some
circumstances, trust is rational only if, on one’s total evidence, it is likely that B will φ
(2017: 183). Yet despite this welcome acknowledgment that trust might involve both –
as Simpson puts it – “cognitive and non-cognitive elements”, an intractable tension
remains whenever trust is at all conceived of as fundamentally something that we do.
This is because our so-called epistemic and non-epistemic ‘reasons for trust’ can
conflict in epistemically devastating ways, rendering us irrational, one way or the other,
whatever we end up doing. This longstanding ‘problem of trust’ will be discussed in the
following section.
In summary, this subsection demonstrated that trust is primarily conceived of as a
three-place relation in the philosophical literature, even among those who recognise
other dimensions to trust. And, even when it comes to the only two existing papers
which argue explicitly that the three-place conception should not be considered central,
both still maintain that (A trusts B to do X) is a legitimate and important kind of trust.
Because of this three-place dominance, where trust is conceived of as something that we
do (leave a diary on a desk) because of something that we believe/hope (our trustee will
I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical Literature 25
not read it), philosophers on trust have largely been concerned with trust as an epistemic
problem.
I.1.3 Trust and rationality
This section addresses literature that has been concerned with an apparent tension
between trust and rationality. This tension is often referred to as The Problem of Trust,
or The Risks of Trust and it is frequently conflated with The Problem of Testimony. This
subsection demonstrates that philosophers concerned with The Problem of Trust view
trust as a three-place relation that is ubiquitous, and inherently risky. The dominance of
three-place trust thus explains the widespread preoccupation with this very real
epistemic problem as a problem of trust.
Paul Faulkner has outlined what he sees as The Problem of Trust, which he takes to
be a “sceptical problem”:
(i) we need to rely on another but recognise that doing so could have a worst outcome – we
rely and the other proves unreliable, and – (ii) we know that this interaction is a one off (or
one of a determinate number), and – (iii) we are entirely ignorant of the other’s individual
motivations but recognise a general motivation to be unreliable. (2017: 111)
Faulkner says that given these facts, “reliance would seem to be irrational, and if it is,
then a fortiori so too is trust” (2017: 111). Notice that Faulkner comes to this problem
via his belief that trust is three-place – essentially involving reliance – and pervasive.
He says:
thus, as with other sceptical problems, the issue is how to reconcile the philosophical result
that reliance seems frequently to be irrational with the everyday fact that trust is pervasive.
The difficult question is to account for how such reliance is rational under these conditions
(2017: 112).
These ideas – that trust is pervasive or ubiquitous, three-place, and is inherently a
matter of reliance and belief – are all apparent in Faulkner’s comments and they
underlie much of the literature on trust, driving the concern that our trusting practices
are irrational, and so also the many proposed solutions.
I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical Literature 26
Among those philosophers concerned with epistemic problems associated with
testimony for example, the idea that trust is a ubiquitous three-place relation is so well
accepted that for them, the ‘to do X’ in (A trusts B to do X) just means to tell the truth:
(Faulkner 2017; E. Fricker 2006; Hinchman 2005; Keren 2007; McMyler 2011; Moran
2005). However, as Pamela Hieronymi put it “calculating the likelihood of her veracity,
[is] precisely not trusting her. You are instead treating her like a good thermometer”
(2008a: 222). What Hieronymi appears to be getting at here, is the worry inherent to
three-place trust that if trust is to be differentiated from belief then trust cannot be just a
cold calculation of our interlocutor’s veracity. Moreover, as Lars Hertzberg has pointed
out, such an approach “disregards the fact that trust also enters into human relations in
ways that have little to do with accepting the truth of statements” (1988: 309).
Notwithstanding some scattered comments like Hertzberg’s, recognition that trust
might be different from the three-place understanding is rare. Indeed, philosophers who
think trust is a three-place relation are much more likely to not make sharp distinctions
between the problems associated with trusting and the problems associated with our
epistemic reliance on testimony, speaking at times as though the one just meant the
other (Coady 1992; Daukas 2006; Faulkner 2007b, 2011; Foley 2001; E. Fricker 1995;
Goldman 2001; Hardwig 1991; Jones 1999; Koenig and Harris 2007; McMyler 2011;
Zagzebski 2012).
The extent to which trust and testimony have become intertwined in epistemology is
too great to explore in detail. However, Russel Hardin provides a typical example when
he writes that trust is:
a cognitive notion, in the family of such notions as knowledge, belief, and the kind of
judgment that might be called assessment. All of these are cognitive in that they are
grounded in some sense of what is true…. The declarations ‘I believe you are trustworthy’
and ‘I trust you’ are equivalent. (2002: 7)
Asserting that trust and belief are effectively equivalent might sound like the sort of
claim that is likely to be rare among professional philosophers. Let me provide just a
few more examples that are not dissimilar from Hardin’s. Some have thought that trust
is merely a ‘rational gamble’ that cooperation with others will ultimately payoff (Bates
I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical Literature 27
1988) others have thought: that trusting is a process of updating our expectations of
other’s behaviour from the evidence we gain in our interactions with them (Gauthier
1986: 156); that trust is nothing but a rational belief about the character or the probable
behaviour of another person (Dasgupta 1988; Gambetta 1988); or that trust is merely
one aspect of self-interest driven and goal-oriented behaviour (Coleman 1990). All such
outlooks put trust firmly in the realm of an instrumental rationality; as Philip Pettit put it
“trusters identify reasons to trust others and trustees show that those reasons are good
reasons” (1995: 202).
Equating trust with other cognitive notions such as belief is one commonality
among many of those who adopt three-place trust. Another is to view trust as inherently
risky. Indeed, the riskiness of trust is generally held to be a central characteristic of
trustful interaction (Lahno 2001: 171). Trust is risky – on three-place accounts –
necessarily. The explanation given for this claim, is simply that if trust were not risky,
then we would have no need to trust. This reflects the deeply held intuition that trust
both goes ‘beyond the evidence’ and is ‘resistant to evidence’ captured in the following
quotations:
Trust involves the risk that people we trust will not pull through for us; for, if there were
some guarantee that they would pull through, then we would have no need to trust them.
(McLeod 2015: Section 1)
One does not actually trust someone to do something if one only believes they will do it
when one has evidence that they will. (Faulkner 2007b: 876)
[trust] go[es] beyond what the evidence supports. (McGeer 2008: 240)
What is the rational relation between trust and evidence? The dominant view among
philosophers is that, in some sense, the importance of trust is that it goes beyond the
evidence. If you are following the evidence, then you are not trusting. (T. W. Simpson
2017: 117)
These quotations expose a deep worry that trust is the sort of thing that necessarily
disappears in the light of knowledge/evidence. This worry deepens even further when it
is added to the idea that trust is pervasive.
I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical Literature 28
For example, it has been proposed that we must have good or at least decent reasons
for trusting others, most especially with regard to that which is important (E. Fricker
1995). Russel Hardin suggests that if my trust in you is rational, then “I make a rough
estimate of the truth of [the] claim … that you will be trustworthy under certain
conditions … and then I correct my estimate, or ‘update,’ as I obtain new evidence on
you” (Hardin 2002: 112). Such reasons for our estimates or for our “trust updates” –
according to Hardin – could come from inductive generalisations based on experience,
or from our knowledge that there are social norms of trustworthiness (Hardin 2002:
130). Yet while Hardin takes it to be the case that our ‘reasons to trust’ must come in
the form of direct evidence of trustworthiness, others have seen less obvious candidates.
Philip Pettit for example, argues that people are naturally esteem-seeking, and so,
they will do what we entrust them to do because they want to continue to be held in
high esteem (1995). Yet this view is compatible with trustees’ acting out of self-interest,
which some – for example: Wanderer and Townsend (2013: 9) – have argued is not
compatible with trustworthiness. Also, Karen Jones says that it may be possible for our
trust to be justified even when we our prediction of trustworthiness is not justified, since
“our evidence for trusting need not be as great as the evidence required for a
corresponding justified prediction” (1996: 15). While many such discussions are
concerned with rationalising the trust involved in reliance, Paul Faulkner has argued
that it is trust itself which rationalises reliance because “trusting and being trustworthy
are actions that we intrinsically value; and in valuing behaviours that are so described
we think that, other things being equal, we have a reason to act in these ways, and
acting in these ways is the right thing to do” (2017: 125).
The idea that trust can serve as its own justification for itself, or for reliance, is
surprisingly quite a popular approach, with another form of this argument stemming
from the recognition that there may be ‘therapeutic reasons’ to trust. The central idea
behind therapeutic trust is that trust (reliance) might increase trustworthiness
(reliability) since knowing that we are trusted (being relied upon) itself provides us with
a reason to prove trustworthy (reliable). When trust is conceived of as a kind of reliance,
then, at least in some cases, trust seems to increase the likelihood of trustworthiness,
and so, this could provide the justification for trusting (McLeod 2015). Philip Pettit
I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical Literature 29
argues along these lines as well, claiming that we can rationally invest trust in others
without any justification (or evidence) that the person we are trusting is trustworthy,
because the act of trust itself can prove inherently motivating (1995: 220). Against this
though, Victoria McGeer has argued that while this mechanism does account for some
of the trustee’s trust-responsiveness, it cannot serve as an account of trust, as it is not a
robust enough mechanism to ensure the rationality of trust (2008: 252).
Like McGeer, Pamela Hieronymi is suspicious about the idea that therapeutic trust
can make trust rational. She maintains that the ends for which we trust cannot provide
reasons for us to trust in the first place, since trust always involves a trusting belief.
Hieronymi claims that therapeutic trust is not pure or full-fledged trust, since people can
rightfully protest that they are not really trusted in such cases (2008b: 230). For a
similar argument, see Lahno (2001: 184-85). Yet Hieronymi’s argument against
therapeutic trust rests on the claim that trust involves belief, and this claim too is
contentious. Domenicucci and Holton (2017) have recently pointed to neuroscientific
evidence suggesting that belief is not central to trust, since a higher level of Oxytocin,
which they take to be correlated with a higher readiness to trust, appears not to increase
the subject’s belief that the risks will be rewarded; they cite (Kosfeld et al. 2005: 154).
This research, though, will only be relevant to philosophical arguments about trust if
trust was in fact the thing that was being ‘tested for’ in this particular study. If this
dissertation’s central point that trust is not a three-place relation is correct, then in many
instances, what is being examined in such settings is in fact not trust, but cooperation.
Thomas Simpson says that: “Not only is it compatible with trust that one is
following the evidence. Further, and stronger, there are times when one’s trust is
appropriate only if one is following the evidence.” (2017: 177). For Simpson, trust is a
“rationally responsive mental attitude” (2017: 178), and as such, its “striking
insensitivity to evidence” (2017: 181), is not an inattentiveness to evidence. Simpson’s
attempt at rapprochement thus relies on a distinction between insensitivity to evidence,
and inattentiveness to evidence, which he thinks marks the relevant difference between
‘rational trust’ and ‘irrational trust’. Lastly, in a wildly different move altogether
(though with the same goal in mind), Victoria McGeer has argued that it is our capacity
to hope that significantly underwrites our capacity to trust, and that since it is rational to
I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical Literature 30
hope for the best, then trust is rational as well (2008: 237-54). Elsewhere, McGeer has
argued that hope is an essential feature of human agency, and so on her view, trust and
human agency are linked (2004).
What should be apparent by now, is that taking trust to be schematically three-place
has cascading logical effects. First, if trust is (A trusts B to do X), then the boundaries
between trust and other three-place relations becomes indistinct, and trust is more likely
to be confused with cooperation, reliance or belief/acceptance of testimony. Second,
since we rely on/believe/cooperate with other people all the time, then trust becomes
ubiquitous: a thing upon which all our knowledge – including self-knowledge – hangs,
since even when it comes to ourselves, we have to ‘trust’ (rely on/believe) our own
sense perception. Trudy Govier has certainly come to this conclusion:
one may be called on to trust one’s perceptions and observations, interpretation of events
and actions, feelings and responses, values and evaluation, memory, judgment, instinct,
common sense, deliberation, choice, will, capacity to act, flexibility, competence, talent,
and ability to cope with the unexpected. (1993: 108)
Like Govier, Thomas Simpson speaks of trust’s “near ubiquity in social interaction”
(2017: 178), which makes trust indistinct from cooperation “Trust simply is the belief
that another is likely to cooperate” (2017: 180). Others who speak of trust as though it
were essentially a matter of cooperation include: Putnam et al. (1993: 171), Gambetta
(1988), and Luhmann (1979). On three-place trust, so many concepts – trust,
cooperation, reliance, belief – become indistinct. It is not surprising that philosophers
embracing a three-place conception have become concerned with separating them out
again. Indeed, the project of distinguishing trust from reliance and belief has become
another great flashpoint in the current philosophical debate. Most suggestively, this only
occurs when a three-place account of trust is accepted. On a two-place account, trust is
much more straightforwardly distinct from any other three-place relations (such as
reliance/belief) as discussed in detail in I.2.
For those who do not adopt three-place trust, the epistemological debate and the
project of distinguishing trust from reliance/belief have failed to hold much
significance. Bernd Lahno’s account of trust as an emotional attitude, for example,
I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical Literature 31
views trust as a mechanism that helps us to cope with uncertainty, which is beyond the
direct control of reason and so cannot be understood as a result of rational reflection
(2001: 173). John Weckert similarly deemphasizes calculation, i.e. the rational
assessment of beliefs and risks. He is critical of such epistemically-based accounts for
overlooking for example, the trust that children have of their parents (2005). Mark
Coeckelbergh also has a view of trust that emphasises the social aspect of trust, while
de-emphasising the rational individualistic view (2012). Sadly, such rejections of the
dominant view, and the subsequent concerns that trust and rationality present a pressing
problem, are rare.
Among those who adopt three-place trust, even if agreement were to be reached
regarding which approach best reconciles trust and rationality, further substantive
questions arise, such as: must the reasons that confer rationality be accessible to the
truster in order to count? On this point, there is once again considerable disagreement,
with some arguing that the reasons must be available for the trust to be rational (Hardin
2002; Hieronymi 2008b), and others arguing that they do not (Baier 1986; McLeod
2002; Webb 1993). Perhaps all we need is a list of ‘justifiers’ for trust, which the truster
could consider in determining when to trust (Govier 1998; Jones 1996), or perhaps trust
is rationally justified if and only if it is formed and sustained by ‘reliable processes’
(Goldman 1992: 113), whatever that turns out to be. As it makes trust a matter of
practical action – of doing/believing something – under a three-place conception of
trust, the tension between trust and rationality will always remain, and further questions
about what “counts as a reason”, and then, what counts as a “reliable form” of that
reason, will always arise. This is no bad thing in principle, but only if we have our
picture of the thing under investigation right, and the questions we think are arising are
actually arising.
This dissertation, in its small way, is a call to refrain from delving too far into the
thicket of epistemology with regard to trust, as the underlying assumptions driving this
need to reconcile trust and rationality are problematic in a number of ways, one of
which was recently captured nicely by Domenicucci and Holton:
It has often been contended that trust involves a form of vulnerability on the part of the
person trusting; and this is often developed as a kind of ignorance. In some accounts this is
I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical Literature 32
understood as ignorance of whether the trust is well-placed: we trust insofar as we cannot be
sure that the trusted will not let us down. That, however, is implausible: on such an account,
as our knowledge of a person grows, so our trust in them must diminish. (2017: 151)
As Domenicucci and Holton say, clearly the very premise that trust and knowledge
are somehow fundamentally and eternally conflicting is not reflected in human
experience; we trust those we know better more, not less. Paul Faulkner has recently
also gone against the conventional wisdom, asserting that trust is “unproblematic when
one knows that the trusted is trustworthy” (2017: 110). Difference of opinion on this
point is reflected in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on trust, which states
that “trust tends to give us blinkered vision, making us resistant to evidence that may
contradict our optimism about the trustee”, while later acknowledging that it would be
odd if it turned out that “what made an attitude justified destroyed that attitude”
(Section 2).
Part of the problem here, is that while the ‘riskiness of trusting’ is frequently
discussed in the literature, it is not always clear precisely which notion of risk
philosophers intend. The term ‘risk’ sometimes appears in the literature in a non-
technical sense, as a rather vague situation in which it is possible (but not certain) that
some undesirable event will occur. Discussion often slides between the notions of risk
as the unwanted event, risk as the cause of that unwanted event, and risk as the
probability of the unwanted event occurring. Since each conception of risk will have
differing epistemic and ethical implications (Hansson 2018), there is a need for
philosophers adopting three-place accounts to identify exactly which notion of risk is
supposed to be relevant to trust. This is particularly relevant to those writing on the
problems associated with ‘trusting testimony’, as in those discussions, the risk is taken
to be just that we might acquire a false belief, since what we trust our interlocutor for is
the truth (Faulkner 2007b). Yet since there are other candidates as well, such as a loss of
self-respect (McLeod 2015), or unpleasant feelings of resentment or betrayal (Baier
1986: 235; Hieronymi 2008b; Jones 1996), mitigating against one ‘risk’ may do nothing
to prevent the others.
In summary, this subsection has presented an assortment of literature that takes The
Problem of Trust to be an epistemic problem, which essentially involves a conflict
I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical Literature 33
between what trust requires of us with regard to risk and evidence, and what rationality
requires of us with regard to risk and evidence. In doing so, this subsection has revealed
that those who worry about this problem, take trust to be a three-place relation, and a
ubiquitous feature of human life, present in virtually all interpersonal and informational
transactions. The idea hopefully seeded is that by doing away with a three-place account
of trust, we might avoid running into this problem altogether. Though this ‘justification
problem’ will always remain as a problem of knowledge, by abandoning three-place
trust the valuable concept of trust might rightly be spared from this particular
philosophical snare.
I.1.4 Voluntariness of trust
This subsection addresses literature concerned with the voluntariness of trust. If trust is
voluntary, then it makes sense to hold people both morally and epistemically
accountable for their trust. Yet if trust is not voluntary, then a question hangs over how
much – if at all – we can hold people to account for their trust. It is evident from the
literature presented already that three-place trust is difficult to distinguish from either
reliance or belief. Accounts which conflate trust with reliance are sometimes referred to
as ‘non-cognitive accounts of trust’, while accounts that conflate trust with belief are
sometimes referred to as ‘cognitive accounts of trust’, as described by (T. W. Simpson
2017). The debate over the voluntariness of trust results directly from this situation:
conflation of three-place trust with reliance (non-cognitive accounts) make it seem
obvious that we can decide to trust, while conflation of three-place trust with belief
(cognitive accounts) make it seem equally obvious that we cannot. Hence, similar to the
division over the rationality of trust, this particular division in the literature owes itself
again to that underlying picture of trust as a three-place relation.
To begin, trust is “obviously voluntary” when it is construed as non-cognitive (an
action), as Benjamin McMyler writes:
In one general respect, it should be uncontroversial that we can decide to trust. We can
decide to trust a mechanic to fix the car, decide to trust a neighbour to look after the kids, or
decide to trust a friend to show up on time. We often find ourselves in situations in which
we must deliberate about whether particular others are worthy of our trust concerning
I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical Literature 34
particular matters, and when the upshot of this deliberation is positive, it is natural to
describe ourselves as having decided to trust. (2017: 161)
This general respect in which it should be uncontroversial that we can decide to trust, as
identified by McMyler, only arises on a schematically three-place account, since it is
only with a three-place account that trust can be viewed as an action, something that we
can decide to do. On two or one-place accounts, trust is instead something that we are
(one place trust) or something we embody/have/experience in relation to another person
(two-place trust). Those philosophers who have been led to accept voluntarism about
trust, have typically been so led by a combination of their acceptance of the three-place
account, and their belief that trust is non-cognitive (Faulkner 2014b: 1979; Holton 1994:
63).
Perhaps the most compelling and detailed argument in favour of the voluntary
nature of trust was made by Richard Holton in his 1994 paper “Deciding to Trust,
Coming to Believe”. This paper has been discussed in a number of contexts already (see
I.1.1 and I.1.3), and in it, Holton rejects the idea that trust is cognitive (involves belief),
with an analogy about riding a bicycle “to ride a bicycle you do not need to believe that
you can do so. You need to act as you would act if you did believe” (1994: 64). In
another example, Holton says that we can decide to trust a friend to be honest even if
we do not believe that they will be honest. Indeed, if we already believed what the
friend was saying, then – Holton says – we would have no need to trust them (1994:
74).
Contained in these examples, which Holton takes to be paradigmatic examples of
trust, is thus both the rejection of trust as cognitive, and the statement that trust is a non-
cognitive action. For Holton – at least in 1994 – trust does not require belief, only
reliance. This rejection of the idea that trust requires belief was shared by Paul
Faulkner, when he said that “A can decide to trust S to φ just because trust need not
involve the belief that S will φ” (2014b: 1979). As Stephan Darwall put it “Holton’s
diagnosis of the difference between trust and reliance, then, is that trust is reliance from
the participant stance” [his emphasis] (2017: 38); later, Darwall also points out that this
is more or less Faulkner’s position, or at least it was in 2007.
I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical Literature 35
While Holton and Faulkner’s positions have changed somewhat by 2017, their
earlier writings have been highly influential, leading many philosophers to ponder
whether their denials of any necessary cognitive elements to trust are sound. Phillip
Nickel disagrees with Holton that trust is a reactive attitude, instead taking it to be a
moral attitude involving the ascription of obligations (2012: 309-31), yet his account
also allows him to conclude that trust can be voluntary. Similarly, the approach taken by
Victoria McGeer – trust as involving hope rather than belief – allows for the idea of
voluntary trust. Because she views trust as “forward looking, anticipating the
transformative effects of extending our trust” (2008: 242), she is able to take cases of
therapeutic trust to be genuine cases of trust, and, if it is possible to trust therapeutically
in the way McGeer describes, then trust must in some sense be voluntary.
Common to views that see trust as voluntary is the idea of trust as something that we
do in lieu of belief; a reliance act that is hopeful, moral, or ‘from the participant stance’.
This denial of the belief element as necessary to trust is significant, since if trust
involved belief then it becomes much harder to maintain that trust can be voluntary,
given that most people are not voluntarists about belief (McLeod 2015). Against these
non-cognitive accounts though, many have held the intuition that it is not possible to
decide to trust for motivational, rather than epistemic reasons. This view is naturally
common among those who do not make sharp distinctions between trust and belief, i.e.
that the trustee is trustworthy (Daukas 2006; Hardin 2002, 2004; Hieronymi 2008b;
Lahno 2001; Webb 1992).
An early ‘cognitivist about trust’ was Annette Baier, who questioned whether
people can trust “simply because of encouragement to trust” (1986: 244). She writes:
‘Trust me!’ is for most of us an invitation which we cannot accept at will—either we do
already trust the one who says it, in which case it serves at best as reassurance, or it is
properly responded to with, ‘Why should and how can I, until I have cause to?’ (1986: 244).
Some years later, Karen Jones wrote that it is an “obvious fact about trust” that it
cannot be willed (1996: 15), since “we are generally not aware of our trusting and
seldom bring it sufficiently clearly before our minds to endorse or reject it” (1996: 14).
For Jones, trust “can no more be sincerely adopted in the face of a known and
I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical Literature 36
acknowledged absence of such grounds than a belief can be adopted in the face of a
known and acknowledged lack of evidence” (1996: 16).
Despite her strong intuition that the cognitive elements to trust cannot be dispensed
with, Jones shows an appreciation of the sense in which trust can obviously be willed.
She distinguishes trusting and entrusting, which is in actions, and actions – she agrees –
are “paradigmatically, things that can be willed” (1996: 18). Thus, Jones deals with the
problem not by rejecting the very idea that trust is a three-place kind of belief/reliance,
but by distinguishing between reliance-trust (entrusting) and belief-trust (trusting). For
Jones, there are two kinds of three-place trust, rather than – as this dissertation argues –
one kind of two-place trust.
Jones agrees that her “entrusting model” of trust does not sufficiently bring out the
affective component of trust, because it “obscures the importance of optimism about the
goodwill of another” (1996: 20). Jones says that trust and distrust are “partly constituted
by patters of attention, lines of inquiry, and tendencies of interpretation” (1996: 20)
hence, while it is impossible that trust be directly willed, it should be possible to
cultivate them by other methods, such as controlling our patterns of attention, lines of
inquiry, and tendencies of interpretation:
the rape victim whose trust in others has been shattered might set about cultivating trust
because she sees herself as someone who is free-spirited and bold, and she does not wish to
be the kind of person who is timid, protective of the self, and on the lookout for betrayal.
(1996: 23)
This idea that trust must be either cognitive or non-cognitive, a belief or an action,
historically has been accepted uncritically. Very recently though, Benjamin McMyler
has presented a sophisticated view which aims to show why this is a false dichotomy.
McMyler makes the case against the voluntariness of trust by separating the claim of
non-cognitivism about trust from the claim of voluntarism of trust. By seeing that there
are in fact these two distinct claims being made by philosophers discussing the
voluntariness of trust, McMyler is able to argue that although trust is non-cognitive, it is
nevertheless non-voluntary:
I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical Literature 37
non-cognitivism about trust and voluntarism about trust are often run together in
philosophical discussions of deciding to trust such that evidence for one is taken to be
evidence for the other. I think this is a mistake… even if one accepts non-cognitivism about
trust, one should reject voluntarism. (2017: 163)
The way McMyler accomplishes this move, is essentially by rejecting an account of
trust that is rooted in action, and assuming a ‘psychological attitude’ account instead.
The result amounts to less than a total rejection of voluntarism, at least as some may
understand it:
The fact that trust is non-voluntary does not mean that we are passive with respect to our
trusting; that we can only manage our trust in the way that we can manage our pains and
sensations. We can directly exercise agency over our trusting by settling the question (or set
of questions) that the attitude of trust embodies, by actively taking the world to be a certain
way. We can, in this respect, decide to trust others. Insofar as deciding to trust others is
deciding to take the world to be a certain way, we cannot decide to trust others for reasons
that we ourselves do not take to show the world to be this way. But this is not a limitation
on our powers. It is simply a reflection of the fact that interpersonal trust is an attitude
toward the world. It is a distinctive attitude to be sure, an attitude towards the soul, and this
makes it liable to abuse and betrayal in a way that many other attitudes are not. (2017: 175)
McMyler says that trust, like belief but unlike action, cannot be adopted for reasons of
inducements like threats or offers (2017: 168) and so trust is a “psychological attitude
that is not voluntary” (2017: 172, footnote 15). His view thus has implications for the
idea of therapeutic trust, since such occurrences would be understood as the actions we
perform when we have good reasons to trust, rather than the trust itself – a result this
dissertation is in agreement with. Indeed, McMyler’s view shares a number of
similarities with the view put forward here, especially in its focus on the private,
psychological nature of trust, and the result that trust can be voluntary, but only in the
slower, cultivator sense.
I.1.5 Summary of Trust: in the Philosophical Literature
Section I.1 examined contemporary philosophical literature on trust. The aim of this
section, rather than to appraise particular views, was to weave a coherent narrative
I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical Literature 38
within which the view presented in this dissertation can be situated. To that end, I.1
provided an overview of the current state of the philosophical literature on trust,
identifying the dominant view, and the questions it raises. In Subsection I.1.1, we saw
how among those that endorse a logically one-place view, there are a number of
characterisations: trust as an attitude, emotion, virtue, character or personality trait, yet
on closer inspection, most philosophers actually endorse a hybrid one/three place view.
In Subsection I.1.2, we saw the extent to which trust is conceived of as a three-place
relation in the philosophical literature – even when other conceptions are
acknowledged, the three-place view is still held to be primary, or a legitimate and
important kind of trust. In Subsection I.1.3, we saw how this dominance of three-place
trust has led to The Problem of Trust being understood as an epistemic problem, which
essentially involves a conflict between what trust requires of us with regard to risk and
evidence, and what rationality requires of us with regard to risk and evidence. Lastly, in
Subsection I.1.4, we saw how three-place trust leads trust to become confused with both
reliance and belief, and how the debate over the voluntariness of trust results directly
from this confusion.
I.2 Dominant Views on Trust: Problems 39
I.2 Dominant Views on Trust: Problems
In section I.1, the aim was to provide an overview of how the underlying three-place
logic has led to the questions that philosophers currently pay attention to in relation to
trust. In this section, the aim is to provide a fuller understanding of three-place trust
itself, and to present its limitations. As the underlying logic is shared by all three-place
views, I.2.1 begins with the bare schematics of a three-place relation. Then, I.2.2
presents three-place trust in its most simplistic form and addresses a recent (2017)
argument for why we should adopt this form from Philip Nickel. As a number of
philosophers have taken issue with simplistic three-place trust and provided various
fixes to it, I.2.3 moves on to consider these ‘three-place trust plus’ versions, which
essentially add to a simplistic account of various things, such as goodwill or a belief in
the trustworthiness of the trustee. Finally, I.2.4 presents some reasons as to why three-
place accounts remain dominant today, despite their limitations.
I.2.1 Three-place trust: logic
Three-place trust encompasses all views which take trust to be a three-place relation,
logically, or schematically speaking. These views are also referred to as three-place
notion trust or three-part trust. The first thing to do when probing the idea of trust as a
three-place relation, is to get clear on what a three-place relation is. We can do this by
looking at some examples of other three-place relations that are often confused with
trust. Reliance is a three-place relation: A relies on B to do X. Testimony is another: A
believes/accepts B’s word about X. Cooperation is when two (or more) parties, A and
B, cooperate they do so to some specific end X. There are other examples, but these
should serve to get the point across. Quite straightforwardly, to claim that trust is a
three-place relation is the claim that trust involves three elements: a truster (A), a trustee
(B), and that which is entrusted (X).
Though the details can vary considerably, as was established in section I.1, most
philosophers endorse and prefer to examine a three-place conception even when they
acknowledge other conceptions, such as “general trust”, “one-place trust”, “fully-
fledged trust”, “two-place trust” or “self-trust”.
So, the bare schematic of three-place trust is:
I.2 Dominant Views on Trust: Problems 40
(A trusts B to do X)
Or, as Thomas Simpson writes: “trust is a tripartite relation, relating a trustor, to
someone trusted, regarding some action that the trusted will perform. Schematically, A
trusts B to φ” (2017: 178). To give this some substance, it would be good to introduce
some examples from the literature. Paul Faulkner writes:
Here are some examples of trust. Leaving one’s closed diary on a desk where one knows
one’s partner will see it. Not asking for a second quote when a mechanic says one’s car
needs lots of work… Following a stranger’s directions. (2017: 109)
Similarly, Richard Holton uses a number of three-place examples, including: trusting an
employee with the till, trusting someone to catch you, and trusting someone with your
car (1994). Annette Baier speaks of trusting our enemies not to fire at us when we lay
down our arms and put up a white flag (1986: 245), and Bernd Lahno uses the example
of a mother trusting the babysitter to care for her daughter (2001).
There are countless such examples to be found in the literature, all sharing the same
underlying schematic structure. The most important thing for our purposes to notice
about these examples, is that when trust is viewed this way, both trust (and subsequently
trustworthiness) are public – they are actions, a matter of relying on a person, not a
private matter of how we regard a person. If we take these examples at face value, then
it seems that what determines whether trust is present in any case is the behaviour,
publicly observable, of the truster.
To see this, let us take a putative instance of trust that is three-place in logical
structure, and similar to the examples above:
Hamish trusts Ana to hang out the washing.
In this example, the implication is that Ana is trustworthy if and only if she hangs out
the washing. The problems with this implication are addressed in II.3. For now, let us
focus on the truster, Hamish. What makes it the case that Hamish is trusting Ana? It
seems like the only relevant facts here are to do with Hamish’s publicly observable
behaviour. If Hamish is sitting inside with a cup of tea waiting for the washing to be
I.2 Dominant Views on Trust: Problems 41
hung, then, he is trusting. If Hamish is checking up on Ana, hanging the washing
himself, or arranging for someone else to hang the washing instead, then he is no longer
– or perhaps never was – trusting.
Without some further specifications about what trust might involve, a three-place
account leads us to believe that what goes on inside Hamish – his private thoughts,
opinions, motives, beliefs, attitudes, emotions etc. – are not relevant. Without some
further conditions added to the basic schematics of three-place trust, Hamish may
behave as though he trusts Ana, all the while thinking her useless, careless, and
incompetent. He can have any kind of private motive towards her or emotional reaction
to her, so long as he keeps sitting there quietly drinking his tea and not behaving as
though he doubts that Ana will hang the washing.
Advocates of simplistic three-place trust are quite content with this result and are
not particularly concerned with the fact that it collapses any meaningful distinction
between trust and reliance. It is an especially prevalent view in areas which straddle the
divide between science and the humanities: the political, social, and economic sciences.
For disciplines that aim for scientific rigour, equating trust with reliant or cooperative
behaviour makes sense, since doing so makes trust far easier to verify empirically. For
those looking to explain complex social, economic or political behaviour, this simplistic
three-place trust stripped bare of any private psychological elements, has been used to
capture countless phenomena, from the behaviour of individual strangers playing
‘investment games’ (Berg et al. 1995), to the behaviour of states (Eric M Uslaner 2018),
economies (Diekhöner 2017), exchange relations in a business environment (C. Lane
and Bachmann 1998), and even to how human beings relate to cryptocurrency, sushi,
and self-driving cars (Botsman 2017). Simplistic three-place trust is the ‘Theory of
Everything’ to the social sciences.
I.2.2 Three-place trust: simplistic
This subsection presents three examples from the literature which have embraced
simplistic three-place trust, from: economist Partha Dasgupta, political theorist Eric
Uslaner, and philosopher Philip Nickel. I pay particular attention to Nickel’s view, as he
argues extensively and explicitly for the simple (or as he calls is “unrestricted”) version
I.2 Dominant Views on Trust: Problems 42
of three-place trust, while Uslaner and Dasgupta adopt it less reflectively. This
subsection aims to show that simplistic three-place trust fails to make trust distinct from
other three-place relations, a situation that some do not appear to consider, and others
consider unimportant or ever valuable, as in Nickel. We begin with Uslaner and
Dasgupta.
Eric Uslaner is interested in the relationship between democracy and trust and takes
trust to be a kind of “rational gamble” that cooperation with others will ultimately pay
off, as well as a commitment to “pro-social behaviour” (1999: 124). Trust, as he sees it,
is individuals expecting other individuals to cooperate and do the right thing (distrust is
expecting the opposite). This understanding leads Uslaner to prescribe a remedy for
declining social capital. He suggests little league baseball as a sort of bootstrapping
remedy “sports build social capital because they build self-confidence and teach respect
for rules” (1999: 146). Uslaner’s reasoning is that if we do not trust one another, if we
do not expect others to cooperate with us or behave in a pro-social manner, then we
need to engage with one another in a rules-based activity, such as sport, in which we
can come to possess the knowledge that ‘the others’ will cooperate with us and behave
in a pro-social manner according to the rules. Hence we can begin to trust them again.
On this conception, trust arises because of a lack of knowledge of how others will
behave, and so the remedy for distrust is simple – provide them with the knowledge.
Uslaner’s advice may indeed be effective for increasing cooperation, peace, and civic
participation. However, it is not clear that trust and trustworthiness ever enter into it. If
to be ‘trustworthy’ just means ‘to behave in a cooperative and pro-social manner’, what
Uslaner is prescribing is that we increase cooperativeness and pro-social behaviour by
increasing cooperativeness and pro-social behaviour. Granted, prescriptions of this
nature can be extremely valuable. Yet it may be possible to achieve pro-social
behaviour without increasing trust and trustworthiness at all.
Suppose, for example, a historically uncooperative and antisocial society, marked by
a history of intense infighting, were taken over by a strict authoritarian ruler who
enforced cooperative and pro-social behaviour upon their citizens through fear of
punishment or even death. With these incentives in place, we can expect cooperation
and pro-social behaviour to increase. Yet we would have no reason to think that this
I.2 Dominant Views on Trust: Problems 43
change would cause any change in the underlying trust between individual citizens.
Such a society may appear to be ‘high-trust’ from the outside – orderly, civil, and
compliant – but this may just be an illusion of trust. Cooperation and civic participation
are not the same thing as trust, since they can be compelled by other things, fear for
example, mutual threats, or nationalistic sentiment.
Not too dissimilarly from Uslaner, Partha Dasgupta interprets trust to be “correct
expectations about the actions (his emphasis) of other people that have a bearing on
one’s own choice of action when that action must be chosen before (his emphasis) one
can monitor the actions of others.” (1988: 51). Hence, for Dasgupta, trust is A correctly
expecting B to do X, when A lacks information about how B will behave. He says that
trust is “not dissimilar to commodities such as knowledge and information” and
emphasises that “the clause concerning the inability to monitor others’ actions in my
definition of trust is crucial. If I can monitor what others have done before I chose my
own action, the word ‘trust’ loses its potency” (1988: 51).
The Problem of Trust for Dasgupta, like Uslaner, ultimately boils down to a lack of
knowledge of how others will behave. This leads him to claim that “the problem of trust
would of course not arise if we were all hopelessly moral” (1988: 53). By “hopelessly
moral” Dasgupta clarifies that he means “always doing what we said we would do in the
circumstances in which we said we would do it.” (1988: 53). Setting aside the detail that
doing the moral thing may sometimes require of us that we act in a manner that is at
odds with what we said we were going to do, this conception of trust – simple three-
place trust – as we can see, is difficult to distinguish from other similar three-place
relations, such as reliance, belief, or cooperation.
For Uslaner and Dasgupta, the difficulty in distinguishing simplistic three-place
trust and reliance seems not to have been deemed so problematic as to warrant a re-
think of the underlying conception of trust. Their understanding of trust as a way of
interacting with things in the world, is widely adopted in their fields. Yet in philosophy,
the worry that simplistic three-place trust is too similar to reliance to be of any distinct
use has had an impact, as we shall see in the following subsection, I.2.3. Yet one
philosopher has gone to the point of arguing explicitly in favour of simplistic three-
place trust.
I.2 Dominant Views on Trust: Problems 44
In a recent book contribution entitled “Being Pragmatic about Trust”, Philip Nickel
argues that we must determine the concept of trust pragmatically, i.e. by our “scientific
explanatory aims” (2017: 209). Put simply, Nickel’s argument is that we should adopt
an unrestricted theory of trust that does not require trusters to have any psychological
elements – emotions, attitudes, motives, beliefs and so on – since this restricts the
number of instances of cooperation that can be “explained” by trust. Nickel says that
trust “should be able to explain cooperation”, and that failures of trust (by which I take
him to mean failures of trustworthiness), “should help explain the emergence of
cooperation-enabling institutions” (2017: 195).
For Nickel, unrestricted or simplistic views of trust – such as those adopted by
Uslaner and Dasgupta – that take trust to be no more than the disposition to cooperate
with or rely on others, should be favoured over restrictive views which require the
trusting person to have some further attitude in addition to this disposition (2017: 196).
Both trust and trustworthiness as presented in this research project would be classed as
‘restricted’ in Nickel’s terminology, since the psychology of the truster very much
determines their presence. Nickel is very clear that he is arguing for the adoption of
simplistic three-place trust on pragmatic grounds, and so before evaluating his
argument, it may be helpful to appreciate his broader motivation.
Nickel claims that most philosophical accounts of trust stand in opposition to
pragmatism (2017: 200), and the approach taken in this dissertation may at first appear
to do so, in its insistence on the distinction between the objectively observable so-called
“practical effects” of trust and trust itself. One cannot, I argue, provide an adequate
account of trust without reference to something other than its practical effects. This may
at first appear to leave this dissertation open to the pragmatist’s complaint that it relies
on “tender-minded a priori intuitions” about trust, while ignoring the “hard facts”.
Yet those philosophers who have argued that there is something more to trust than
the simplistic three-place picture reveals, have not come to do so just by thinking about
it, revealing to themselves hidden “a priori truths”. Instead (though they may very well
do so from an armchair) they have put forward considered views on trust by reflecting
on their own and others’ lived experience as trusters. This is precisely to take in and
examine the “hard empirical evidence”. Many accounts of trust which are restricted (in
I.2 Dominant Views on Trust: Problems 45
Nickel’s sense) are not at all “anti-pragmatic”. At the very outset, Nickel’s motivation
for his approach is somewhat suspect, as it relies on the spurious claim that accounts of
trust that go deeper than the “practical effects” of trust, are anti-pragmatic.
For Nickel, it is legitimate to explain instances of cooperation as trusting or
trustworthy not only when things like goodwill or optimism are absent, but even if
things like fear, suspicion, greed, or selfishness are present. He says that we should
leave open what might count as instances of trust so that “a range of possible
motivations can potentially fit, instead of defining them away analytically a priori.”
(2017: 199). As an example, he provides a description of one of the first encounters of
European explorers of North America with Native American tribes. The account he
offers us, which he takes to be an example of cooperation that we should be able to
explain by appealing to the notion of trust, comes from the French explorer La Salle:
At nine o’ clock, doubling a point, [La Salle] saw about eighty Illinois wigwams, on both
sides of the river. He instantly ordered the eight canoes to be ranged in line, abreast, across
the stream ... The men laid down their paddles and seized their weapons; while, in this
warlike guise, the current bore them swiftly into the midst of the surprised and astounded
[Illinois people]. The camps were in a panic. Warriors whooped and howled; squaws and
children screeched in chorus; some ran in terror, and, in the midst of the hubbub, La Salle
leaped ashore, followed by his men. None knew better how to deal with Indians; and he
made no sign of friendship, knowing that it might be construed as a token of fear. His little
knot of Frenchmen stood, gun in hand, passive, yet prepared for battle. The Indians, on their
part, rallying a little from their fright, made all haste to proffer peace. Two of their chiefs
came forward, holding out the calumet, while another began a loud harangue, to check the
young warriors who were aiming their arrows from the farther bank. La Salle, responding to
these friendly overtures, displayed another calumet; while Hennepin caught several scared
children and soothed them with winning blandishments. The uproar was quelled, and the
strangers were presently seated in the midst of the camp ... Food was placed before them;
and, as the Illinois code of courtesy enjoined, their entertainers conveyed the morsels with
their own hands to the lips of [La Salle’s party]. (Parkman 1869: 158-59)
About this encounter, Nickel says “the unrestrictive view explains these outcomes in
terms of trust, and the restrictive view cannot do so” (2017: 201), implying that this is
I.2 Dominant Views on Trust: Problems 46
obviously a severe failing of restricted accounts. But is it? Though there is clearly a
ceasefire, and a suspension of outward hostilities, this interaction is far from friendly.
Indeed, La Salle made “no sign of friendship” and upon approach his party “seized their
weapons” and, having a “warlike guise”, came upon the Illinois people who are
described as “surprised”, “astounded”, “in a panic”, and who “ran in terror”. Given
these facts, it is not clear why we should be able to explain the ensuing ceasefire as an
example of trust and trustworthiness.
It is more accurate, and more useful to say that the Illinois Indians “made all haste to
proffer peace” because of their desperation, fear or good sense, rather than their trust.
This is especially so, seeing as we are told La Salle’s “little knot of Frenchmen stood,
gun in hand, passive, yet prepared for battle”. We gain no practical benefits by
describing tactical interactions involving guns, terror, power, and oppression as trusting.
It is far more explanatory to say that the cooperation that occurred between these two
fearful, suspicious and warlike groups was distrustful and strategic – a considered move
on the part of the settlers to strike fear into the Indians by showing their strength, and an
equally considered response by the chiefs to secure the safety of their people by
compliance.
Nickel, following Russell Hardin (2006), points out that such preliminary moves can
result in trust developing (2017: 197), which may be true. Hostile violence can turn into
strategic peace marked by cooperation, which can – in time – grow into trust. But the
fact that such interactions can in the future produce trust is not a reason to describe
them as already trusting. Nickel brings in trust as an explanatory device to account for
cooperative behaviour that occurs before trust has properly developed, and in doing so,
the unrestrictive view of trust actually restricts what we can say about such interactions.
Nickel wants our “scientific aims to determine which account of trust we accept” (2017:
209) and so “philosophers should take the argument from explanatory potential on
board as a way of grading accounts of trust” (2017: 212). Yet without getting into the
ongoing debate in the philosophy of science about what counts as an explanation, there
is general agreement even among those who favour pragmatism that everything a theory
says about observable aspects of the world must be true. Explanations might omit some
details, but they cannot say things that are outright false (Van Fraassen 1980) and it is
I.2 Dominant Views on Trust: Problems 47
just false to claim that interactions like this are trustful. How do we know this? Not by
defining things away analytically a priori, but by examining the evidence: guns are used
to make people cooperative when there is no trust. That is indeed one of their main
functions. If there is trust between individuals, then they are not standing ready
“prepared for battle”. The threat of violence here tells us all we need to know about the
trust situation.
Nickel claims that adopting simplistic three-place trust (unrestricted trust) would be
of pragmatic benefit because “trust is messy” (2017: 209). He provides as evidence for
this the claim that “our intuitive sense of what genuine trust is, is perhaps not shared
universally” (2017: 209). This makes it unclear whether Nickel worries that trust is not
universal, or that the concept of trust is not universal. He provides an explanation for the
non-universality of trust/concept-trust, in a footnote:
In Dutch, ‘I rely on x’ and ‘I trust x’ can both be naturally translated as ik vertrouw [in, op]
x, and ‘reliability’ and ‘trustworthiness’ can both be naturally translated as
betrouwbaarheid. In French, the respective pairs are both translated as faire confiance en
and fiable. Of course a distinction can be drawn, but it lies further from the surface than in
English. (Nickel 2017: footnote 12)
Here, Nickel points out that the words ‘rely’ and ‘trust’ are close in both Dutch and
French and takes this as evidence that trust/concept-trust is not universal. This is when,
as he says, “a distinction can be drawn” between trust and its cognates even in these
languages. This is puzzling. Supposing for a moment that the translation of ‘trust’ in
language A is close to the equivalent of ‘hope’, and in language B is closer to the
equivalent of ‘think’, then, this is not by itself evidence that trust/concept-trust is not
universal. Translations of the German words Torschlusspanik (fear that time is running
out to achieve lifegoals) or Fremdschaemen (feeling ashamed on someone else’s behalf)
may differ considerably across languages, but this does not need to mean that these
phenomena are not, in the relevant manner, shared.
There may even be languages where the English word “trust” has no equivalent at
all. We can come for the first time to possess words for things that we already have
concepts for and are already doing with full awareness: ‘sexting’, ‘cybernating’,
I.2 Dominant Views on Trust: Problems 48
‘upspeaking’ and ‘barebacking’ for example. To demonstrate that people do not possess
the concept of trust, we must actually demonstrate that they do not possess the concept
of trust. To overthrow the common-sense idea that trust and trustworthiness are
‘universal’ i.e. shared human experiences like love, forgiveness, and betrayal, it is not
enough to appeal to language differences, or even cultural differences in expression
(this theme is explored in greater detail in II.3).
Nickel’s argument is not just a denial that we might be able to produce a single
coherent account of trust. He takes trust to fail to be a “natural kind” (2017: 210) in the
strongest sense:
That medical scientists’ understanding of arthritis should determine the boundaries of the
concept is plausible, but it is not similarly plausible that biologists, rather than
psychologists, political scientists, economists, or philosophers, should determine the
boundaries of the concept of trust. The second problem is that trust is a concept with heavy
social and political significance in modern times (see, e.g. Baberowski 2014). Concepts like
this, such as legitimacy and democracy, are public property, maybe even contested territory.
The boundaries of such concepts are not dictated by experts alone. It appears, then, that
there is no decisive reason to regard the concept of trust as being determined by a natural
kind, nor by social facts that give experts authority over the concept. (2017: 211)
Somewhat misleadingly, Nickel may mean “determine” as “define” or he may instead
mean something closer to “figure out”. I take no issue with Nickel’s claim that
philosophers are not experts with freewheeling authority to define concepts. Yet this is
true also of medical scientists. All of us are bound by what really is, and there is no
reason in principal why a philosopher may not be able to use their specific skills to
figure out the boundaries of the concept of trust. I have argued that if cooperation,
reliance, and belief, can exist without trust, as they did between early European
explorers of North America and Native American tribes, then they are not the same
thing and it is better to adopt an account of trust that reflects this clearly.
Here we can glimpse the first tangible benefit of the way trust is understood in this
dissertation. Even if it were to be established that there are differences in trust and
trustworthiness across cultures and throughout history, both in the way they are
expressed in language and behaviour and so objectively observed, and in the subjective
I.2 Dominant Views on Trust: Problems 49
experience of trusters and trustees, a complex experiential account can accommodate
such disparities. Diverse cultural and societal norms surrounding trust and
trustworthiness – which acts count as violations, repentance and forgiveness for
example – do not constitute trust and trustworthiness, but rather, express trust and
trustworthiness in those cultures and societies. When we understand trust and
trustworthiness as complex experiences, with varying manifestations, differences in the
details are well tolerated. Rather than admonishing trust and trustworthiness for being
“messy”, this dissertation has embraced their inherent complexity. In doing so, as
Nickel rightly says, trust and trustworthiness cannot explain as many phenomena as a
more “unrestricted” view of trust or trustworthiness might. This is held to be a positive
attribute of two-place trust. A restricted theory of trust and trustworthiness, applied
correctly, has genuine explanatory power. It is able to say that there was cooperation,
but there was no trust, whereas an unrestricted theory of trust can only say of
cooperation: there was trust.
In summary, this subsection presented literature in favour of simplistic three-place
trust. Philip Nickel’s argument for the adoption of simplistic three-place trust on
pragmatic grounds was considered and rejected. Simplistic three-place trust is
indistinguishable from reliance and cooperation. This is not a reason to favour it, as
doing so does not allow us to explain more phenomena, we merely lose nuance where
nuance is sorely needed.
I.2.3 Three-place trust: plus
Three-place trust plus includes all accounts which add any additional elements to
simplistic three-place trust. Unlike simplistic accounts, which are entirely
behaviouristic, ‘three-place trust: plus’ accounts are not. These accounts vary
considerably, the motivation behind them is similar, with the aim being to distinguish
trust from reliance, genuine trust from pretending to trust. As Philip Nickel observes,
the motivation to make trust distinct from belief, reliance and cooperation is precisely
what separates the treatment of trust in philosophy as compared to the social sciences
(2017: 196).
I.2 Dominant Views on Trust: Problems 50
Yet precisely what needs to be added to trust to distinguish it from reliance, belief,
and cooperation has become yet another flashpoint of disagreement in the literature, and
it is spurred on by the insistence on maintaining an underlying three-place schematic.
As Katherine Hawley put it:
What is the magic ingredient which distinguishes (dis)trust from mere (non-)reliance?
Philosophers, inevitably, disagree: maybe a truster imputes appropriate motives to the
trustee, including perhaps a concern with or responsiveness to the needs, desires, or indeed
trust of the truster; or maybe a truster sees a trustee as morally obligated, committed, or
accountable in appropriate ways. (2017: 231)
Interestingly, the growing number of ‘three-place trust plus’ accounts which Hawley is
pointing to here, treat trust in a way that is strikingly reminiscent of the way in which
knowledge – since the Gettier examples – is treated in Anglophone analytic philosophy.
Here, we see knowledge being “fixed” by being analysed as justified true belief plus
something else, such as an epistemic “anti-luck” condition (Zagzebski 1994: 72), a
causal connection (Goldman 1967), or a reliability condition (Dretske 1989: 95), to
make it non-accidental. These similarities between the way trust and knowledge have
been treated by philosophers are increasingly being recognised (Domenicucci and
Holton 2017: 149; Hinchman 2017: 56-59), and such parallels might be taken as further
evidence that trust has been largely viewed as an epistemic notion.
Three-place trust plus accounts are all the same in their underlying schematics, yet
the details vary considerably. For example, Philip Pettit takes the philosophically
interesting kind of trust to be a three-place “interactive trusting-reliance” in which A’s
reliance on B to do X is manifest to B. Pettit explains that if we are trusting a bus driver,
for example, to take us to the city centre, then that driver “knows that I am relying on
him and knows that I am aware that he knows that.” (1995: 207). Hence, for Pettit, trust
is like (or involves) a second or even third-order belief-like state. As we shall see in II.3,
Karen Jones provides a parallel view – rich trustworthiness – which this dissertation
argues is second-order reliability. More recently, Pettit has taken trust relations to
involve a universal desire for the “good opinion of others” (2002: 354).
For Bernd Lahno:
I.2 Dominant Views on Trust: Problems 51
A trusting person is disposed to react to a misuse of her trust in a particular and emotional
way. This is due to the fact that the other is seen as a responsive person consciously
engaged in interaction with the trustor. As the author of her acts she is held responsible and,
thus, the expectations of the trusting person are normative in character. In contrast,
perceiving the other from some distance like a mechanism governed by natural behavioural
laws, an objective attitude in Strawson’s sense that would allow for pure factual
expectations only, is incompatible with genuine interpersonal trust. (2017: 132)
Thus, for Lahno, the key elements of trust are the participant stance, and
“connectedness” in the sense of shared norms and values. Meanwhile, Pamela
Hieronymi discusses what she calls a “purist’s notion of trust”, according to which one
person trusts another to do something to the extent that one trustingly believes that the
other will do that thing (2008b). Colin O’Neil takes it that three-place trust requires an
“expectation of performance” (2012: 308). Still others have proposed various additions,
such as: hope (McGeer 2008), the participant stance (Holton 1994), an
acknowledgement of the value of the trusting relationship (Hardin 2002), an expectation
of goodwill (Jones 1996), a desire for the continuation of the trusting relationship (Baier
1986), a “feeling of trust” (M. Fricker 2007: 79), a belief in the trustworthiness of the
trustee (Keren 2014: footnote 4), an emotion (Lahno 2001), a moral attitude (Mullin
2005), a commitment to a social norm (Coeckelbergh 2012), a disposition to experience
Strawsonian reactive attitudes (Helm 2014), or even that trust is a gift (Mansbridge
1999).
In summary, what we can see from these various proposed fixes is that philosophers
have tended to choose one specific thing to add on to simplistic three-place trust. Trust
is reliance plus belief in trustworthiness, or reliance plus the participant stance, or
reliance plus a feeling of trust, or reliance plus a commitment to a social norm.
However, despite considerable recognition that a straightforward three-place analysis of
trust will not cut it, the inclination to abandon three-place trust altogether is curiously
absent. This is odd, since what philosophers have added to make simplistic three-place
trust reflect more accurately our actual experience as trusters, is invariably some private
psychological/mental phenomenon. Nobody is arguing that, to trust, one must rely to
‘some sufficient degree’, or ‘with regard to certain things’. Trust is nowhere being
I.2 Dominant Views on Trust: Problems 52
distinguished from reliance by the claim that trust is ‘about’ serious or expensive things.
Instead it is argued that one must be in a certain psychological state, or be prone to
experiencing certain psychological effects, in order to be trusting. This demonstrates
that there is already a good deal of recognition of the private experiential nature of trust,
despite the oddly persisting confidence in the public nature of trust as an act.
I.2.4 Three-place trust explained
This subsection considers why philosophers have preferred to hold on to a three-place
conception of trust, adopting ‘three-place trust plus’, or acknowledging three-place trust
as a ‘kind of trust’, rather than abandoning the idea of three-place trust altogether. The
primary explanation provided is to do with the way the word ‘trust’ is used in the
English language. Two further explanations are then considered: 1) the persistent sense
that what causes ‘trust-reactions’ are ‘trustworthy-actions’; and 2) the false idea that the
only alternative to three-place trust is complete and total confidence in the trustee.
Primarily, the inclination to continue to view three-place trust as an important kind
of trust despite its known limitations, stems in part from the way the word ‘trust’
functions in language, particularly the English language. On this point, Stephen Darwall
has said that the effort that goes into distinguishing trust from reliance in philosophy, is
not aimed at settling a terminological dispute:
Used sufficiently broadly, ‘trust’ need not contrast with ‘rely’ or ‘reliance’. When we trust
our cars or eyes to work properly, or perhaps even when we trust other motorists, no more
need be going on than our relying on them. We simply proceed on the assumption that these
will function or conduct themselves correctly or appropriately. Philosophers who write
about trust, however, have mostly been concerned to distinguish trust from mere reliance of
these kinds. (2017: 35)
And yet, the ways in which English speakers use the terms interchangeably can mean
that we easily lose sight of the distinction, as Katherine Hawley notes:
We do not mark the trust–reliance distinction sharply in everyday language, and nor do we
mark the trustworthiness–reliability distinction consistently. This everyday loose talk
I.2 Dominant Views on Trust: Problems 53
presents a problem to the theorist who hopes to explain the underlying differences between
trustworthiness and reliability. (2017: 234)
Despite widespread recognition that the problem is not terminological, there is still an
inexorable pull towards providing an account of trust that mirrors the way the word is
used in everyday language, and ‘trust’ in English at least, is often used synonymously
with ‘rely’. The conceptual confusion that has resulted from this pull is demonstrated by
the kinds of example philosophers provide when they purport to be providing ‘examples
of trust’ (see I.2.1). In English, ‘trust’ appears frequently in the three-place construction,
and some philosophers writing in English have explicitly argued along such lines when
defending a three-place trust account (Hardin 2002; McLeod 2015).
Yet such arguments may only be convincing depending on which language one
happens to speak. Richard Holton and Jacopo Domenicucci have pointed out that the
three-place construction as it appears in English may be atypical, as it is not readily
available in other languages; they note Latin, Italian, and French (2017: 150).
Domenicucci and Holton take this to raise questions about the correctness of taking the
notion of three-place trust at face-value and say that it points to an important area for
further empirical investigation. That said, despite their scepticism about the concept
being universal, they still do not suggest abandoning the idea that three-place trust is a
kind of trust:
We don’t deny that this three-place relation exists, expressed in a perfectly natural English
idiom, with a useful role to play. (2017: 149).
What Domenicucci and Holton do here in moving from the way the word ‘trust’
functions in language to allowing ‘different kinds of trust’ is actually quite a common
ploy. We saw a similar move already in Nickel’s treatment of trust, though he provided
contrary advice as to how we should manage the situation (I.2.2). Others who have tried
to get at trust via language have been left with scepticism that there is only one kind of
trust:
I.2 Dominant Views on Trust: Problems 54
What I doubt is that there is a distinctive attitude of trust that serves as a psychological
underpinning of our sociality; rather different forms of trust are appropriate to different
sorts of object. Owens (2017).
Comparable sentiments can be found in the work of Wright (2010); and Paul
Faulkner (2017) has argued in a similar vein from language use that three-place trust –
although again still a kind of trust – cannot be the fundamental kind. Instead of noting
how the construction differs across different languages though, Faulkner makes his
argument by noting that there is no three-place form of distrust in English “we do not
say ‘X distrusts Y to φ’ – I don’t distrust my mechanic to deliver my mail!” (2017:
121). Essentially, Faulkner moves from the assumption – taken from Hawley (2014) –
that there must be analytic connections between trust and distrust, to the claim that there
is no three-place form of distrust, and hence, to the conclusion that the three-place form
itself cannot be fundamental (2017: 120-21).
Faulkner’s line of reasoning is problematic in the same way as Nickel’s and
Domenicucci and Holton’s. The reality that there is no common three-place form of
distrust in the English language does not mean that English speakers experience no
three-place distrust equivalent to three-place trust. That the construction sounds odd to
our ear, does not mean the idea or practice of distrusting a person to do a particular
thing is so odd.
Both Faulkner and Domenicucci and Holton (as well as many others, see: I.1), take
the fact that there are two (or more) distinct ways we talk about trust – at least in
English – as evidence that there are two (or more) distinct ways of trusting. Indeed, the
limitations of three-place trust have meant that most philosophers acknowledge multiple
‘kinds of trust’, the arguments really being over which kind is fundamental, or
interesting. This move is not – on the face of it – a bad way to go. When it comes to
some concepts, language provides a reliable signpost. And after all, why should it not be
the case that there are multiple kinds of trust? As Thomas Simpson writes:
That premise is: ‘trust’ is univocal. As such, ‘trust’ always has the same referent. I deny
this. Listening to the way the word is used provides a compressed argument. Sometimes
‘trust’ is naturally understood as referring to a sort of affective attitude (‘I will trust my
I.2 Dominant Views on Trust: Problems 55
wife; I will not be jealous’); at other times to a conative one (‘Come what may, I will trust
you to the end’); and at yet others to cognitive ones (‘I know you are honourable; I trust
you’). Surely correctly, Annette Baier comments that ‘Trust, if it is any of these [affective,
cognitive and conative], is all three’ (1994: 132). Indeed, sometimes it is not a mental state
but action itself which is described as trust (‘The patrol followed the scout, trusting him to
spot an ambush before it was too late’). It may be that there is an explanation of why it is
felicitous to use ‘trust’ in each of these instances on which the term has an invariant
meaning, perhaps expressible by necessary and sufficient conditions. It is all but certain,
however, that any such conditions do not require the referent of ‘trust’ to be always the
same kind of mental state. Further, I doubt that there are any such invariant conditions of
use. The vulnerability of existing analyses of trust to counterexample is inductive evidence
of this… The equivocity that ‘trust’ exhibits is not the same as that of ‘bank’. It is mere
linguistic accident that ‘bank’ is ambiguous between a financial institution and the side of a
river. It is no accident that ‘trust’ functions as an umbrella term that may refer to a variety
of mental attitudes that, while non-identical, nonetheless share a range of similar features.
(2017: 183-84)
I agree with Simpson that ‘trust’ does not always have the same kind of mental state
referent. Indeed, in an important way, as we shall see in 1.5, the referent is complex,
and can change depending on context. Here now though, is a different way to think
about the things that Simpson has brought to our attention. Rather than capturing
different kinds of trust (the conative, cognitive, or affective), each of the statements that
Simpson points out merely capture just one part of trust. “I will trust my wife; I will not
be jealous” captures the way in which trust makes us vulnerable and requires an
ongoing effort. “Come what may, I will trust you to the end” points to the surprising
strength of trust, and how it can shore up cooperation in the face of overwhelming
adversity. “I know you are honourable; I trust you” points to the ability of trusting
relationships to make us feel safe, secure, and certain. While “The patrol followed the
scout, trusting him to spot an ambush before it was too late” probably just points to
reliance, unless the scout is a trusted member of the patrol, and then it may point to the
fact that trust can cause reliance behaviour. The point is that Simpson has not identified
many varieties of trust, but many parts of trust, many upshots of trust, the many ways in
which trust reveals itself in our feelings, thoughts, and actions.
I.2 Dominant Views on Trust: Problems 56
We could go the way of Faulkner, Simpson, Nickel, Domenicucci and Holton and
others, and say that because the referent changes, across and within languages, cultures,
and contexts, there are multiple kinds of trust. Alternatively, we could go the way this
dissertation proposes and say that trust is complex, involving different things at
different times, and producing multiple kinds of effects. The benefit of their way is that
every time a philosopher provides a counter-example, pointing to a different way the
word ‘trust’ is used, we do not need to go to great lengths to explain how this instance
of trust fits (or does not fit) with our conception. We can just call it a different kind of
trust. The downside of their approach is that it dilutes trust indefinitely and risks
obscuring what all these ‘kinds’ share that make them ‘kinds of trust’ in the first place.
The downside of my approach is that it may prove unwieldy, messy, and resistant to
exacting philosophical analyses. But the upside of my approach is that we may just
manage to acknowledge and capture the inconsistency, irregularity, and intricacy of
something which is in actual fact all of these things.
When it comes to trust, language use provides nothing but an exceptionally terrible
starting point. This is true of other concepts, such as love. Trust, like love, is a part of
human experience. We know this, because we recognise it. Across language and
cultural barriers, we recognise trust, distrust, broken trust, betrayal, forgiveness,
gratitude, closeness, friendship, loyalty, and love, in art, literature, poetry, history, song.
We recognise them in our stories, many of which would make no sense – would be
wholly unrecognisable – if their subjects (trust and trustworthiness) were not shared
experiences. The way ‘trust’ functions in English provides one explanation for the
continued acceptance of three-place trust despite the recognition of its limitations.
Three-place trust remains dominant, even though there is plenty of precedent in the
English language to capture a two-place conception. We do already speak coherently of
trust that is not ‘about’ anything at all, without reference to anything entrusted: we trust
her, she trusts him, you broke my trust, we trust one another, you have to learn to trust
me again, we have lost our capacity to trust one another, the only person I’ve always
trusted is you. We already speak about trust that has only two elements to it – a truster
and a trustee. Note that this is not true of the other three-place constructions that are
I.2 Dominant Views on Trust: Problems 57
frequently confused with trust, such as reliance, dependence, cooperation and belief,
which logically and grammatically require that they are ‘about’ something.
Another explanation for the continued dominance of three-place trust stems from a
deeper intuition that the three-place construction captures something importantly true
about trust that any other construction would miss; it seems like trusting and being
trustworthy really are about what we entrust one another to do. If someone says, “She
broke my trust”, the natural response is “What did she do”? Indeed, any changes in our
trust – whether for better or worse – appear to march in step with the actions of our
trustees. Reflecting on those times when we have had our trust broken, when we have
felt the sharp sting of a surprise betrayal, seems plainly to reveal that it was because of
something that our trustee did: such as breaking a promise, lying, failing to return
something, protect some treasured belonging, failing to follow through on a deal, or pull
through with a favour, or the classic: infidelity. Given that trust and trustworthiness
clearly manifest in acts of reliance and reliability, this concern is not easily dispensed
with, and this dissertation cannot address it adequately until the following section. In
this subsection, I will develop a two-place notion of trust, which, as we will see,
nevertheless allows that there is a connection between trust and behaviour, without
admitting that the behaviour constitutes the trust. As we shall see, once the confusion
surrounding the object of trust that arises on three-place trust is addressed, this concern
falls away.
And so lastly, the final explanation considered here for the preference for three-
placed trust stems from an apparent problem with two-place trust. The problem occurs
when two-place trust – trust in a person, without reference to anything entrusted – is
conceived of as a sort of irrational blind foolishness, a total confidence in someone
else’s powers and abilities. This line of argument represents a historically entrenched
way of thinking about trust and seems to be behind many philosophers’ distaste for
anything other than a three-placed account. It is present in Howard John Neate
Horsburgh’s distinction between three-place trust and trust in a person:
…sometimes when we say that A trusts B we mean that A has perfect confidence in B.
Thus, we sometimes use the total absence of doubts and questionings as to the reliability of
someone as our criterion for trust. (1960: 343)
I.2 Dominant Views on Trust: Problems 58
“Perfect confidence” in someone or the “total absence of doubts and questionings” as to
their reliability is one thing, and probably very rare. But it is a mistake to think that this
is two-place trust. At fault here is a false dichotomy – the difference between two-place
trust and three-place is not the difference between trusting a person to do everything and
trusting a person to do one specific thing. Trusting a person to do everything is
complete reliance or total dependence: it is universal three-place trust. Trusting a
person in the two-place sense, though, does not require any presumptions regarding the
specific skills or interests of the trustee. Two-place trust does not presume that the
trustee is competent or committed to do anything specific at all, let alone everything.
Two-place trust involves only a truster and trustee, that is precisely the point of it. Trust
as it is presented in this research project allows that we do indeed navigate our trusting
relationships cognisant of each trustee’s abilities and limitations, including their
limitations of character. Yet we need not assume that it is our trust that is the thing that
is changing as our understanding of each trustee’s commitments and competencies
change. Trudy Govier writes that trust and distrust are “often relativized to specific
roles or contexts” (1993: 105). As this dissertation argues, our beliefs about people,
predications about they will behave, and tendencies to depend on them are most
certainly relativised to specific roles or contexts, but trust and trustworthiness are not.
In summary, there are likely a number of explanations as to why philosophers have
continued to prefer the three-place analysis of trust despite its known limitations. This
subsection has considered three. First, in English, the three-place construction reflects
language; second, there is a nagging connection between the growth and demise of trust
and the successes and failures of our trustees that is not easily dispensed with; and third,
there is an apparent limitation of the two-placed account that arises when two-placed
trust is conceived of as ‘total dependence’.
I.2.5 Summary of Dominant Views on Trust: Problems
Section I.2 considered the notion of three-place trust in detail, and in various
manifestations of its forms. Beginning in subsection I.2.1 with the bare schematics of
three-place trust (which all three-place accounts share), we then saw various examples
from the literature of three-place trust. Subsection I.2.2 presented the simplistic version
I.2 Dominant Views on Trust: Problems 59
of three-place trust and discussed three writers who have preferred to adopt it, focusing
on Philip Nickel’s argument that there are pragmatic advantages to simplistic three-
place trust. That subsection argued that simplistic three-place trust is indistinguishable
from reliance and cooperation and rejected it as an adequate account of trust on those
grounds. Subsection I.2.3 presented ‘three-place trust plus’ accounts, which aim to
address the limitations of simplistic three-place trust with the addition of various private
psychological elements, demonstrating that there is much disagreement as to what needs
to be added to simplistic three-place trust to make trust distinct from reliance. Finally,
subsection I.2.4 presented and considered three explanations as to why philosophers
have clearly preferred not to abandon three-place trust despite its limitations, and
despite the lack of agreement as to what additions to it need to be made. This subsection
raised but did not address one of these explanations – the hunch that trust and
trustworthiness really are a matter of what we do. The next section, The Object of Trust,
presents a confusion that arises from the logic of three-place trust, demonstrating how –
once this confusion is addressed – this hunch can be accommodated within a two-place
framework.
I.3 The Object of Trust 60
I.3 The Object of Trust
I claim that trust is a two-place relation: (A trusts B). Though this is not all there is to it,
schematically, it involves a truster and a trustee. The object of trust, then – on a two-
place account – is quite straightforward: it is the trustee. What counts as the proper
object of trust is a further matter affecting both two and three-place accounts equally.
Yet on three-place accounts (A trusts B to do X), not only is it not immediately obvious
what things might count as the proper object of trust, it is also unclear whether those
who adopt three-place trust intend the object of trust to be taken as the trustee (B), or
what is entrusted (X).
In subsection I.3.1, I reveal this ambiguity regarding the object of trust that is
inherent to the three-place trust logic. I then consider the proposal that the object of
three-place trust is X, concluding that the idea of ‘trusting’ that a certain state of affairs
will come to pass is better captured with notions such as: prediction, expectation,
anticipation, confidence, calculation etc. Subsection I.3.2 considers the proposal that the
object of three-place trust is B, revealing two possible ways in which ‘three-place trust
in B’ might be interpreted: the conjunction of trust and an instance of reliance, or a
causal relation between our trust and an instance of reliance. I propose that – rather than
instances of trust – both of these possibilities are better expressed as simply: trust and
reliance, or trust causing reliance. In subsections I.3.1 and I.3.2, this dissertation puts
forward a significant and original recommendation of this research project; for
conceptual clarity, it is essential in academic settings to adopt these more accurate ways
of describing the phenomenon of so-called three-place trust.
Then, I.3.3 addresses the question: What is the proper object of trust? demonstrating
the wide variation in answers philosophers have given, from: anything, to only persons,
to only things that are person-like, all the way to: most things except persons. Such wide
variation, it is argued, underscores the importance of settling the metaphysical question
before trying to tackle any ethical or epistemological issues that trust apparently throws
up. The proper object of trust on the two-place account explored here, is anything that
possesses the possibility of being worthy of it– anything that can both have, and induce
in us, complex experiences of trust and trustworthiness. While trust and trustworthiness
may not always be reciprocated in individual cases, the inherently reciprocal nature of
I.3 The Object of Trust 61
them – in the “proper” cases – is thus significant: while many things might induce
genuine experiences of trust in us, only things which can also have full complex
experiences of trustworthiness themselves count as the proper objects of trust.
I.3.1 The object of three-place trust: X
The object of trust is the thing that trust targets– the thing that is trusted. On one-place
accounts, there is no object of trust, trust is just something trusters have, it is just
something that they are, similar to a mood or temperament. On two-place accounts, the
object of trust is the trustee directly, not the trustee’s actions or words, since what is
‘entrusted’ is not part of trust on a two-place account. Yet if we examine the logical
structure of three-place trust, it is not immediately obvious exactly what the object of
trust is supposed to be. At least two possibilities present themselves–
1. The object of trust is X
2. The object of trust is B
The first interpretation says that the object of trust is X (an event, or a certain state of
affairs), which happens to involve B. The second interpretation says that the object of
trust is B, and yet, unlike on two-place accounts, the trust is not so much in them, as
they are, but is in some way contingent on them performing the entrusted action. This
distinction is nuanced, so an example may help. Taking a familiar example from the
literature (the Trust Game discussed by Holton – see I.1.2) if an instance of trust is me
falling backwards and ‘trusting’ that Damian will catch me, then, am I trusting that I
will be caught (by Damian) or am I trusting Damian (to catch me)? We can appreciate
the relevance of this distinction by thinking about the circumstances under which I
might consider my trust to be broken. If I am trusting that I will be caught, and Damian
fails to catch me but Sandra rushes in and catches me instead, then I seem to have no
reason to consider my trust broken. On the first interpretation, Damian just happened to
be who I thought would perform the trusted action, but it did not need to be him. Here,
B serves as a placeholder that can be occupied by any individual or thing. But on the
second interpretation, B is more than a placeholder, identifying always a single specific
individual or thing. If the object of my trust is Damian and the same situation unfolds –
I.3 The Object of Trust 62
he fails at X, but Sandra succeeds – then my trust has been broken. We can naturally
imagine being personally hurt by a friend who fails to do something for us, even if
someone else comes to the rescue, and does it anyway.
This ambiguity surrounding the object of trust inherent to all three-place accounts
goes some way to explaining the various competing intuitions about trust evident in the
current literature, as laid out in both I.1 and I.2. Yet both these possibilities – ‘trusting
that X will be done (by B)’ and ‘trusting B (to do X)’ – are not what trust is. Such
phenomena are better captured with different concepts entirely, or else, with two
concepts, such as trust and reliance. To see this, let us consider each one. First:
The object of trust is X
In this interpretation, the trust is placed in X, and the trustee just happens to be the
facilitator. If we say, “I trust the pilot to land the plane safely”, or “I trusted that the
doctors would save her” then, these statements can mean that the actual person doing
the landing, or the lifesaving does not matter. Sometimes, what matters is the outcome
and the ‘trustee’ can be ‘swapped out’ for any other competent individual. When this is
so, a ‘breach of trust’ occurs not when a specific trustee fails to do X, but just whenever
X does not occur. Reflecting on our own experience, we see that such circumstances are
commonplace; we regularly find ourselves in situations in which we are relying on a
certain outcome X, where X depends in some way on someone or something B, though
it matters very little which specific individual or thing serves as B to secure X. Indeed,
this is perhaps the most common situation we find ourselves in with regard to our
dependency on others. Typically, we do not know, nor does it matter, who delivers our
mail, collects our garbage, grows our food, or checks the quality of our water. What
matters is that whoever it is, they get it done and do it right. As it is the quintessential
dependency relation that exists between individuals in a modern global world, why
should we not think that the object of our trust could be the event itself, X? Surely, we
can trust planes to land safely, economic downturns to right themselves, armies not to
invade our borders, and election promises to be fulfilled. Indeed, this is how we already
see the idea of trust being employed in a great deal of academic and journalistic
discourse.
I.3 The Object of Trust 63
One could argue along pragmatic lines as to why we should understand trust as
being in X: 1) we already use the notion of trust in X, 2) trust in X provides a simple
way for us to describe complex situations, and 3) when people come across the concept
of trust in X, for example in headlines like ‘Investors Trust in Economic Recovery
Secured by Government Reforms’, they are not hopelessly confused but grasp the
situation.
Yet convenient as it is, such anthropomorphist metaphor has its perils. It is no
accident that connotatively, trust is linked to things like: forgiveness, love, gratitude,
and betrayal. Our concept of trust is linked to such phenomena, because trust, in our
experience, is linked to such phenomena. Our position with regard to events though, is
not. Strictly speaking, we are not betrayed by events, but by people. We do not forgive
the past, but the people who wronged us in the past. We are not grateful to the plane, but
to the pilots (or some of us perhaps to God). By accepting that the objects of trust are
events, then, while we appear to gain an exceptionally diversifiable explanatory device,
what we actually do is dilute an effective way of explaining one another. There is a
difference between having something that we expected to happen fail to happen and
having someone that we expected to do something for us fail to do it. If we want to hold
on to this distinction, in academic settings, then we had better not use the same concept
for both purposes.
Recently, Stephen Darwall has drawn out this important distinction in discussing the
difference between ‘expecting that’ and ‘expecting of’, taking only the latter kind of
expectation to be associate with trust:
we can expect that something will occur or expect something from or of someone.
Expectations take propositions or possible states of affairs as objects, whereas the object of
an expectation of is a person (or group of collective persons). Expectation of both sorts
impose standards. But where an expectation that says how things will be (or how we have
reason to believe they will be), an expectation of says how someone should act. (2017: 36)
As Darwall describes, the kind of expectation involved in trust must be an expectation
of, since “not living up to someone’s expectation is not to confound what she thinks will
happen, it is to fail to meet her standards of how one should act or be” (2017: 37).
I.3 The Object of Trust 64
Hence, to capture trust’s distinctive connection to things like betrayal and personal
disappointment (which is disappointment in someone) trust must involve an expectation
of. Three-place trust in X involves B in the trust not as a distinctly individual person,
but only as a logical placeholder, and, as Darwall says:
Interpersonal relations do not merely have persons as logical relata. They are constituted by
people relating to [his emphasis] one another… the objects of reactive attitudes are
therefore implicit addressees; the attitudes implicitly address their objects and invite or
demand reciprocation in some way; they come with an implicit RSVP. (2017: 38)
Répondez s’il vous plaît is not something we can ask of the X’s in our lives (believe me,
I have tried). Events, situations, states of affairs, and circumstances are influenced by
our actions (and even perhaps by our attitudes), but they cannot respond to us. Many
philosophers have recognised that there is a ‘bootstrapping’ mechanism inherent to
trust, whereby trust that targets the untrustworthy can increase trustworthiness (Holton
1994; Horsburgh 1960: 346; Jones 1996: 6; Nickel 2007: 317). There is no similar
bootstrapping mechanism to expectations, as Charles Dickens, through poor Pip,
reminded us. If the object of three-place trust is X, then, what may broadly be termed
our ‘trusting experiences and practices’, such as:
1. feeling betrayed
2. communicating resentment
3. holding one another to account
4. begging for forgiveness
5. giving the benefit of the doubt
6. pretending to trust to engender trustworthiness
7. assuming the best of someone
8. displaying gratitude
9. giving second chances
10. acting on a sense of loyalty. etc.
… become senseless, inexplicable, and hollow, when these experiences and practices
are in fact very meaningful and often successfully alter the outcome. This dissertation
I.3 The Object of Trust 65
finds no problem with the use of anthropocentric metaphor in everyday conversation (or
even in sensationalist news headlines). However, it cautions against such use in serious
academic settings, where claims are being made about the nature of reality. If broken
trust can explain broken hearts, then it cannot also be used as a theoretical device in a
purported explanation for the Chinese government’s political retaliation to the Australia
government’s bungling of that latest trade deal. It is most unlikely that the same
mechanism is the cause of both conditions.
Happily, there is no need to use trust in academic settings to capture our experience
of, and stance towards, events. When we ‘trust’ something to happen, indifferent to who
specifically is involved, then this situation is better captured with concepts like:
prediction, expectation that, anticipation, confidence, hunch, calculation etc. Using
these alternative concepts instead of trust in academic settings to describe our
relationship to events need not imply that we cannot have attitudes towards events, or
emotional reactions to them. Nothing about the concept of prediction for example,
precludes us from having some sort of private emotional reaction when our predictions
turn out to be wrong. It is not as though we have cold emotionless expectations that on
the one side, and hot sentimental expectations of on the other. Great expectations can
produce great emotional suffering; again, we recall Dickens’ Pip. Nonetheless, there is a
difference in the experience of having someone break our trust, and having a prediction
fail to come to fruition. The complex nature of these experiences, though hard to
characterise and no doubt sharing some overlapping qualities (we may grieve in both
cases for example), are distinct. Three-place trust in X confounds this very real and
very important distinction.
I.3.2 The object of three-place trust: B
This initially looks better, because here, the trust is directed at an entity which can
presumably respond to it – the trustee. But what now are we to make of the X? It seems
to just be hanging there, and we might well ask: what work is the concept of entrusting
supposed to be doing in a three-place account, if we have already admitted that trust is
in the trustee? Put another way, if who I trust is Damian, then how is my trust connected
to my relying on him to catch me?
I.3 The Object of Trust 66
One idea is to understand three-placed trust as being comprised of two distinct
things: 1) a trusting feeling, belief, or attitude towards a specific person, and 2) a
specific instance of reliance in them, or acceptance of their testimony, connected
together. This was Richard Holton’s move in 1994, when he argued that trust is
“reliance from the participant stance”. Though it was not made explicit there, integral to
Holton’s 1994 discussion was the idea that trust was made up of two things– an act of
reliance, and an attitude of the participant stance. Yet if trust is a phenomenon that is
made up of both a public act of reliance, and a private belief, feeling, or attitude, then
the next question to ask is: what precisely is the nature of the connection between these
two distinct phenomena, that together give rise to trust?
I consider two possibilities: conjunctive and causal. Firstly, the connection between
trust and reliance, between trust in a person and our reliance on them to do X, is
conjunctive. The conjunctive move is a common one, as Domenicucci and Holton have
recently noted :“many have tried to build trust conjunctively out of reliance: if one
trusts, then one relies, and some other condition obtains” (2017: 153). A conjunctive
account says:
(A is relying on B to do X) and (A trusts B)
To give an example of this approach in practice, it is good to examine Paul Faulkner’s
thinking back in 2007:
A’s expectation is grounded by the conjunction of the belief that S recognises A’s
dependence on S φ-ing and the presumption that this will move S to φ. This conjunctive
ground then implies a further presumption. In presuming that S will be motivated to φ by
A’s dependence on S φ-ing, and believing that S can in fact recognise A’s dependence, A
comes to presume that S will indeed φ. This implied presumption, made for these reasons, is
just the presumption that S will fulfil the expectation that A holds him to—that S will prove
trustworthy. (2007b: 884)
For Faulkner here, trust involves both the truster’s private beliefs and presumptions, and
a public act of reliance. One problem with the conjunctive approach in general, as
Domenicucci and Holton recognise, is that it cannot explain a truster feeling betrayed
I.3 The Object of Trust 67
by a trustee’s failure if the truster’s trust in the trustee and their reliance on them merely
happen to occur together (2017: 153). Moreover, there may be instances of trust even
when there is no opportunity for reliance: “we do not automatically stop trusting
someone when they lose the power to act in ways in which we relied on them” (2017:
154). On a conjunctive account, my trust and reliance can occur together without being
in any way connected to one another. We rely on, cooperate with, and believe those we
trust all the time, but we do not consider every instance of reliance, cooperation, or
acceptance of testimony to be instances of trust. Sometimes my trusted spouse fails to
remember to pick up nappies on his way home, even though I was relying on him to do
so. Sometimes he tells me that it is not going to rain, and then it does. In many such
instances of his unreliability (and there are many) my trust remains wholly unaffected.
Equally, like a broken clock that is right twice every day, or an Immanuel Kant who
takes a walk once every day, sometimes my darling proves most especially reliable
without this being in any way connected to his trustworthiness. The fact that trust and
reliance can occur together without it being a case of three-place trust shows that there
must be something more to three-place trust than the conjunction of trust and reliance.
Let us try again.
Perhaps the two components of three-placed trust enjoy a causal connection. In that
case we would have a genuine case of three-place trust only when:
((A is relying on B to do X) because (A trusts B))
In this interpretation, it is precisely the existence of a causal relationship between the
two components itself that gives rise to three-place trust. Sometimes we rely on one
another out of necessity, coercion, a sense of obligation, or the pressure exerted on us
by particular social norms, and sometimes we rely on somebody for the simple reason
that we believe them to be reliable. But on the causal account of three-placed trust, it is
trust only when ((A’s trust in B) caused (A to rely on B to do X)).
This looks promising, since it captures the intuition that it is more significant to trust
somebody to do something than to merely rely on them to do it, even if we happen to
share a background of trust with that person. The causal picture, unlike the conjunctive
picture, is able to weed out those cases of unconnected coincidence between our trust
I.3 The Object of Trust 68
and our tendencies to rely on, cooperate with, and believe one another. As such, it
effectively does away with the problem we saw with the conjunctive account. So far, so
good. And yet, while there is no doubt a genuine phenomenon here – sometimes the
way we feel about someone causes us to rely on them in ways that are distinctly
significant – are we satisfied with saying that this – ((A is relying on B to do X) because
(A trusts B)) – is what trust is?
An analogy might help here. Love can cause us to act in ways that are ‘loving’ –
devoted, caring, selfless, affectionate, passionate – but it need not do so. Sometimes
love is unreciprocated and unwanted, and known to be so, and so remains hidden.
Sometimes it is necessary to act as though we do not love when we do, and such
pretence can even be considered an ‘act of love’ in itself. Here we can point to the
behaviour of some Tutsi fathers and sons during the forced family rapes that occurred in
the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, or, we can just remember that episode of Friends where
Chandler pretends not to be in love with his best-friend Joey’s girlfriend. Love can
cause us – require us even – to act as though we do not love.
Trust is like this too. If it becomes essential to convince an enemy that we are not in
cahoots, you and I might feign distrust in one another. Trust can cause and even require
distrustful behaviour. Because of this, we should not accept an account of trust that says
that trust is a phenomenon that occurs when how we experience someone causes us to
behave in ‘trusting ways’ towards them, by relying on them, cooperating with them,
believing what they say. Those advancing a three-place conception of trust say, “here is
an example of trust”, and then talk of diaries being left on desks and people leaving
their children with babysitters. This is like saying “here is an example of love” and then
talking of meals being paid for and candles at dinner. Acts of trust and love come in
many forms – reliance and romance are just the Hallmark versions.
So, where does this leave us? The fact remains that we so often talk as though we
trust people to do certain things, and this, at least at times, seems to be explanatory.
Why do I choose to leave my children with my mother rather than a perfectly qualified
stranger? Because I trust my mother! Sometimes trust is the thing that makes all the
difference when it comes to our tendencies to rely on, cooperate with, and believe one
another. Happily, the two-place account put forward in this dissertation finds no
I.3 The Object of Trust 69
problem with the idea that trust can play a role, sometimes a very significant direct
causal role, in our acceptance of testimony and our decisions to rely on and cooperate
with one another. A two-place account of trust can do this by categorising the
phenomenon of so-called ‘three-place trust’ not as a kind of trust at all but as a kind of
reliance; reliance that might have been caused by lots of things (necessity, coercion) but
has, in this instance, been influenced to some notable degree by trust. Philosophers who
have come some way to a similar understanding as I have, have chosen to hold on to the
concept of three-place trust as a kind of trust (see I.1.2). While I gave possible reasons
in subsection I.2.4., this is a mistake, and it leads to a good deal of unnecessary
confusion.
Here is another analogy: If we have elevated blood pressure (EBP) because we have
a virus, then this is not a kind of virus (the EBP virus). Rather, it is a kind of elevated
blood pressure (the kind caused by a viral infection). Similarly, if we are relying
because we trust, then this is not a kind of trust, but a kind of reliance. Those who deal
in explanations of human behaviour must be awake to the fact that reliance,
cooperation, and acceptance of testimony can have many causes. Even when there is a
background of trust, trust will not always be the culprit. Those who seek to explain
human behaviour need to be on the lookout for coercion, compulsion, obligation,
nativity, misunderstanding, intimidation, fear, faith, sympathy, or any one of many other
things that might make one person rely on another, just as doctors need to be awake to
the multiple causes of elevated blood pressure in their patients – even those patients
who are known to have the EBP virus.
By letting go completely of the idea that trust is a three-place relation, we lose
nothing, and we accomplish much. We lose nothing, because there are plenty of other
concepts at our disposal that are better placed to account for those cases three-place
trust previously covered, as we have seen. As for what we accomplish: 1) we do away
with the ambiguity surrounding the object of trust, thereby gaining a clear way of
conceptually separating our experience of relying on events, from our experience of
relying on trustees. And, 2) if trust is not a three-place relation, we do away with any
difficulty in distinguishing between trust and all other three-place relations with which
it has been historically confused. We also thereby, 3) leave epistemic problems to
I.3 The Object of Trust 70
epistemology, no longer getting in a knot about the ‘irrationality of trusting-beliefs’ or
the ‘irrationality of trusting-behaviours’. Under a two-place framework, we can still ask
about whether or not it is good, rational, or sound to let our trust influence our beliefs
and behaviours in any particular instance, but we do not need to worry about any
inherent absurdity regarding how ‘trusting beliefs’ that must be ‘resistant to evidence’
can possibly be rational. Disconnected from an epistemological concern about the
rationality of trust, 4) it also no longer matters very much whether trust is voluntary.
Free from such ambiguities, conceptual confusions, logical impossibilities, and
epistemological concerns, 5) we are permitted to think about other aspects of trust
which might be important to us, such as how we might cultivate deserved trust, and
recover from broken trust. When we re-frame three-place trust as reliance because
trust, all this is possible, 6) without having to let go of that stubborn intuition that there
is a connection between trusting a person and relying on them, believing what they say.
In summary, subsections I.3.1 and I.3.2 addressed the question – what is the object
of three-place trust? Two possible interpretations were considered, both were rejected.
The first interpretation – the object of trust is X – was unsuccessful because it conflated
trusting someone with expecting something to happen. The second interpretation – the
object of trust is B – led to two possible ways of characterising the relationship between
(A trusts B) and (A relies on B to do X): conjunctive and causal. The conjunctive
interpretation came up short because trust and reliance can co-occur without it being a
case of trust. The causal account captured something important; however, I have argued
that the causal relationship between our trust and our reliance is better understood as
just that – a causal relationship – not as a kind of trust. Even if one accepts this picture
and adopts the view put forward here that trust is a two-place relation involving A (a
truster) and B (a trustee), a further question regarding the object of trust remains. B (the
trustee) might not always be a person. Indeed, as we shall see, one philosopher David
Owens argues that B is never a person. Now, we turn to considering the proper object
of trust.
I.3 The Object of Trust 71
I.3.3 The proper object of trust
The previous subsection considered the question: what is the object of trust in three-
place accounts? This subsection considers the proper object of trust. This issue has
historically been seen as important because, in three-place trust, our trust has been
thought of as rational, warranted, or well-grounded only when it targets that which is
trustworthy (McLeod 2015). Such concerns are less pressing in a two-place account,
since two-place trust that fails to correctly target its proper object poses no immediate
problem to our practical or epistemic rationality. Yet even so, if trust is a kind of
complex reciprocal two-place relation, then it is still worthwhile thinking about what an
object must be capable of, to qualify as a party to such a relationship. Indeed, this
question helps us to get a grip on the nature of the trust itself.
This subsection first provides a brief overview of the current debate in the literature.
As we will see, the discussion has concentrated on the issue of personhood. On this, as
we will see, there are a number of possible stances philosophers have taken: 1) that
some take it as given that non-person entities can trust, whereas others maintain that
only persons can trust, 2) arguments are given that non-person entities are ‘person-like’
enough to trust, or, that they are not person-like enough to trust, 3) the question is side-
stepped with a qualification that – whatever the reality – the philosopher is addressing
trust only as it exists between persons/non-person entities. I then present three examples
from the literature, each of which demonstrate how a philosopher’s stance on the proper
object of trust reflects their understanding of the nature of trust. Finally, this subsection
provides a partial answer to the question: What is the proper object of trust? which takes
the form of a recommendation about how high we should set the bar if we are to keep
trusting relations distinct from other kinds of relations. This answer is partial, because
the proper object of trust is that which can be worthy of it, and so a full answer to this
question will not become possible until Part II of this research project, when we come to
consider what it is to be worthy of trust. To anticipate, reflecting the reciprocal nature of
trusting relations, the answer is the same: the proper objects of both trust and
trustworthiness are all those things which both can create and experience trust and
trustworthiness.
I.3 The Object of Trust 72
Advocating for a conception of trust that is purportedly able to explain more
phenomena, some philosophers maintain that certain non-person entities can be proper
objects of trust. As we have seen (I.2.4), there is a significant motivation here to provide
a conception that can be used as an explanatory device to predict and explain the
behaviour of all sorts of non-person entities, from states to financial markets, in areas
outside of philosophy such as economics, sociology, and international relations. Among
those philosophers who write about a trust that is not interpersonal, there are various
candidates for what is taken to be the object of trust. Some speak of trust in institutions
(Govier 1997; Potter 2002; M. N. Smith 2008; Townley and Garfield 2013), others of
trust in government (Hardin 2002; Eric M Uslaner 1999), trust in animals (Silvers and
Francis 2005), and more recently trust in artificial intelligence (Coeckelbergh 2012;
Taddeo and Floridi 2011).
Sometimes, no explicit argument is given for why we should consider these non-
person entities to be the proper objects of trust. Instead the focus is on questions that
would only arise if the coherency of the idea had already been accepted, such as: How
can we increase trust in governments? and What are the conditions that precede a
breakdown of such trust? (see, for example, Warren (1999). At other times, it is argued
that such entities are ‘person-like’ in the relevant respects, and so it may be proper to
trust them (Domenicucci and Holton 2017). Reflecting the ongoing difficulties involved
in settling the philosophical question of what qualifies as a person (Campbell and
McMahan 2010; Olson 2007; Parfit 2012; Shoemaker 2011, 2012), one approach
philosophers have taken is to side-step this question altogether and simply state that,
whatever the reality here, they are speaking only of trust between human persons
(Horsburgh 1960: 343; McLeod 2015; Mullin 2005: 316; Wright 2010: 616). Still
others make no such explicit qualification, and simply discuss trust as though it were
obviously a relation that existed only between human persons (Hertzberg 1988: 307-22;
Lahno 2001: 171-89). In short, the issue of personhood is viewed as highly relevant to
the proper objects of trust, whether it is argued for, argued against, or openly and
expressly side-stepped.
The present disagreement on this issue underscores the importance of having a firm
answer to the metaphysical question: What is trust? prior to attempting any
I.3 The Object of Trust 73
epistemology or moral philosophy on trust, since whether or not you think non-person
entities can be the proper object of trust will be determined by the underlying account of
trust that you have adopted, and whether or not you believe non-person entities can be
the proper objects of trust will influence your answers to any moral and epistemological
questions. For example, Karen Jones says that trust is a form of optimism about the
goodwill of another. She reasons that:
one can only trust things that have wills, since only things with wills can have good wills–
although having a will is to be given a generous interpretation so as to include, for example,
firms and government bodies (1996: 14).
For Jones, things that can have goodwill are legitimate targets for trust because she
takes assumptions about the goodwill of the trusted to be part of what it is to trust. It is
worth noting that in her later work, Jones takes assumptions of goodwill to be
insufficient for trust (2012: 67), but this does not impact the current point that there is a
link between the type of account a philosopher adopts (at any one point in time) and
their position on the proper objects of trust.
Like Jones, Domenicucci and Holton have asserted that some institutions might be
the proper objects of trust. Yet this is not because they think institutions might possess
goodwill, since goodwill is no part of their account of trust. Instead, they say institutions
might be the proper objects of trust because of the reactive attitudes we invest in some
institutions, such as Britain’s National Health Service, which – they assert – could only
have “got going” in the first place as an object of the people’s trust, and thus it is right
that we have invested it with such trust (2017: 156-59). Holton’s account of trust as a
reactive attitude thus appears to have informed his and Domenicucci’s view that the
proper object of trust might be anything that we can sensibly take a Strawsonian
participant stance towards.
Jones, and Domenicucci and Holton, talk predominantly of interpersonal trust while
allowing that trust might sometimes involve non-persons if those non-persons are
person-like enough in the ways relevant to their underlying ideas about trust. Almost all
philosophers, even those who endorse trust in non-person entities explicitly, take
interpersonal trust as given, and often, as primary. Yet one philosopher David Owens
I.3 The Object of Trust 74
has recently (2017) provided an exception. Working within a three-place logical
framework, he has argued that persons are precluded from being the proper objects of
trust. For Owens, the proper object of trust is any object which has a distinctive value
which can be realised by trust. According to him, trust has no distinctive value of its
own; rather, it is the thing that allows us to realise the value of its object:
I trust my car when I am prepared to drive it around (not merely sit in it), an attitude that
enables me to realize the distinctive value of a car. I trust an apple when I am prepared to
eat it (rather than use it as a football), an attitude that enables me to realize the distinctive
value of an apple. A specific apple and a specific car are worthy of this trust when they
actually possess the value distinctive of their kind. In the absence of trust, the value of a
(trustworthy) apple and of a (trustworthy) car will be wasted. (2017: 216)
For Owens, trust is ubiquitous (2017: 214). So much so, that we cannot drive cars and
eat apples without it (though we can sit in them and use them as footballs without it).
Unlike apples and cars, though, objects that have no distinctive value cannot be the
proper objects of trust:
There may be objects that are valued by us but which have no distinctive value; they are just
valued in different ways by different people. Perhaps the moon is such an object, valued by
some as a celestial adornment and by others for its gravitational pull. In that case there
would be no such thing as trusting the moon. We may trust that tonight will bring a full
moon but we won’t thereby be trusting the moon. (2017: footnote 5)
Persons, Owens thinks, are like the moon in this respect “it is doubtful whether people
as such have a distinctive value, one that can be realised by trust” (2017: 217). Instead,
Owens says that when we trust other persons, what we are doing is trusting some
distinctive value they possess, such as their actions, technical skills, or particular
character traits. So, I can trust you to be on time, since you have the distinctive value of
promptness, but I cannot trust you (or the moon). This line of thinking leads Owens to
conclude that “there is no general attitude of trust fitted to play a foundational role in
our social theory. Trust is as various as the objects of trust” (2017: 229).
It is not easy to place Owens’ thinking within our current framework. It is almost
diametrically opposed to what I am arguing about trust here. The first thing to say is that
I.3 The Object of Trust 75
what Owens is describing here is a genuine phenomenon; there is a sense in which we
relate to parts of the people in our lives, realising their distinctive and various values to
us. Yet it is hard to understand why Owens thinks that relating to “parts of people”, is
trust. For one thing, it is far too self-interested to be likely to elicit that which trust so
often elicits in our trustees – loyalty, gratitude, care, and indeed, trustworthiness itself.
Perhaps what Owens is describing is our confidence in, knowledge about, or previous
experience with certain objects – including people – that allow us to use them to our
advantage to realise their individual values. We use strangers in this way, and we use
those we love and trust to further our own goals as well. But we also relate to those we
love and trust in another way– in a way that is not about realising their distinctive value
to us, rather it is about creating value in one another. It is good to keep these distinct
ways in which we can relate to a single individual (demanding/trusting, loving/
receiving) separate in our minds.
We can see from Jones, Domenicucci and Holton, and Owens how various answers
to the question ‘What is the proper object of trust or what should we trust?’ are
informed by a philosopher’s approach to the underlying metaphysical question about the
nature of trust. If trust involves goodwill, then the trustee should have goodwill. If trust
involves the participant stance, then the trustee should be the sort of thing we take the
participant stance towards. If trust involves ‘realising an object’s distinctive value’, then
the trustee had better possess a distinctive value. As I have said, the account presented
here is no different in this regard. If trust is a complex private experience that induces a
complex private experience (trustworthiness), then the trustee should be able to both
induce, and have, a complex private experience. This situation is evidence of the
symmetrical nature of trust and trustworthiness, a point made further in II.1.1.
As Domenicucci and Holton astutely point out though, the question about the proper
object of trust breaks down into the empirical: do people in fact have the same sorts of
trusting attitudes towards non-person entities that they have towards people? – as well
as the normative: is it appropriate or good for them to do so? (2017: 158). They are right
to draw our attention to the importance of separating these questions, as in practice they
are so intertwined as to be easily conflated. Even if we discover that people do in fact
sometimes have experiences of trust that are caused by or directed towards non-person
I.3 The Object of Trust 76
entities, whether or not they should trust non-person entities will depend on whether or
not those non-person entities are capable of responding (and responding appropriately)
to trust. This creates a whole series of further empirical questions, and each individual
case – animals, governments, systems, groups – would have to be addressed
individually. Yet anyone aiming to settle these empirical questions with regard to any
specific non-person entity will first have to specify what an appropriate response to
being trusted or to breaking someone’s trust should be, and this is not an empirical
question but a normative one.
Although this is where debate in the literature on the proper object of trust has
settled, I feel it is not my place to try to answer the empirical question regarding which
entities qualify as proper objects of trust and which do not, since I claim that trust is a
complex experience and I have no qualifications to say which entities have complex
private experiences, and which do not. Instead, this dissertation makes a
recommendation. There are a number of general motivations people can have for
cooperating with, or relying on, one another. These include fear of sanctions, self-
interest, a positive evaluation of cooperation, and a positive evaluation of friendly
relations (Williams 1995: 118). Only the last of these has the potential to capture
something about our trusting relationships. If we are to enhance our ability to explain
human behaviour by keeping trusting relations distinct from our strategic and self-
interested relations – membership, alliance, association, coalition, network etc. – then
the requirements must be set quite high. While they may suffice to mend a fractured
strategic alliance, in the case of broken trust, for example, the words of an apology,
confession, or the act of undoing or compensating are not enough. Compensatory
actions can be powerful and sufficient means of mending some relations, such as those
between governments and their peoples or financial institutions and their customers, but
it is not enough to ‘respond’ to breaking a friend’s trust this way. A bank may re-secure
our business by compensating us, but a friend who steals from us would not be likely to
secure our forgiveness just by giving the money back. A proper response to breaking
someone’s trust requires genuine remorse, regret, distress, concern, guilt and other
appropriate feelings. No matter how person-like it appears, an entity that cannot respond
with real sentiment, reflection, and understanding, should not be trusted, since whatever
I.3 The Object of Trust 77
it is responding to – a need, a desire, a command, a line of code, a fiscal benefit, a law, a
recommendation – it is not responding to us, to our trust.
On this point, Domenicucci and Holton, speaking of trust in the banking institutions,
comment that the banks seem to want the kind of discretion that we give to people when
we genuinely trust them – to wit, banks want the freedom to do what they want without
regulation (2017: 157). Taking this as potential evidence, they say that institutions can
be person-like in many ways and we can, in some instances, interact with them as
though they are persons without “absurd anthropomorphising” (2017: 158). However,
what the banks want, which is to be allowed to do what they want without regulation, is
actually very far from trust. In our trusting relationships, it is true that we want a certain
amount of discretion. If we are being gratuitously micromanaged, then we may
legitimately complain that we are not trusted. But trust is not incompatible with
monitoring, though there is a commonly held belief that it is. To provide a recent
example of this thinking, Paul Faulkner has agreed with Elster (2007) that, when we
trust, we refrain from taking precautions against the trustee even when they could act in
a way that might seem to justify precautions (2017: 109). Faulkner thinks that if we take
such precautions – such as consolidating a handshake with a legally binding contract –
then such actions preclude trust. Elsewhere he has said “Too thorough an assessment of
the risk is inimical to trust” (2007b: 879).
There is something importantly true about this idea – sometimes monitoring
behaviour can reveal underlying distrust. Yet the opposite of micromanagement is not
trust, but disengagement. Friends who do not register each other’s behaviour, far from
trusting one another implicitly, fail to embody the kind of care and attention that
trusting relationships require. Being a party to a trusting relationship involves
‘regulating’ one another, in the sense that we ‘monitor’ one another’s lapses of trust and
trustworthiness, and – with humility if possible – lovingly bring these to one another’s
attention. Our trust and trustworthiness are not fixed elements of our personalities, after
all (I.1.1); they are something we create together in our relationship. This being so, in
the course of a normal relationship occasional lapses are standard, and usually not fatal.
As we have seen, monitoring has historically been viewed as wholly incompatible with
I.3 The Object of Trust 78
trust (see I.2.2), but in reality, there is no point at which monitoring necessarily turns
into distrust.
Other than this ongoing background monitoring, some situations call for a truster to
monitor a trustee’s immediate behaviour intently. If the trustee is doing something
difficult, dangerous, or important, a good truster may monitor their actions extremely
closely. This – far from signalling distrust – may show nothing but the seriousness of
the situation and a deep concern for all involved. For twenty-two years now, I have been
a rock-climber, and that pastime involves a great deal of what is effectively intense
micromanagement blossoming in relationships of profound reciprocal trust. Climbers
who fail to monitor one another’s actions are not exhibiting their trust but failing to be
worthy of it. We must allow context to determine what behaviour signals what. As for
the banks, we have no good reason to consider their request for freedom without
regulation as constituting a request for genuine trust. It is a request for freedom without
regulation, nothing more. There is also something deeply concerning about trusting an
entity that requests such things of us and yet cannot respond to us in the way that
genuine trusters do, a fact that Domenicucci and Holton do note (2017: 158).
Other than their claim that some institutions desire genuine trust, Domenicucci and
Holton think that we may be able to trust some non-person entities because it makes
sense in some situations to take the participant stance towards them, and this, they say,
indicates genuine trust as opposed to mere reliance. Indeed, a number of philosophers
have held that reactive attitudes signify trust in the strong sense that this is precisely
how we should mark the distinction between trust and reliance (Baier 1994: Ch.6-9;
Hieronymi 2008b; Holton 1994; Jones 2004; McGeer 2008; McMyler 2011: Ch.4;
Walker 2006: Ch.3). If reactive attitudes like resentment and betrayal do signify trust,
and if we can and should have them towards some institutions, then this would seem to
compel us to accept that those institutions are the proper objects of trust.
Here I think Katherine Hawley has got the right idea. Beginning from the
observation that “even the most inflationary accounts of collective agency hold back
from treating such entities as fully-fledged persons in every respect, on a par with
individual human persons” (2017: 231), she asks whether the distinction between
trustworthiness and reliance, which is so important when it comes to persons, remains
I.3 The Object of Trust 79
pertinent in the case of groups and organisations. Clearly observing the distinction
between the relevant empirical and normative questions, Hawley says “certainly some
of us seem ready to react to groups and organizations with attitudes like loyalty,
gratitude, resentment, and a sense of betrayal. If groups are not genuinely trustworthy or
untrustworthy with regard to their testimony, merely reliable or unreliable, then such
reactions would seem to be mistaken” (2017: 243). Yet she does not give the standard
reply that such reactions are always mistaken:
reactive attitudes connected to ‘trusting’ a group can sensibly be directed at individuals
connected to the group. But is this really feasible where the audience does not know who
these individuals are? Yes: you easily resent the person, whoever it was, who wrote graffiti
on your front door, and your feelings are quite different about the wind which
inconveniently blew litter into your garden. Likewise, you can resent the individuals who
contributed to the publication of a misleading report, even if you do not know who those
individuals are (2017: 244)
To provide a contrasting argument which may help us to appreciate the significance of
Hawley’s insight in the current debate, Stephen Darwall says:
We take ourselves to be entitled to expect of other drivers that they will drive responsibly
and to be justified therefore in objecting and having second-personal holding-accountable
attitudes like resentment and moral blame when they do not. But when, however, one is cut
up by an overly aggressive driver who is a stranger, it would seem odd to have participant
responses that are distinctive of trust, to feel let down or disappointment in the driver, or
personally hurt or betrayed. These would seem to imply some form of personal relation that
would not exist in such a case. (2017: 46)
Hawley thinks we can take the participant stance towards strangers; Darwall disagrees.
Yet here, both Darwall and Hawley are speaking truth. Darwall is right in his broader
point that trust is the sort of thing that occurs only when we know someone personally,
but Hawley’s observation, as I would put it, that elements of our trust – such as the
response of resentment – can sensibly be directed at members of a group, even when
they are unknown to us, is right too. How is this possible? Well, as Hawley perceives,
I.3 The Object of Trust 80
we do not need to move from the claim that resentment can sensibly be directed at a
stranger, to the claim this is any indication of trust and trustworthiness:
there are individuals who may legitimately be resented for creating or perpetuating an
agency whose main function is to mislead. Whether this involves a failure of
trustworthiness, rather than some other sort of moral or political failure, may depend upon
which detailed account of trust and trustworthiness we espouse, but reactive attitudes reach
beyond the domain of trustworthiness and untrustworthiness in any case (2017: 245)
Reactive attitudes can “reach beyond trust and trustworthiness”, they can exist without
it constituting a case of genuine trust/worthiness. Just as we can rely on a person or
believe what they say without trust, sometimes we can resent a person without there
being any underlying trust between us. We may not even know the person towards
whom our resentment is directed. To Hawley’s observation, I add the related
observation that we can trust a person and resent them without the two being in any way
connected. Perhaps we resent our badminton partner, who is also our trusted dear old
friend, just because she keeps beating us at badminton. On the two-place account
presented here, any single part of trust and trustworthiness – an attitude of resentment, a
feeling of betrayal, a belief in the trustworthiness of the trustee, a sense of security – can
exist in any relationship without it necessarily constituting a case of trust and
trustworthiness. Trust and trustworthiness are made up of a constellation of elements,
which are not fixed. We can experience elements of trust towards entities and the
unknown individuals within them, just as we can experience elements of love towards
them. We might grieve the break-up of our favourite band or resent the ‘actions’ of our
educational institution. We might feel secure with our current bank or believe our
customers to be loyal. Yet such entities and the unknown individuals within them will
still usually fall short of being the proper objects of trust, since the experiences they
have of us and create in us are still importantly dissimilar and usually inferior to those
we have of and create in one another in our close reciprocal interpersonal relationships.
At the end of the day, having a friend is different from ‘being a friend’ of The National
Parks Foundation. Hawley herself concludes that:
I.3 The Object of Trust 81
whatever our terminology, if the trustworthiness–reliability distinction lacks merit in the
group case—or, in other terms, if there is a type of trustworthiness which individuals but
not groups can exemplify—then this is of significance to wider debates. Even in the
individual case, many public concerns about ‘trustworthiness’ are really about reliability,
but they are pressing concerns nonetheless... many public concerns about trust and groups
are in fact best construed as (genuine, pressing) concerns about trusting individuals in a
group context. (2017: 247)
The issues discussed under the banner of ‘trust’ in international relations, sociology,
economics, law and so on are extremely important. They are no less important for being
about relations that are strategic, mutually beneficial, or self-interested, rather than
trusting. If we are to address these concerns adequately though, then we must frame
them adequately. If something is not an issue of trust but an issue of reliance or is not an
issue of ‘trust in groups’ but an issue of trusting individuals within a group, then we
need to say so – explicitly. Friendships and family relationships work in different ways
from coalitions and alliances; they produce different effects and have different causes.
We cannot use the same concept to explain both the micro and the macro of human
interaction.
This subsection has not as yet made any claims as to what the proper objects of trust
are, and, as promised, it will not do so. Instead, I will leave this discussion with a story
of trust which did fail to target a proper object of trust, in the hope that it leaves the
reader with some sense of my position on this issue:
My daughter’s first love – at three years old – was a tiny plastic styracosaurus. When this
miniscule dinosaur (like a triceratops but with only one frontal horn) went missing for a day
once causing immeasurable distress, and then turned up inexplicably in plain sight on the
bathroom floor, she experienced all the characteristic signs of broken trust. Initially
concerned for his safety, when Styro was found she felt deeply betrayed by the nature of his
cavalier reappearance. Her beliefs about him, about what sort of dinosaur he was, were
shattered. This was no accident – Styro had gone missing on purpose, just to hurt her. She
had stern words with him and sought revenge by refusing to give him his usual place
(clutched tightly in her small left hand even when sleeping) for some days. After a while,
when she was satisfied that he understood his transgression and was sufficiently repentant,
I.3 The Object of Trust 82
she began to forgive him, though she never quite forgot the sting of that occasion. For the
rest of their time together, if she ever grabbed Styro wrong and he spiked her with his one-
horn, or if he again went missing, she would bring up and rehash with him his previous
wrongdoing, as though the background of that incident somehow informed his current
motivations. Their history together provided a continuing struggle for her throughout their
time together, and, in it, because of it, she grew reflective, morally aware, and found some
emotional maturity.
I did then, and do now, find nothing wrong with taking this to be an example of trust.
Misplaced trust, but trust, nonetheless. And I do not agree with the assessment that my
daughter’s trust in her cherished styracosaurus was irrational – her trust was not
epistemically problematic, rather, her belief that Styro could respond to it was.
Moreover, this was a case of misplaced trust, not because Styro was not a person, nor of
course because he was untrustworthy. He could also never do long-division, but that did
not indicate that he had dyscalculia. It was misplaced trust because Styro was not
capable of being worthy of trust, even under all the transformative power of her sincere
and earnest trust (and it was, indeed, sincere and earnest). The proper object of trust is
that which can be worthy of it, that which can respond to it, be transformed by it,
experience it. What this requires in a two-place account is not ‘doing what is expected’,
‘providing accurate testimony’, or ‘proving reliable’. Trustworthiness is equally as
complex an experience to the trustee as trust is to the truster. Dear Styro, though he
manifestly created complex trust, just did not have what it takes to experience it.
To summarise, this subsection first revealed that the issue of the proper object of
trust has been conceived of as an issue of personhood, and then demonstrated how a
philosopher’s stance on this issue will be informed by their underlying understanding of
the nature of trust. Acknowledging that some non-trusting relations can produce some
elements of trust, this subsection argued that this does not require us to concede that
such relations are trusting. Even when they share some similarities, there is a difference
between our strategic and self-interested relationships, and our trusting relationships.
The proper object of trust and trustworthiness, this subsection proposed, is anything that
can both have and create in others the experiences of trust and trustworthiness. I have
remained silent on whether any non-persons can live up to this requirement as this is an
I.3 The Object of Trust 83
empirical question far beyond my ability to assess, though I suspect that most human
beings (including non-speaking and pre-verbal human beings) and some border collies
would make the grade, and all political establishments and plastic styracosauri would
not.
I.4 Trust 84
I.4 Trust
Trust is a two-place relation. It involves a truster and a trustee and not what is entrusted.
When we rely on someone because we trust them, thereby entrusting something to
them, that is not an example of trust but an example of trust causing reliance. But that it
is a ‘two-place relation involving a truster and trustee’, is not all that needs to be said
about trust. This section aims to flesh out the bare two-place schematic, thereby
providing further reasons to accept it; it does not provide any formulae, strict
definitions, or necessary and sufficient conditions for trust.
Instead I shall proceed in my efforts to capture trust by first, in I.4.1, making use of
an exchange between three characters in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch, which is
rich in its exploration of trust specifically and human relationships in general, and then,
in I.4.2, by highlighting the similarities between trust and love. What we are left with at
the end of subsections I.4.1 and I.4.2 is hopefully an impression of trust not as a
behaviour, nor a behaviour coupled with, or caused by, any single thing, whether
attitude or emotion, reliance or belief. Rather, trust has a complex, manifold, and
variable nature, that takes its shape in reflection of a specific other– the trustee. This
section then moves on to consider some of the outcomes of shifting from a three-place
view of trust that is rooted in the truster’s immediate behaviour with regard to a specific
act of reliance, to a two-place view, which takes trust to be something complex that
arises in the trusters experience of the trustee over time. The aim here is to clarify some
consequences of this shift and anticipate and address some objections that may be
raised. To that end, I have chosen to focus on the issues that were of particular concern
for three-place trust, as laid out in I.1. Subsection I.4.3 revisits the issue of the way the
word ‘trust’ functions in the English language. Subsection I.4.4 discusses in more detail
how trust can be compatible with monitoring the trustee. Subsection I.4.5, discusses
what happens to the notion of self-trust on an account of trust as a complex private
experience, and subsection I.4.6 comments on what this shift means for the question of
the voluntariness of trust.
I.4 Trust 85
I.4.1 Middlemarch
When looking to give an account of trust in human relationships, rather than just
looking to how the word ‘trust’ is used by speakers of just a single language, it is quite
right to look to literature that takes human relationships as its subject matter. The novel
Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial life by George Eliot (1871-2) is considered one of
the greatest works of fiction in English, though interestingly it is also regarded as a
work of realism in its study of human relationships. Victoria McGeer first used the
excerpt from Middlemarch that I shall be using in a discussion of trust in 2008. In that
paper, ‘Trust, Hope and Empowerment’, McGeer identified the important connection
between trust and hope. I use the same excerpt as she, as I believe there is much more in
it that has been missed.
McGeer’s significant insight is valuable, though I do not strictly agree with her
conclusion that trust is made rational by being underwritten by hope, for reasons that
should by now be apparent. Adopting an underlying ‘three-place trust plus’ logic,
McGeer intentionally runs the public acts that trusting produces (reliance, acceptance of
testimony), and the private experience of trusting a person together, clarifying that she
takes the capacity to trust to mean both:
the capacity to cultivate an appropriate set of attitudes and a capacity to act in ways
commensurate with those attitudes. Hence, when I speak of trust, I mean the capacity to
operate, both mentally and materially, in hopeful or trustful ways (2008: 237)
Our works thus differ in that she takes trust to be three-place, and I take it to be two-
place; this dissertation explicitly does not take the “capacity to operate materially” as
trust, but rather this is the capacity to act on, or act in accordance with out trust (see
I.3). Moreover, our underlying motivations are different, as McGeer aims to
demonstrate how trust can be rational, and this dissertation has argued that trust requires
no rational justification. Trust is not something that makes us rational by being
underwritten by hope as McGeer says; instead rationality is a part of trust, something
employed in the service of trusting well.
McGeer brings us up to speed on the relevant relationships in the novel so well, that
I shall paraphrase her synopsis in what follows, then quote the exact same passage. The
I.4 Trust 86
passage in Middlemarch involves a conversation that takes place between three
characters: Dorothea Casaubon, Camden Farebrother, and Sir James Chettam, as they
discuss a fourth character, a young doctor named Lydgate. Dorothea is an intelligent,
idealistic and enthusiastic young woman, who has befriended Lydgate, a talented, but
naïve young doctor who has fallen into debt and difficulty and is suspected in
Middlemarch of a scandal (though the evidence against him is circumstantial). The
scandal involves a dubious character, a man named Bulstrode. Farebrother is a poor but
clever vicar, generous in his feeling, and – like Dorothea – a friend to Lydgate. Sir
James is in love with Dorothea and has only her best interests at heart. The conversation
between Dorothea, Farebrother and Sir James is as follows:
[Dorothea says:] ‘Mr Lydgate would understand that if his friends hear a calumny about
him their first wish must be to justify. What do we live for, if it is not to make life less
difficult to each other? I cannot be indifferent to the troubles of a man who advised me in
my trouble, and attended me in my illness.’ . . . ‘But, Dorothea’, [Sir James] said,
remonstrantly, ‘you can’t undertake to manage a man’s life for him in that way. Lydgate
must know—at least he will soon come to know how he stands. If he can clear himself, he
will. He must act for himself.’ ‘I think his friends must wait till they find an opportunity’,
added Mr Farebrother. ‘It is possible—I have often felt so much weakness in myself that I
can conceive even a man of honourable disposition, such as I have always believed Lydgate
to be, succumbing to such a temptation as that of accepting money which was offered more
or less indirectly as a bribe to insure his silence about scandalous facts long gone by. I say, I
can conceive this, if he were under the pressure of hard circumstances—if he had been
harassed as I feel sure Lydgate has been. I would not believe anything worse of him except
under stringent proof. But there is the terrible Nemesis following on some errors, that it is
always possible for those who like it to interpret them into a crime: there is no proof in
favour of the man outside his own consciousness and assertion. ‘Oh, how cruel!’ said
Dorothea, clasping her hands. ‘And would you not like to be the one person who believed in
that man’s innocence, if the rest of the world belied him? Besides, there is a man’s character
beforehand to speak for him. ‘But, my dear Mrs Casaubon,’ said Mr Farebrother, smiling
gently at her ardour, ‘character is not cut in marble—it is not something solid and
unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies
do.’ ‘Then it may be rescued and healed’, said Dorothea. ‘I should not be afraid of asking
Mr Lydgate to tell me the truth, that I might help him. Why should I be afraid?... [I could]
I.4 Trust 87
ask for his confidence; and he would be able to tell me things that might make all the
circumstances clear. Then we would all stand by him and bring him out of his trouble.
People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their
nearest neighbours.’ . . . ‘It is true that a woman may venture on some efforts of sympathy
which would hardly succeed if we men undertook them’, said Mr Farebrother, almost
converted by Dorothea’s ardour. ‘Surely, a woman is bound to be cautious and listen to
those who know the world better than she does’, said Sir James, with his little frown.
‘Whatever you do in the end, Dorothea, you should really keep back at present, and not
volunteer any meddling with this Bulstrode business. We don’t know yet what may turn up.
You must agree with me?’ he ended, looking at Mr Farebrother. ‘I do think it would be
better to wait’, said the latter. (Eliot 1871-2: see 1994, Ch.72, 734–5)
If we can agree that Dorothea trusts Lydgate, while the other characters – Farebrother
and Sir James – do not, then we can make some good headway. Though the other
characters may not necessarily distrust Lydgate, it is fair to say that they have
something less than full, proper or robust trust. We are interested in the nature of trust,
so what exactly is it that Dorothea has that her interlocutors lack? Let us first start with
the familiar three-place analysis (A trusts B to do X) and see how far it gets us. Filling
the details from Middlemarch into a three-place construction, we get:
Dorothea trusts that Lydgate did not accept any bribe money from Mr. Bulstrode.
We also get:
Mr. Farebrother and Sir James do not trust that Lydgate did not accept any bribe money
from Mr. Bulstrode.
The idea that Dorothea’s trust, and Mr Farebrother and Sir James’ distrust, are all
epistemically grounded three-place cognitive assessments of Lydgate’s conduct with
regard to Bulstrode’s bribe, does at first seem plausible. She does say “and would you
not like to be the one person who believed in that man’s innocence, if the rest of the
world belied him?” suggesting that her trust may indeed involve a cognitive belief that
he has done as entrusted. Yet Dorothea’s trust does not seem to require the belief that he
did not accept Bulstrode’s bribe. If this were so, then maintaining her trust would
demand that she ignore the evidence against him, just as a number of epistemologists
I.4 Trust 88
have pointed out (see I.1.3). Indeed, what would we make of Dorothea’s trust if she had
said “I trust Lydgate not to have accepted Bulstrode’s bribe, though I believe he did
accept Bulstrode’s bribe”? The three-place analysis can make no sense of a person’s
trust remaining robust in the face of the belief that the trustee may not have done as
entrusted, and yet, this is exactly what happens. Dorothea does not ignore the evidence
– on the contrary, her trust compels her to seek it out. She goes on to say: “I should not
be afraid of asking Mr Lydgate to tell me the truth” so that this might “make all the
circumstances clear”. Meanwhile the other men, lacking trust, urge her to leave matters
alone. It is the distrusters in this scenario that recommend turning away from the
evidence. Dorothea is not approaching the situation with a kind of irrational blind faith
in Lydgate’s behaviour. Instead – ardent in her trust – she is clearly wide awake to the
possibilities regarding what he may, or may not, have done.
There is another way we could fit this situation into a three-place conception.
Perhaps Dorothea’s trust is not in any specifics about what Lydgate has done, but is
more general. Perhaps her trust is still three-place, but it is in his character:
Dorothea trusts Lydgate to have a trustworthy character.
She does say “there is a man’s character beforehand to speak for him”, suggesting that
something like this might be going on. The problem is that when Farebrother points out
to her that “character is something living and changing, and may become diseased as
our bodies do”, Dorothea does not reject this possibility as she would need to do, again,
if her trust was a three-place cognitive assessment of his character. Instead she
maintains that even if it were true that his character has become corrupted, it may still
be “rescued and healed”. It is not that she trusts Lydgate to have a trustworthy character,
rather that her trust means that that she is not prompted by the possibility that his
character has become “diseased” to think it is all hopeless and to give up on him.
important measures of her trust at this point in time. But alone they are not enough.
Farebrother also believes Lydgate is respectable, “a man of honourable disposition” he
calls him. Yet Farebrother is able to maintain a pessimism about Lydgate that Dorothea
cannot. He slides into despair, falling victim to the faulty reasoning – and it is faulty
reasoning – that the corruption of a person is hopeless. Locked in such pessimism,
I.4 Trust 89
Farebrother is not able to see, Dorothea must remind him, that people have the capacity
to change, to redeem themselves.
Dorothea, unlike Farebrother and Sir James, experiences an attitude of optimism, of
hope, towards Lydgate. And as McGeer rightly identifies, Dorothea’s capacity to hope
is an important part of her trust. Indeed, hope is what sustains our trust when the
evidence is irrefutably damning. Yet optimistic hope itself is built on other things. In
Dorothea’s case, her hope requires her memory. She is able to recall a man she once
knew, who “advised me in my trouble, and attended me in my illness” and this enables
her to imagine that he may be brought back to this self, no matter how far he may have
diverged from it. Imagination is thus also crucial: we cannot hope for a future that we
cannot first imagine.
So far, we have found that Dorothea’s trust consists of beliefs and attitudes,
imagination and memory. Yet it is fair to say that her trust is constituted by desires as
well. She desires firstly, to defend Lydgate. If she did not, then we might seriously
doubt her trust. And she desires to seek the truth, and then, to set things straight, or to
deal with his mistake however uncomfortable it may be. If he has become
untrustworthy, then she desires to redeem him. Dorothea, like all good trusters, is
strongly compelled by these desires: “what do we live for, if it is not to make life less
difficult to each other?” she catechises.
Yet although she desires to know the truth, this desire is not an emotionless cold
cognitive desire, the kind a detective charged with investigating Lydgate might have.
Dorothea’s desire to understand is driven by her emotions. She “cannot be indifferent”
as Sir James is. Moreover, her words belie her outrage, indignation, sadness, and
concern, and these can be added to our list of things that make up her trust. If she lacked
such emotions, then she would not experience Lydgate in the way that she does, and she
would not be compelled to act in his defence just as the other two men are not. Trusters
are emotionally responsive to their trustees. But there is no list of emotions that
constitute trust in general. What trusters experience emotionally will depend on the
circumstances. We can imagine Dorothea’s trust manifesting in experiences of relief,
joy, and a sense of gratification, were Lydgate to be exonerated.
I.4 Trust 90
What Dorothea does not experience is perhaps more telling. She is not uncaringly
confident. It is not composed certainty or assuredness– it is not blind faith that she has.
And she does not resent Lydgate nor feel betrayed by him. Though she wants to know
the truth, she is neither suspicious nor doubtful, and she is not pessimistic. Moreover,
although she may become entangled in his considerable difficulties, tarnishing her own
reputation as Sir James rightly points out, she is notably unconcerned with her own fate.
There is, in her trust, a certain selflessness, a generosity. In contrast, Sir James is
markedly ungenerous, being concerned only with how the matters affect him, or affect
other things that he cares about, such as Dorothea. Generosity, like so many of the
complexities of trust, is also part of what it is to trust, a part that Eliot draws attention to
when she says:
The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the
lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that
we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.
Being able to experience other people in the way that Dorothea experiences Lydgate,
with trust, is also not an accident of luck. Much of Middlemarch concentrates on how
Dorothea refuses, though many opportunities to do so present themselves, to sacrifice
her ideals and fall into cynicism and despondency regarding the people around her.
When she is confronted with a seemingly endless stream of moral and social failings,
cultivating her trust engages her reason. As we can see, she provides her interlocutors
with reasoned arguments as to why trust should be the preferred approach, even in the
face of so much disappointing humanity. But what enables her to take the stance that
she does towards Lydgate is not reason alone. The idea that Dorothea’s trust in Lydgate
is constituted by some simple three-place epistemically based trust that he did not do
what he is accused of doing, is exposed as grossly inadequate in the light of the
complexities of trust that are apparent in Eliot’s rich example. As is the idea that
Dorothea trusts Lydgate “over certain domains” with the implied exclusion of others.
And it is clear that she has not merely made a rational assessment of his behaviour,
character, or of his particular “commitments and competencies” in the way a disengaged
bystander might be able to do. Dorothea’s trust in Lydgate is not a three-place relation
I.4 Trust 91
at all. It is not the case that she trusts him to do or even to be anything. What’s more, it
is not possible to capture Dorothea’s trust by tagging on to a three-place analysis any
one single thing, such as an expectation of performance, goodwill, hope, or belief in his
trustworthiness.
Rather than interpreting the ongoing disagreements about trust as revealing that
there are in fact ‘multiple kinds’ of trust, instead, I propose, it reveals that trust is
multifarious in its inherent nature. Many phenomena that have been identified by
philosophers before as being connected to trust are vibrantly present in Eliot’s example.
But it is only by recognising the complexity of Dorothea’s experience that we might
hope to account for her trust. Her ‘act of trust’ towards Lydgate is not rooted in – and so
cannot be explained by – any single belief or attitude, nor any single emotion.
Moreover, different phenomena will be in play and in different measures in different
cases of trust: sometimes a steadfast belief in the trustworthiness of the trustee will be
the most salient element; at other times, it may be the desire to defend them, or rely on
them, or give them the benefit of the doubt. Occasionally our memories of the trustee
will be what really matters, or our ability to reason that – however things look – they are
still deserving of our trust.
Domenicucci and Holton have come somewhat close to this assessment, in the
context of their doubts that any of the things that have been identified as being parts of
trust – a readiness to feel betrayal, belief that the trustee is trustworthy, tendency to give
the benefit of the doubt, readiness to testify to others, readiness to rely, hopeful or
optimistic view of the trustee etc. – are strictly necessary for trust (2017: 154). Where
my account diverges from theirs can be gleaned from their discussion of the extent of
trust (2017: 155-56). In that discussion, they ask how trust can be two-place when it is
the case that our trust can be different in different spheres, i.e. we trust our partner
except where alcohol is concerned or trust our plumber to fix the hot water system while
not trusting them with our bank details, etc. The relevant passage is here:
the first thing to say is that the two cases we have given are rather different. The first
involves a general attitude of two-place trust, with a qualification: the trust gives out when
alcohol is involved. Such qualified trust is straightforwardly handled on the two-place
approach. The two-place attitude is still fundamental. One arrives at the qualified attitude by
I.4 Trust 92
starting with it and knocking something off. Other cases involve a similar pattern, motivated
by a welter of considerations about competence and motivation: ‘I don’t trust her when it
comes to dogs’; ‘I don’t trust him once his relatives are involved’ and so on. The case of the
plumber cannot be thought of in this way though. It is not as if one’s attitude to one’s
plumber is like one’s attitude to one’s partner, except qualified in various ways... we don’t
start with lots of trust and then reduce; quite the reverse; we start with rather a little, and
then, perhaps if things go well, we add more. Nevertheless, we suggest that the two-place
model is more revelatory, even in the case of the plumber. We still trust them, first and
foremost, as a person; the variation comes from the fact that, given a typical relationship
with a plumber, what is required to trust them as a person is radically less than is required to
trust one’s partner. (2017: 155-56)
Taking seriously the idea that one might trust ones’ partner except where alcohol is
concerned or trust one’s plumber only when it comes to fixing the hot water system,
relies on a three-place logic underlying this line of reasoning. What Domenicucci and
Holton call ‘two-place trust’, is really a universal three-place trust that is qualified: A
trusts B to do everything, except X, Y, Z etc. In the case of people that we do not know
very well such as plumbers and politicians, the three-place trust is just more qualified.
On my two-place account however, we no longer have any need to justify how it can be
the case that we typically trust people to do certain things while not trusting them to do
others, since when we move to a genuinely two-place view, not some hybrid two/three-
place version, then we reject the idea of ‘trusting people to do certain things’ altogether.
In summary, this subsection presented an excerpt from George Eliot’s novel
Middlemarch proposing that one character in that novel (Dorothea) trusted another
(Lydgate). By reviewing this brief exchange, we found Dorothea’s trust to be
constituted not by any single attitude, emotion, or belief, but by a number of things.
Dorothea’s trust was in Lydgate, as he was, as he had been, and as he might become.
I.4.2 Trust and love
This subsection provides further colour to a two-place view of trust by drawing on the
similarities between trust and love. Such similarities have been noticed before, and this
subsection begins by acknowledging as much. Then, I.4.2 presents a series of
interrelated observations about trust and love, in a relaxed format. This subsection does
I.4 Trust 93
not provide an account of trust or love as such. The aim here is to collect and so
demonstrate a few ways in which trust and love are importantly alike. While it is
outside the scope of this research project to delve deeply into the literature on love, I
would like to make specific note of a number of philosophical accounts of love that are
relevant to this discussion and may differ in subtle but important ways from my own
(Abramson and Leite ; Ben-Ze'ev 2001; Brogaard 2015; De Sousa 2015; Grau 2004,
2010; Kolodny 2003; Pismenny and Prinz 2017; Smuts 2013, 2014b, 2014a).
Both Becker (1996) and Lahno (2001) have previously mentioned the similarities
between trust and love, and more recently Domenicucci and Holton have compared
them as well, though they caution against drawing too close an analogy (2017: 152).
Interestingly, Brian Skyrms has provided a detailed analysis of empirical evidence that
is usually taken as providing reason to believe that trust has an evolutionary basis in
cooperation, to argue instead that it has an evolutionary basis in love (2008).
The most detailed philosophical comparison has come recently from Stephen
Darwall, who argues that trust and love are both “second-personal attitudes of the
heart”. He says:
Trust can be welcome in some ways and burdensome in others: a source of confidence and
encouragement on the one hand, and the yoke of expectation on the other. But personal
relationships are complicated in just these ways… When we trust someone, we implicitly
invite him to trust himself also. We regard him as trustworthy and bid him to see himself
this way too. Something analogous is true of love. To love someone is to see him as lovable
and to invite him to see himself this way as well. Someone’s not loving himself is
disturbing to those who love him not just because of its effects on his wellbeing, but
because it can make it difficult, if not impossible, for him to accept their love. (2017: 48)
Darwall identifies that trust and love are welcome and burdensome invitations, which
bid their objects to see themselves as they are seen; and that when those we love or trust
cannot see themselves as we see them, this can impede the very relation itself. Such
parallels, once we turn away from the idea that trust is an epistemically grounded three-
place relation similar to reliance or belief, are easy to come by. In what follows, I make
a number of further observations aimed at building a stronger sense of the likenesses
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between the two. I focus on trust and love’s complex two-place experiential nature, and
the way these features contribute to our sense of a shared humanity.
Trust and love may be good or bad, challenging or straightforward, joyful or
miserable, result in action that is moral or immoral, right or wrong, desired or detested,
or both, at different times, and even at the same time. This makes them complex
experiences. What ties instances of trust and instances of love together is the shared
understanding we gain from becoming experienced trusters, lovers. Trust and love
produce common lessons, common sympathies, hence they constitute important
contributors to our sense of a shared humanity. No matter how different we are, no
matter how differently our lives and relationships go, having experienced friendship
with one true trustworthy friend who is genuinely loved affects us all in similar ways,
provides us all similar opportunities for personal, social, and moral growth.
We are subject to countless complex experiences throughout the course of our lives.
Doing a PhD is a complex experience. Raising Irish wolf hounds is a complex
experience. Complex experiences are unique and private, in the sense that they belong
only to the person experiencing them. Yet complex experiences give rise to public
knowledge via their commonalities, and salient features. When PhD students get
together and speak of their PhD experiences, even if those experiences vary greatly
(good ones and bad ones, engineering ones and philosophy ones), there is shared
understanding, and this shared ground forms a particular kind of club. Many
undertakings require endurance, and are frustrating, and lonely, but not in the same way
as doing a PhD.
People who have shared any common complex experience (living for a time in
France, marrying into a difficult family) can relate to one another with understanding;
and because most of us have loved and trusted, trust and love come to play their
significant roles in our sense of a shared humanity. Unlike the PhD Club or the Irish
Wolf Hound Club, the trust and love clubs have highly inclusive membership. Through
language and cultural barriers, our understanding that the death of a loved one will be
grieved, that betrayal explains revenge, that forgiving does not entail forgetting, that
love and hate are contraries not contradictories, binds us all and allows us to share in
one another’s histories, stories, purposes, and practices.
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Our sense of a shared humanity does not just come from trust and love of course.
There are many private experiences that we all ‘share’– pain for example, or sunshine.
Yet unlike pain and sunshine (or puberty and existential angst), trust and love are two-
place experiences one person has of another. Trust and love take specific and
irreplaceable objects. By taking a unique object and so having in each instance a unique
form, trust and love are doubly unique. When we love, we experience the particular
beloved in a particular way, in a way that is different from how we usually experience
things of that sort, and different from how we experience anything else that we
trust/love. The objects taken by love and trust thus become special.
What I mean by special is this: we cannot undo the loss of a deceased child by
having another. We cannot replace the trust lost in a lost friend with the trust gained in
another. At most, new objects of trust/love can fill the void left by the ones who have
gone; but new loved ones, new trustees, will fill it in their own unique ways. Because
people are all different, because our history together will be different, each object will
be loved or trusted differently – not more or less necessarily, but differently. My
daughter inspires more devotion; my son, more joy; my daughter more considered
attention; my son, more playful attention. My trust of my mother is complex in ways my
trust of my partner never will be, yet my partner can betray in ways she cannot, and,
even so, my forgiveness of him comes more quickly. The whole complex character of
my trust or love for each of them responds to them and is shaped over years into its own
particular form. That is why we grieve the loss of love and trust so much: because their
objects are uniquely special, they are truly irreplaceable.
The uniqueness and specialness of each instance of love or trust means that we can
only ever produce broad themes and patterns in our representations of them, rather than
strict formulae, or conditions. Such broad themes have been so well-represented by
humanity, that they seem to become worthless platitudes– love dies slowly, love is
dangerous, love knows no bounds, love hurts, love changes everything, trust is precious,
trust starts and ends in truth, trusting is hard – knowing who to trust even harder, trust
takes years to build seconds to break and forever to repair. Yet these well-worn
platitudes, which tickle us when we first encounter them (that is why ten-year-olds
devote themselves to pop songs) contain powerful truths that strike us only when we
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come to actually live them ourselves. Like all complex experiences, we come to know
trust and love only via first-hand experience. No matter how many romantic or revenge
novels we read, such impractical knowledge is practically useless. Hence, each
generation makes the exact same mistakes in love and trust as the previous generation.
One understanding we gain about them as we experience love and trust is their
complexity. As a child I imagined love would be a new kind of emotion – a sort of
euphoric exhilaration, like the falling-out-of-myself excitement of going on holiday. It
was. But this was only one tiny part of it. With experience, I understood that love is
sometimes manifest in this feeling – especially when it is romantic – but love is not just
a feeling. Like trust, love is not just a desire for the beloved, or a belief in the loveliness
of the beloved, or a hope that the beloved will reciprocate the love, or an optimism that
everything will work out all right in the light of love, or a feeling of butterflies when the
beloved is near, or a disposition to become distressed if what is loved is in peril and
grieve if what is loved is lost. Love is all of these, and more, and sometimes it is none of
these. Sometimes love is all darkness and desperation (and not just in the bedroom).
Trust and love cannot be captured with general necessary and sufficient conditions
because only trusters and trustees, lovers and beloveds, get to say what is necessary and
sufficient for their trust or love. Each person’s trust or love comes with its own unique
set of conditions, and the conditions change depending on who is asking for it. There are
commonalities, but there is no set list of human betrayals. What counts as a betrayal
depends on you and me and our shared history. Some relationships survive infidelity,
others do not. Some love fortifies during periods of long illness, other love distorts or
fades. Some trustworthiness is rooted in honesty, some in benevolent lies. There are
patterns, hence there are platitudes, but no general conditions can be given which tell us
how love and trust will behave, what effects they will have, what will mend them or
break them. All this is entirely dependent on the individuals involved and the nature of
their unique relationship.
Embracing trust and love as complex two-place relations need not entail that trust
and love have no explanatory power. Far from it. The understanding we gain in our
experience with them is precisely what allows us to grasp the complexities and
inconsistencies of human behaviour, human relationships. We can watch foreign films
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and read translated novels, and, even if we do not fully understand the cultural practices
surrounding them, we have no trouble usually recognising who is in love, whose trust
has been betrayed, and so, why they may be elated, grieving, seeking revenge, etc.
Trust helps us to understand one another, on the level that we inhabit in our
everyday lives, in our everyday interactions with those we live with, care for, and need.
Trust and love cannot explain cooperation (in a general sense), economic systems, or
sweeping social or political movements, but they can help us to understand, for
example, why John moved out of Sarah’s apartment even though he had only just
moved in; why Lucy left us all (her dearest friends) to be with Vyacheslav in Siberia; or
why Aunty Jude yells at everybody over nothing every year on the anniversary of
Cousin Martin’s death. These are not things we understand well as small children, when
we are often left frightened and confused by the behaviour of adults as it relates to love
and trust.
Trust and love are also alike in that they both begin when we first encounter the
person who will go on to become someone we trust/love. We cherish our children’s
births and old friends and lovers reminisce over their first chance meetings because this
is where the story starts, no matter how long it takes for love and trust to blossom. We
can sometimes pinpoint a ‘moment’ when it became apparent to us that we loved or
trusted somebody, but this is to have a realisation of something that is already
happening. It is not really ‘the beginning’ as it were. Such realisations happen because
much is already happening in the background. George Eliot calls this sort of thing
being:
humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and
perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely
without it. (1871-2: Ch.35)
Because people grow and change, trust and love, which tie people together, never
stay long in their current forms. If they do, they can fracture. Iris Murdoch’s character,
the priest Brendan Craddock, says “people often start by falling in love, and they go on
for years and years without realising that the love must change into some other love
which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognised as love at all” (Murdoch 2010).
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The love we have at the beginning of a relationship is more like blind desire, the trust,
more like blind faith. As they develop, love and trust involve not a turning away, but a
turning toward the beloved or trustee, seeing them as they are, and holding our ground
in the face of their imperfections, limitations, and failures. As such, it could be said that
trust comes in degrees, with it tending to grow and deepen with the passage of time, or
break and wither as the result of certain events.
The strength of trust and love to hold their ground lies in their very complexity.
Emotions and beliefs, attitudes and virtues, these can be capricious things. But because
love and trust involve so many complex elements, when one element is challenged or
waning, we can use another to shore them up. If our belief that our trustee is not a liar is
overthrown, we can remember a time when they were bravely honest. If our optimism
that our beloved is worthy of our trust is challenged, we can reason that they deserve a
second chance. If we find we care less than we should, we can desire to care more, and
spark love anew with this new kind of desire. A belief or a feeling is not enough: it
takes many tools to craft the disappointments we throw at one another over the course
of any relationship into something that will last the decades.
Because of their complex natures, love and trust break in similar manners. It is said
that love dies slowly but trust breaks suddenly. Yet broken trust works more like a fatal
stab wound. The act of betrayal is sudden and fatal, but even so, the full death of trust is
slow. Some parts die abruptly, like the beliefs we had about our trustees that can change
in an instant, but other parts take longer to diminish, like the hope, the memories. And,
even beyond all hope, still, we may look – as Tim Hardin sang – to find a reason to
believe, our rational mind searching for a way back to one another even long after love
and trust are dead.
Because of the similar natures of trust and love, trusters and lovers also share a form
of vulnerability. Trusters and lovers are not vulnerable because they might have made a
mistake, being ‘wrong’ in their love and trust, but because trust and love can sour into
guilt, grief, bitterness, resentment, regret, paranoia, insecurity, self-doubt, and betrayal.
These experiences are not parts of love and trust’s contraries (distrust and indifference).
They are what trust and love can become if they are not properly regarded or not
properly tended to.
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What causes trust and love to sour into their curdled forms might be the behaviour
of the object of trust or love; an ‘untrustworthy trustee’. But it does not have to be. Trust
and love can sour following an ‘act of betrayal’ of course, but souring can also occur
because of something that has gone wrong with the truster/lover. The suspicion, doubt,
paranoia, bitterness, resentment, hatred, coldness, confusion or indifference that
constitute distrust or a lack of love can be induced by illness and disease, or a lack of
maintenance on the part of the truster or lover. It is not always the lover or trustee’s
fault that they are unloved, distrusted. When trust and love are understood as
experiences, rather than as acts, we can explain such unfair and unwarranted changes
without attributing any undeserved blame to those who should still be trusted, loved.
Trust and love are both two-place relations of a similar complexity and play a
similar role in our lives. They are both two-place relations because they are experiences
of something– the trustee, the beloved, the object of trust or love – and they are complex
because they involve a whole host of things occurring over some time. Love and trust
are best understood, not as kinds of feelings, beliefs, attitudes, actions, etc., but as
complex experiences of their particular irreplaceable objects. And since – though their
precise forms are always unique and special – trust and love are common experiences,
they play a valuable role in our sense of a shared humanity, helping us to understand
and relate to one another even across cultural or language barriers.
Indeed, language provides the final comparison – ‘trust’ functions in English quite a
lot like ‘love’. Developing an account of the nature of love by starting from the way the
word ‘love’ is used – I’d love it if you would go away and leave me alone to work in
peace! – would likely result in a very confused account. Philosophers on love tend not
to suggest that we must ‘expand the concept of love’ so that it has greater explanatory
power, covering requests for cups of tea – I’d love another cuppa… or false-
compliments – I love the way that dress hides your ankles… We are confident when it
comes to love that these uses of ‘love’ are wholly irrelevant to the analysis. This
dissertation has highlighted that the three-place analysis of trust reflects a common
construction in the English language (I.2.4). It is interesting that in English, love has its
own three-place equivalent: ‘I’d love you to get me another cup of tea’. Yet nobody is
proposing any three-place account of this ‘kind’ of love (A loves B to get T). As the
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Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy entry on love makes it clear right at the outset,
many common uses of the term ‘love’ form no part of the philosophical analysis of love
(Helm, 2017). When addressing the question what is love, philosophers have not
provided short reductive definitions, necessary and sufficient conditions, or logical
formulas, but lengthy and colourful essays, such as Harry Frankfurt’s The Reasons of
Love. ‘Trust’ and ‘love’ are common, convenient and co-opted words that do not pick
out any single phenomenon– trust you to do something like that… I trust you have
enjoyed your flight with Air New Zealand – these are Karen Jones’ examples (1996: 5) .
That doesn’t mean, however, that trust and love are not singular phenomena. We must,
when investigating trust, begin with the shared understanding we gain in our experience
as trusters, and not with that ‘beguiling devil’, language.
In summary, this subsection brought forth a number of interlinked parallels between
trust and love as contribution to this dissertation’s case that we should treat them in
similar manners in academic settings. In philosophy, we already treat love as a complex
inter-relational phenomenon that plays an important role in contributing to our sense of
a shared humanity. Given their intuitive and manifest similarities, we must treat trust in
a comparable way. The following four subsections of 1.5 raise and briefly discuss some
objections and upshots of this proposed pivot in thinking about trust.
I.4.3 Trust in language
Even if we accept that trust can be a two-place relation, the fact is we more commonly use
the word ‘trust’ in the three-place construction, and we do so in contexts that really do seem
to be about trust. Are you proposing we do away with the three-place construction?
This dissertation has argued that language is not a good starting point to argue for any
particular conception of trust. I add here, that it is also not a good starting point to argue
against any particular conception of trust either. Domenicucci and Holton have
proposed that because in English there is no three-place syntactic construction of
distrust, we should be cautious of the notion of three-place trust:
Strikingly… even in English there is no three-place syntactic construction of distrust. We do
not say that we distrust someone to do something. We simply distrust, or mistrust, a person.
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But if distrust is in some important way a contrary of trust, and so inherits the basic form of
trust, that suggests that trust itself is primarily an attitude to a person. (2017: 150)
This dissertation agrees with Domenicucci and Holton, and Katherine Hawley
(2014) that distrust is the contrary of trust, and so, as this dissertation has it, distrust is a
two-place relation: a complex way one person might come to regard or experience
another. Yet any argument that moves from a lack of any particular construction in any
particular language to the claim that the concept or the phenomenon itself does not exist
is suspect, as I have discussed already (I.2.2). Though it is unnatural to say so in
English, the idea of three-place distrusting someone ‘to do X’ – in the sense that we are
suspicious of their competence or motives with relation to some specific area – is not so
bizarre. The idea of a three-place form of distrust that is not absolute but rather causes a
failure to rely in some instances, is, I think, perfectly within our grasp– even if it is, in
the end, a kind of confusion. That the two-place construction of distrust is unnatural in
any given language is not an argument for two-place trust. To their credit, Domenicucci
and Holton do say that this observation is only suggestive, and, acknowledging that
linguistic considerations cannot suffice to make their point (2017: 151) they go on to
provide firmer arguments.
This dissertation, as it relates to the word ‘trust’, should not be read as a proposal
that we change language but as an argument that language is not a good starting point to
analyse trust (I.2.4). What has been argued, is that all those apparent three-place
‘examples of trust’ (leaving your diary open on your desk, lending your car to a friend)
obscure the important reality that trust and behaviour are distinct: we might have trusted
and not acted on it, or acted as though we trusted when really, we did not. When we
‘see’ an ‘act of trust’ (or an ‘act of love’) such as cooperative activity (or an affectionate
embrace), we are always making an inductive inference. It is a consequence of the shift
to a two-place understanding as I have presented it in the previous subsection (I.4.2),
that the only person whose trust (or love) we might have certainty of is our own, since
we are the only person undergoing the complex private experience. This understanding
clarifies how trust is risky: trust is risky not because we cannot be certain what the
trustee will do, but because we cannot be certain that our trustee is experiencing us the
way they would need to in order to be worthy of our trust.
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Karen Jones says:
acting as if you trusted and genuinely trusting could have the same result only on the
assumption that there is no perceptible difference between the behaviour that would be
produced from trust and the behaviour that would be produced from acting as though you
trusted [which she takes to be an implausible situation] (1996: 22)
Jones is likely correct that we can perceive a difference between trust and trust-
pretence, since we do get a sense sometimes that we are not trusted, not really.
However, taking ourselves to be trusted when really, we are not, is hardly an
implausible situation. People do discover (and are shocked to discover) that they are not
really trusted when they have been going along for some time perceiving (wrongly) that
they are. Such discoveries do not always occur via a sudden perception of the lack of
trust; a frank admission or a third-party disclosure is often what brings things to light.
Now and then there is no perceptible difference between trusting and behaving as
though we trust; we can be deceived not only about who is trustworthy, but also about
who is trusting. It is better to embrace a two-place account that locates trust in the
private complex ongoing experience the truster has of their trustee, and not in their
public behaviour, otherwise how do we make sense of those times in which we only
‘find out’ through admissions, that we are not trusted, or worse, not loved.
Making the shift to a two-place understanding of trust need not entail doing away
with the three-place construction in language or with the idea of three-place trust
altogether. What is prescribed is that we 1) understand three-place trust differently, and
2) take more care with language in certain settings. Regarding 1) – the alternative
picture of three-place trust that was presented in I.3.2 enables us to hold on to the idea
of trust qua act by shifting our understanding of three-place trust as a kind of trust, to
three-place trust as a kind of reliance. Examples of so-called three-place trust are
examples of reliance that has been affected, caused or influenced by trust and so
constitutes a special kind of ‘trusting-reliance’. Nothing really is lost, but more
precision and clarity has been gained. If someone says – for example – “the patient
trusted that the doctor prescribed the correct medication” we do not need to think this is
nonsense, or nothing to do with trust. We can simply interpret this as meaning that the
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patient believed the doctor to have prescribed the correct medication, because he trusted
her. Similarly, the statement: “I trust him as a father and not a doctor” doesn’t make
much sense on my two-place conception. What we are saying in such cases, is that we
have a trusting relationship with a person (our father), and yet, we would not rely on
him in some particular capacity (medical care). On two-place trust, trust can feature in
explanations of behaviour, and we can maintain the all-important distinction between
trust and behaviour.
Regarding 2: this dissertation is not proposing that we do away with any talk of
“trusting to do”. It rather argues that because the three-place trust construction can
capture two distinct things (trust and reliance), or a relationship between two distinct
things (trust causing reliance) or only one thing (just reliance) we must take care in
using it. Moreover, often the three-place construction is used in contexts that are not
even about trust or reliance. Take the following three-place sentence:
I don’t trust Chloe when it comes to dogs.
This may have several intended meanings:
1. Don’t let Chloe look after your dog! She is so irresponsible with animals.
2. Don’t let Chloe go to the dog show – she’ll come home with another puppy!
3. Chloe is terrified of dogs and behaves very irrationally around them.
4. Chloe is ignorant and misinformed about dogs.
Sentences containing the three-place trust construction have various functions: to warn,
threaten or manipulate, to justify, induce guilt or compliance, to reassure, comfort,
encourage or pressure. In saying “I don’t trust Chloe when it comes to dogs”, the
speaker may not share any background of trust with Chloe at all. What is more, even if
the speaker does trust Chloe, this may be no part of what is being communicated. When
we say to our teenager (whom we do in fact trust) “I am trusting you with the car”, use
of the word ‘trust’ may just be serving as a warning to drive safely, and when we say to
our partner (whom we do in fact trust) “I was trusting you to clean up the house and
you’re just sitting here playing Solitaire!” we may just mean to induce guilt. We can use
‘trust’ in a three-place construction when there is no trust to speak of. In such cases,
‘trust’ is just a synonym for ‘rely’. And, we can use ‘trust’ in a three-place construction
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in the context of a background of trust with the person we are referring to, and still not
actually mention trust. We can also use ‘trust’ in a three-place construction and not refer
to trust or reliance, but instead just mean to warn, induce guilt etc. When seen this way
we realise, though a relatively common word, just how little we talk about trust.
The suggestion put forward here, is that: 1) given that trust is not a three-place
relation and 2) given that the three-place construction may not mention trust, or 3) may
mention trust in an ambiguous manner, those discussing trust in some settings treat
three-way constructions with caution. In some instances, especially when there is a
pressing need to emphasise the role trust has played in the outcome (X), rephrasing
restrictive clause (that) three-place trust statements as non-restrictive clause (which)
statements can be a useful tool for English-speakers to keep these separate notions
apart, so that the reader understands the role of trust and its significance. For example, if
we think trust has played a significant role in the outcome, then instead of:
Parents trust that vaccines administered by their family general practitioners are safe, but
they are less trusting when it comes to vaccines administered by doctors at medical centres.
Researchers could write:
Parents trust their family general practitioners, which we suggest played a role in the higher
rate of compliance in these settings than in medical centre settings, where doctors and
patients have often never met before.
The first three-place restrictive-clause way of framing the situation (A trusts that…) is
less informative and more ambiguous. This may be what is intended. Trust may not be
the key factor, or we may not know whether or not it is. Perhaps the researchers who
found this discrepancy in compliance mean ‘trust’ synonymously with ‘believe’ and go
on to explain that parents have been led by a false-news reports to believe that medical
centres are stocked with inferior vaccines. Yet if it is suspected that trust was the key
factor, then the second non-restrictive clause two-place way of framing the situation (A
trusts B, which…) unambiguously points to trust, to the relationship, as the factor that
made all the difference.
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Trust and belief, trust and compliance, are separate issues, even though they can be
powerfully connected. If it is important, then being reminded with non-restrictive clause
language that links trust and reliance, rather than implying trust is reliance, may prompt
those reading (policymakers for example) to better interpretations. In this case, the non-
restrictive clause version would likely prompt the reader to reason that relationships are
important in some medical contexts. For instance, if we want to increase parental
compliance with the childhood vaccination schedule in medical centres, then creating
opportunities for better continuity of care in medical centres may prove more effective
than, say, our current policy of making sure they are heavily stocked with vaccine
information pamphlets. With the shift to two-place trust, those meaning to report on the
ways trust is shaping our behaviour, have a clear way to conceptualise and
communicate their point.
As a final example, imagine that you meet an elderly couple on a train. They appear
utterly harmless and friendly, and they invite you to stay at their home that evening.
You graciously accept, and the evening goes well. However, in the morning you awake
to find that your wallet has been stolen, and the elderly couple are nowhere to be found.
Immediately you jump to the (correct) conclusion that it is them who have stolen your
wallet: you have been tricked, hoodwinked, ripped off, robbed. What is your reaction?
Of course, individuals will differ, but I suggest that a likely reaction would involve a
prompt trip to the local police station to report the crime. Internally, you may
experience anger, annoyance at the inconvenience of it all, and perhaps some sense of
betrayal. You may feel less safe than you did before and be less likely to rely on other
strangers in the future. You may say out loud “I trusted those two!”, so, isn’t this a
straightforward case of broken trust? No doubt, it has some of the hallmarks.
Yet the distinction I am making can be seen if we think about what happens next. In
this example, your main concern isn’t to find out why your robbers stole from you, nor
to reform them. There is no complex reasoning to engage in to understand the events,
nor complex emotions to overcome. You have been robbed; it happens. Your only
concern is to report these two charlatans, so they may be caught. Your mind is on
getting your possession back, and perhaps preventing others from suffering the same
fate. In contrast, suppose that you are staying with your own dear brother for the night.
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Again, you awake to find your wallet has been stolen, and your brother is nowhere to be
found. What is your reaction then? In contrast to the elderly strangers, here, you are
unable to jump quickly to any conclusion. The first thing you feel is probably
confusion– could my own brother really have stolen from me? You may entertain the
thought– if we were robbed by a third party, did something bad happen to him? If it
becomes apparent somehow that it really was your own brother who did the deed, then
likely, you do not call the police at all. Instead of anger at this point, you feel concern–
why has he done it? Is he on drugs? Has he lost his job and felt too ashamed to tell me?
Indeed, your mind is not on getting your wallet back, but on locating your brother and
ensuring he is safe. Because a relationship of trust underpins this example, and does not
underpin the first example, your experiences of having your wallet stolen in these two
cases are wholly distinct.
Whatever our ways of speaking, one way we can get clear on whether or not a case
of reliance was underpinned by trust, is to see what happens when that reliance is let
down. Do we jump quickly to conclusions of guilt, or do we entertain other
possibilities? Do we immediately seek justice, or do we first and foremost seek
understanding? Do we allow our anger to guide our actions, or are our immediate angry
reactions quickly overcome by a deeper concern? Again, I am not drawing sharp
distinction with my examples. Individuals may indeed trust complete strangers they
meet on trains wholly and immediately, experiencing – if those strangers let them down
– all that they would experience if a close old friend or family member let them down in
the exact same way. Yet I think this is probably rare. At least in adults who have
cultivated mature and healthy trusting relationships, there will be a distinction, even if
we do not mark it adequately in the English language.
I.4.4 Trusting and monitoring
Traditionally, philosophers have worried that monitoring destroys trust. If I am monitoring
or “checking up” on you, then I do not really trust you. How can you say that trust is
compatible with such monitoring? Surely monitoring is the very stuff of distrust!
Good. This objection gets us to the heart of things. To refresh, thinking of trust as
incompatible with monitoring is what has led philosophers to think of The Problem of
I.4 Trust 107
Trust as a problem of epistemic and practical rationality, as discussed already in I.1.3.
In demonstration of the prevalence of this line of thinking, observe the following
remarks from prominent philosophers on trust:
substantial trust may be characterized by two related features: (1) it involves making or
maintaining judgements about others, or about what our behaviour should be towards them,
that go beyond what the evidence supports; and (2) it renounces the very process of
weighing whatever evidence there is in a cool, disengaged, and purportedly objective way.
The problem, then, is to explain how trust of this sort can be rational. (McGeer 2008: 240)
since trust inherently involves risk, any attempt to eliminate the risk through rational
reflection could eliminate the trust at the same time… trust tends to give us blinkered
vision: it makes us resistant to evidence that may contradict our optimism about the trustee.
(McLeod 2015, Section 2)
[trust] shields from view a whole range of interpretations about the motives of another and
restricts the inferences we will make about the likely actions of another. Trusting, thus
opens one up to harm because it gives rise to selective interpretation, which means that one
can be fooled, that the truth may lie, as it were, outside one’s gaze. (Jones 1996: 12)
I believe [that my friend] is innocent. I do not, however, come to believe she is innocent,
despite the evidence, by weighing and balancing present evidence against her past record….
What others regard as evidence against her isn’t considered by me as evidence at all. (Baker
1987: 3)
As this dissertation has shown (subsection I.2), philosophers on trust have been led by
their adoption of three-place trust to the conviction that good trusters overlook evidence,
selectively interpret evidence, go beyond the evidence, renounce the very process of
weighing the evidence objectively, and are resistant to evidence. According to the
dominant view, good trusters have blinkered vision, do not engage in rational reflection
and put themselves at risk both practically and epistemically.
Yet we saw in subsection I.4.1 with Dorothea that this is not an accurate
characterisation of trust. Good trusters do not need to have blinkered vision; indeed, it
was the distrusters in this example, Sir James and Farebrother, who turned away from
the evidence. These philosophers are describing a feature of wishful thinking, blind
I.4 Trust 108
faith. Faith goes “beyond what is ordinarily reasonable, in the sense that it involves
accepting what cannot be established as true through the proper exercise of our naturally
endowed human cognitive faculties” (Bishop 2016: Section 4). Trust though, requires
no such thing. Though much work has gone in to distinguishing trust and reliance, this
common way of understanding the relationship between trust and evidence shows that
philosophers need to start paying more attention to the distinction between trust and
faith.
When we make the shift to two-place trust, and so see clearly that trust is not a kind
of reliance but is instead a complex experience one person has of another, it becomes
easier to keep sight of the fact that it is not the monitoring per se that affects our status
as trusters, but the complex experience behind our monitoring. For instance, if the
truster is checking up on the trustee just to see how they are getting along, because they
have thought of some relevant information that might help the trustee succeed, or
because some new information has come to light that the task is far more difficult than
first thought, then they are not compromising their trust. So long as they continue to
experience the trustee as worthy, trusters can monitor their trustees, check up on them,
devise contingency plans, seek reassurance, or organise assistance for them. This kind
of ‘benevolent monitoring’ is important for maintaining our practical and epistemic
rationality – not to mention not dying when rock climbing – and it can be done without
affecting our trust.
If trust is a complex way in which we experience another person, then trust can only
be undermined by a significant change in that complex experience. I say significant,
because if we think about the people whom we trust the most, we may notice that these
relationships historically involve many little doubts, moments of resentment, moods of
insecurity, worries about unreliability, flashes of duplicity. Even the best trusters do not
maintain a perfectly serene optimism all the time, because even the best trustees are not
perfect. Struggling with such provocations when they arise is not at odds with trusting,
it is part of the experience of trusting. This is another way that trust is like love. False
love is like false trust in that it is blind to its object’s failures and limitations. We come
to know trust and love’s genuine forms by the way in which they, unlike their false
forms, somehow miraculously thrive in the face of grim truth. A significant change in
I.4 Trust 109
trust, like falling out of love, is a complex manifold experience; a deep hopelessness
and pessimism, persistent negative thoughts about the trustee, entrenched beliefs that
the trustee is compelled by ill-will or malice, strong feelings of betrayal and resentment,
gripping desires to end the relationship, and so on. As trust’s opposite, distrust is a
complex experience as well – it is a far more serious condition than a touch of cynicism.
Though it has been argued that trust is compatible with monitoring, this dissertation
is not proposing that monitoring never indicates distrust. Like the withdrawal of
affection that often accompanies fading love, it is quite a reliable sign. But just as
reliance does not constitute trust, monitoring does not constitute distrust. One way we
know this is because we can argue back and forth about it, all the while agreeing on the
facts. Adolescents complain “You never trust me, you’re always checking up on where I
am and what I’m doing!”. To this, the parent replies “I do trust you, it’s other people I
don’t trust, and I need to make sure you’re safe”. It may be that the adolescent thinks
the monitoring is occurring because they are not trusted, the parent knows it is because
others are not to be trusted. If monitoring constituted distrust – if behaviour was all
there was to it – then such disagreements would be puerile and easily settled by the
evidence. What we find though, is that such disagreements are not puerile, and they are
not easily settled by the evidence. In time honoured fashion, with the same evidence
planted firmly between them, adolescents and their parents argue back and forth for
years like this without getting anywhere, generation after generation. What settles such
arguments is not more evidence, but experience. Until we ourselves have been charged
with the responsibility of caring for someone who is not yet fully capable of caring for
themselves, we cannot appreciate this feature of trust; it is possible to trust someone and
need to know where they are and who they are with at all times.
One way to understand the confusion about trust and monitoring, trust and
rationality, comes from acknowledgment that trust involves a kind of optimism, coupled
with the misconception that optimism itself puts us into conflict with the facts. As
Michaelis Michael and Peter Caldwell (2004) argued convincingly in “The
Consolations of Optimism”, optimism is an attitude, not a set of beliefs. Being
optimistic is not a matter of how one takes reality to be; optimists and pessimists do not
disagree on the facts:
I.4 Trust 110
The wishful thinker really does think that things are other than they are. Wishful thinking is
by its very nature not a rational cognitive strategy, whereas optimism involves no such
irrationality. Wishful thinking is a belief-like attitude, and it can lead at least temporarily to
a kind of cheerfulness. But it can also be said that it is irrational since it involves founding
beliefs on inadequate evidence and ignoring contrary evidence. Only the optimist is happy
while seeing things as they really are. (Michael and Caldwell 2004)
In the context of the current discussion, we could say that distrust involves an attitude of
pessimism, trust involves an attitude of optimism, and truster and distruster do not
necessarily disagree on the facts about their trustees. Trusters can monitor their trustees,
review evidence objectively; the optimism component of trust does not give us
‘blinkered vision’. In my experience at least, the pessimism that has led to my own
failures at giving people the benefit of the doubt has more often put me in conflict with
truth than my optimism has. I suspect this is not because more people are good than bad
and so optimism is the best ‘stab in the dark’ strategy. Instead, I agree with those who
have pointed out that people are usually both good and bad, but that treating them as
though they are good gives them more reason, more opportunities to be so. I discuss this
more in II.4.4, but for now I will say that trust and trustworthiness are features not of
moments, but of relationships. How others respond to our momentary failures of
trustworthiness can determine what happens to it next. That is why Bishop Myriel of
Digne is the real hero of Lés Misérables.
I.4.5 Self-trust
If trust is a complex private experience, then what of the notion of self-trust? Can we
have a complex private experience of ourselves?
Self-trust, as it is currently conceived of in philosophy, is a cognitive notion that has
been put forward as playing a significant role in our practical and epistemic rationality.
For example, Keith Lehrer (1997) talks about how assessing the truth of our beliefs
necessitates that we be able to ‘trust ourselves’ to do this work; Richard Foley (2005)
argues that knowledge requires self-trust; and Trudy Govier (1993) and Carolyn
McLeod (2002) argue that agency requires self-trust, since we cannot act autonomously
unless we trust ourselves in this regard.
I.4 Trust 111
In this dissertation I have not made any argument against the claims that: 1) to plan
effectively, it helps if one believes one’s own beliefs; and, 2) to make sound decisions,
one must rely on one’s own reasoning. Indeed, we might start to question a person’s
agency when they fail in these regards. What I have done, is argue that the situation
described by these philosophers is not one in which trust plays any vital – let alone
necessary – role. When Richard Foley talks about the necessity of trust as a “leap of
intellectual faith” (2005: 18) and “the need for which cannot be eliminated by further
inquiry” (2005: 20) for example, I understand him to mean that to have knowledge we
need to be able to rely on our own belief-forming mechanisms. This is in line with his
comment that “living a normal life requires trusting that one’s opinions are generally
correct, and the faculties and practices that give rise to them generally reliable” (2005:
3). What is ubiquitous in our intellectual and practical lives is that we might be wrong,
might have made a mistake. This situation calls for us to press on in the face of
uncertainty, but it does not necessitate trust. As Part I has shown, many other things can
play this role. We often press on in the face of uncertainty in the absence of trust,
instead spurred on by hope, faith, acceptance, coercion, or any number of other reasons
and compulsions.
Trust does not ubiquitously manifest in every instance of decision, belief, and
action, but manifests only in our close interpersonal relationships. Trust is not there
every time we sit on a chair and expect it not to collapse, believe our colleague’s
scientific findings, act according to our prior reasoning, follow a stranger’s directions,
or hand our teenager the car keys. On two-place trust, we reframe the important
epistemic concerns that Lehrer, Govier, Foley and others are getting at as follows: when
I believe that my belief is true, I have a second-order belief, not a trust in my belief,
and, when I use my prior reasoning to make a decision, I rely on my prior reasoning, I
do not trust my prior reasoning.
If the two-place picture is correct, and trust is a complex experience we have of the
trustee, then self-trust is the ability to experience oneself as trustworthy: to experience
oneself in the way one would experience another person that one trusted, with all the
history and complexity that this involves. It is beyond the scope of this dissertation to
address this proposal in any detail, but we can talk a little about what two-place self-
I.4 Trust 112
trust may require. First, we would need to have a self, and then we would need to be
able to experience that self. This feels a little incoherent: do we have a second self that
experiences a first self? Along with Iris Murdoch and Galen Strawson, I struggle to find
even one self, let alone two. Perhaps just as other people gain a certain realism in our
experience of them, so we too gain a certain realism in our experience of ourselves.
Thought about this way, maybe self-trust just is what it is to ‘have’ a self.
If two-place self-trust can be made to be coherent, then a person with self-trust
would come to experience themselves the way that Dorothea experiences Lydgate: with
gratitude, imagination, hope, optimism, beliefs about trustworthiness, an absence of
doubt and suspicion, and a tendency to feel self-betrayal, self-resentment, self-
forgiveness, etc. I leave it up to the reader to examine their own experience and see if
they find any truth to these proposals.
If there is a problem in principle with two-place self-trust, then it is that there must
be a certain opacity to trust. This is a significant theme of Part II so I shall not go into
too much detail here. For now, I will say that although some knowledge is not
incompatible with trust, trust requires us to experience the trustee in a way that might
not reflect reality. Hope, imagination, or giving the benefit of the doubt, are parts of
trust that require us not to have full knowledge – extending both backward and forward
in time – of the object of our trust. Omniscient beings cannot trust. This does introduce
a potential incoherency – in order for two-place self-trust to be possible, it must be
possible that we sometimes do not know what we think, what we want, why we are
doing what we are doing, who we may become in the future. If I examine my own
experience, this, at least, is a proposal I personally can get on board with, and, it
becomes even more salient with regard to two-place self-distrust, which is where I shall
finish this discussion.
On two-place trust, self-distrust does not manifest when our reasoning or memory
fails us. Self-distrust is not a failure to put thoughts together properly or forget what we
had previously decided (though these conditions may confound self-trust, even so, they
are problems of self-reliance, self-belief). Self-distrust is a far more complex
experience: it is when we come to doubt that we have our own best interests at heart,
suspect we might be out to harm ourselves, cannot maintain optimism about ourselves,
I.4 Trust 113
cannot relax in our own company, imagine no good future for ourselves, give up on
ourselves, and – in the most troubled case – desire to end our relationship with
ourselves. Such a complicated way of experiencing one’s self would be highly
distressing, highly destabilising, and does seem to describe very well the difficult-to-
manage experience of some individuals who we today describe as mentally ill or
addicted.
If self-distrust eludes us in mental illness or addiction, then, regaining it would be
part of any robust and enduring recovery. When looking at the factors which precipitate
and sustain recovery from severe mental illness, this is precisely what Davidson and
Strauss found. In their report, Sense of Self in Recovery from Severe Mental Illness,
Davidson and Strauss (1992) identify a “sense of self” as essential to recovery, which
they take to involve a number of things including: imagination, belief in the face of
counterevidence, the ability to experience one’s self in a way that might not reflect
reality (all the while keeping track of any evidence), an accurate “personal inventory” of
current capacities, an awareness of potential, and critically, hope. It is notable that their
account of a sense of self that gets shattered in mental illness and repaired in recovery is
strikingly close to my account of two-place self-trust.
Moreover, what they discovered when they looked at people who had been
hospitalised for severe mental illness and recovered, was that the process of recovery –
of regaining a sense of self (or self-trust) – is far from solitary. At critical points it is
either undermined or bolstered by others:
It is important to recognise the influence of others’ appraisals – whether spoken or
implicitly conveyed through actions and attitudes – on the [mentally ill] person’s own
process of taking stock of the self. A highly critical and over-involved family milieu can be
seen as interfering with the development of an active sense of self by fostering negative
appraisals and undermining a [mentally ill] person’s efforts... On the other hand, a
supportive social network can be seen as facilitating the development of a positive sense of
self by providing one with a sense of self-worth through belonging and nurturing self-
initiated action. (Davidson and Strauss 1992: 142-43)
I.4 Trust 114
In other words, the self-trust that is essential to recovery can be given us, and taken
from us, by other people. If we find ourselves deprived of such a trusting social
network, then we are doubly at risk. In such cases, the mechanisms we employ to
bootstrap trust in others may be useful at bootstrapping self-trust. Indeed, cognitive
behavioural therapy, which is essentially a matter of getting an individual to challenge
and change their negative beliefs so that a more complete attitudinal and effective
change might follow, is likely one such ‘bootstrapping mechanism’ already in
widespread clinical use (Westbrook et al. 2011). In light of the current discussion, some
other things we might try are if we find ourselves in such a predicament are: giving
ourselves the benefit of the doubt, foregoing judgement on ourselves, interpreting
evidence against ourselves in the most favourable light, looking harder within ourselves
for reasons to believe we are worthy of our own trust, and giving ourselves many
opportunities to prove to ourselves that we are.
That said, the prospects of successful self-bootstrapping of self-trust may be grim,
so long as one remains in the throes of the distressing disturbance itself. As such, to
underscore the importance of the interpersonal element even when it comes to self-trust,
I shall end by suggesting that to recover, in place of the agonising, time-consuming, and
expensive work of self-examination, it may be more advantageous to try to establish a
new, more favourable social network. This advice is in line with the significant outcome
of a large cross sectional survey into global patterns of mental health discrimination,
which found that “the main source of reported discrimination [of those diagnosed with a
mental illness] is from family members, which is also the source of the most reported
support” (Lasalvia et al. 2013: 59). In short, if you’ve got a good family, good; if not,
jump ship. The difference could be between recovery – i.e. recovering a sense of
self/self-trust – and continued psychological distress. As a recently recovered friend of
mine with a highly stigmatised diagnosis and a highly critical family said to me “from
now on, friends and lovers… forget the others!”
I.4.6 Deciding to trust
If trust is a complex experience, involving all manner of things, then how does two-
place trust answer the question about the voluntariness of trust?
I.4 Trust 115
The argument over the voluntariness of trust reveals best the underlying ontological
disagreements about trust. When trust is conceived of as an emotion or a belief in the
trustworthiness of the trustee, then we cannot decide to do it. When trust is conceived of
as an act of reliance or cooperation, then, we can. When trust is understood as a two-
place complex experience involving all sorts of phenomena, the answer – unsurprisingly
– is more complex. Complex experiences are the sorts of things which, by their nature,
contain both elements that are within our control and elements that are not. I can decide
to enrol as a PhD student, but I cannot decide whether or not I will get to graduate and
so wear the floppy hat. I can decide to holiday with Frank and Marsha, but I cannot
decide whether I will find their company exhilarating or nauseating. When we make the
shift from trust as an epistemic stance or leap one takes with regard to some specific
situation, to trust as an ongoing interpersonal tête-à-tête, then an imprecise answer to the
question of the voluntariness of trust is much better tolerated.
Again, it is beyond the scope of this dissertation to go into detail as to the various
imprecise ways in which trust is and is not voluntary in a two-place account. However,
a few details are intriguing. A truster who feels they experience too little trust might
resolve to rely on their trustee more or to take their word as true despite any
reservations they may have, thus providing their trustee with a chance to prove
themselves. This ‘fake it till you make it’ technique can be highly effective, and it does
involve a decision, as a number of philosophers have noticed (Holton 1994; Horsburgh
1960: 346; Jones 1996: 6; Nickel 2007: 317). Yet we must be clear about what is
happening here. When a person undertakes such a bootstrapping of their trust, they are
not ‘trusting though they do not trust in order to trust’ (for that hardly makes sense).
What they are doing is acting as though they trust in order to produce genuine trust.
Therapeutic trust, as it is called in the literature, is not trust.
Although to believe that the trustee is honest or reliable is not what it is to trust, such
a belief can certainly help get things going. Pretending to experience a person with trust
can sometimes produce trust, precisely because trust manifests in complexity. Once we
believe the trustee is reliable and honest, we may feel gratitude towards them, develop
an optimistic attitude towards them, then over time develop a desire to defend them and
to give them the benefit of the doubt, and eventually develop the potential to feel
I.4 Trust 116
betrayed by them, etc. Pretending is not all bad. It can have a cascading effect;
pretending is how all relationships get going. None of us trust at the outset. Instead we
follow social norms: we are credulous and polite, we rely, we cooperate, and we see
what comes of it.
In opposition to this, Victoria McGeer considers the example of the parents who
allow their teenager to borrow the family car to be an example of trust, even when it
involves:
no comfortable feelings of optimism or confidence but is instead characterised by explicitly
imposing on them [the teenager] certain normative expectations (McGeer 2008: 241)
She rejects the proposal that therapeutic trust is not really trust but merely acting as if
we trusted, arguing that it is trust because:
it is an attitude that both empowers us in our trust – making it possible for us to think and
act in trustful ways – and empowers them through our trust, by stimulating their agential
capacities to think and act in trustful ways (McGeer 2008: 242)
McGeer is right insofar as there is a sense in which part of experiencing trust is
experiencing the hopeful beginnings of trust, just as part of experiencing a PhD is
hoping you will be accepted into the programme. If you end up with trust, or with a
PhD, then the hopeful beginnings will end up being part of the story. But if things do
not work out and you cannot get that initial burst of hope to spur on all the other
complicated set of things that constitute trust, or a PhD, then you never trusted, or
completed a PhD. Dashed hopes are one thing, but broken trust is quite another. The
parents who have “no comfortable feelings of confidence or optimism” but are instead
merely “imposing normative constraints” on their child, do not trust their child.
Normative constraints can be imposed on all sorts of people– those we dislike, hate,
fear, and most commonly, on those we have only just met and have no specific feelings
about at all. Enemies and strangers are people we can believe, and choose to rely upon,
but we must not equate this ‘trusting behaviour’ with trust. Sometimes we accept a
person’s testimony because we believe it is true, and sometimes because that is the
polite thing to do, normatively speaking. At other times we accept a person’s testimony
I.4 Trust 117
because we trust them. The source and force of many outwardly indistinguishable
“trusting behaviours” vary in all sorts of philosophically intriguing ways.
We can certainly decide to try for trust, but we cannot guarantee we will experience
any. This is partly because of the complex nature of trust, but it is also partly because of
the reciprocal nature of trust. Some trustees make it easy for us to lean in and
experience greater trust, and others make it difficult. What is more, each one of our
trusting relationships affects the others: a bad sod can rot the whole lot. This goes the
other way as well; one good strong trusting relationship can act like the giant old tree
that creates a canopy of shade to protect small seedings as they mature. A healthy deep-
rooted relationship of trust with even just one person generates in us the ability to
produce more. At risk of stretching the analogy too far: ancient giant trees, when they
fall, flatten and destroy everything below.
We need to talk more in philosophy about deciding to trust, but discussion should
not be around which experts should we trust, how do we decide which network to trust
in the current fake-news climate. These are important discussions, but they are not about
trust. We need to talk about the importance of making good decisions about who we let
into our personal private lives in the first place, before it even comes to trust. We need
to talk about the decision between trying to forgive and letting go. We need to talk
about how our actions impact on our trusting relationships. We need to talk about those
times when we need to decide between doing the right thing and doing what is best for
our trustee, doing the rational thing and doing what’s best for our trustee. These are not
moral questions or epistemological questions. They are questions about how best to get
along with one another.
I Summary of Part I, On Trust 118
Summary of Part I, On Trust
Part I began in Section I.1 by reviewing the current literature on trust, outlining the
major issues philosophers have seen in relation to trust, and establishing that they arise
because the dominant view in philosophy is that trust is a three-place relation. Sections
I.2 and I.3 then demonstrated that trust is not a three-place relation, which satisfied the
primary aim of this research project. In Section I.3, I put forward an alternative picture
of three-place trust: three-place trust is reliance-because-trust. When we rely on a
person because we trust them or take their word as part of the trust that we have in
them, these are kinds of reliance, not kinds of trust. This research project is able to
account for the way we commonly use the word ‘trust’ in the English language, and the
intuition that such usage does in fact on occasion mention trust. Section I.4 presented an
original discussion about trust that emphasised the private nature of trust as a complex
experience one person (the truster) has of another (the trustee)– the object of trust. Only
when we identify the object of trust as the trustee can we account for what is inimitable
and distinctive about trust, and so overcome the problems with the three-placed account
identified in Section I.2. This two-place shift in thinking about trust was able to
incorporate much of what philosophers have identified before as distinctive features of
trust, and so, unifies many important, and previously incompatible, insights about trust
under one account. Section I.4 addressed some outcomes of two-place trust as they
relate to the major points of division in the literature revealed in Section I.1.
When we think of trust as a two-place relation, an experience one person has of
another, it is much easier to maintain the conceptual separation between trust and any
other three-place relations. This has been a long-standing issue in the philosophy on
trust, with a great deal of effort spent on conceptual distinctions between trust and
reliance, trust and belief, and trust and cooperation. Acknowledging trust’s status as a
two-place relation also has benefits for our understanding of the rationality of trust,
which has been of considerable concern to philosophers as outlined in subsection I.1.3.
In any situation where there does happen to be a causal connection between trusting a
person and relying on that person, a two-place account allows us to keep sight of the
fact that there are actually two distinct and independent things going on that we should
I Summary of Part I, On Trust 119
be awake to: our practical or epistemic dependence on a person, and our trusting
relationship with that person. If I trust you, and am currently relying on you to do
something, then I should be awake to the practical and epistemic risks and benefits of
my reliance that pertain directly to your success or failure, as well as any evidence that
suggests how things might go in this regard, and I absolutely should update my beliefs
and actions in light of any new information I receive regarding your potential success or
potential failure. To not do so – to look the other way when relevant evidence is
presented – is irrational, as many have pointed out, and could be dangerous to both of
us. When trust is conceived of as a complex ongoing experience, trusters can monitor
their trustees in the moment without destroying trust. The tension between trust and
rationality thus dissolves.
120
On Trustworthiness
There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go
around believing they've got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to
what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies.
–Philip Roth (2000)
Given the dominance of three-place trust, it should not be surprising that, currently,
trustworthiness is most often conceived of as a three-place relation as well: as a matter
of the trustee doing what is entrusted (keeping a secret, looking after a possession,
returning a borrowed item etc.) for the truster. On the strong version of this view, a
person becomes trustworthy just when they have successfully done what they have been
entrusted to do. On a weaker version, a person is trustworthy prior to their successfully
doing what is entrusted, and even in some cases if they fail, so long as they remain both
competent and committed to doing what they have been entrusted to do.
Yet while three-place trustworthiness is again dominant, it is more common to find
one-place trustworthiness in the literature: trustworthiness as a stable virtue or character
trait, that takes no specific object. However, on close examination, most apparently one-
place accounts are in fact hybrid one/three-place, in that they take the personality of the
trustee and their actions into account when deciding a person’s worthiness of trust.
A small number of philosophers have recognised the major problem with three-
place trustworthiness. Acting in a ‘trustworthy manner’ is not sufficient, since one could
be merely pretending to be trustworthy, doing what one has been entrusted to do this
II Overview of Part II, On Trustworthiness 121
time in order to gain trust for what are ultimately underhanded reasons– the ‘Mr Fox
and Jemima Puddle-Duck’ effect. Just as in the literature on trust, the addition of
various motivating factors such as goodwill, selflessness, conscientiousness, or
benevolence, creating a corresponding ‘three-place trustworthiness plus’ is quite
common.
The primary aim of Part II of this research project is to argue against the various one
and three-place views of trustworthiness in favour once again of a two-place view, in
which trustworthiness, like trust, is a complex way of experiencing a particular
individual– the trustee. Trustworthiness is not an immutable feature of our personality
but a relational quality. It is not an action, and it is not an action guided by any single
motivation such as conscientiousness or loyalty. Trustworthiness does not exist until
there are at least two of us: we find it alongside trust (and love) in what two individuals
create in their complex, historical, reciprocal experiences of one another. The reason
this dissertation gives equal weight to establishing the two-place nature of
trustworthiness is because trust and trustworthiness are two elements of a single
phenomenon; not only do they share important similarities regarding their logical
structure and ontological commitments, they are responses to one another. An account
of the nature of trust is half-finished without an accompanying account of the nature of
trustworthiness.
Overview of Part II, On Trustworthiness
Part II has four substantial sections, three of which mirror those of Part I. The difference
is that while Part I focused more on the epistemological implications of three-place
trust, Part II focusses more on the ethical implications of one/three-place
trustworthiness. Section II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature reviews
the current philosophical literature on trustworthiness. The picture that emerges is again
one in which three-place accounts are dominant. Although in the case of
trustworthiness, various one-place conceptions are also commonly adopted. Section II.1
Dominant Views on Trustworthiness: Problems explores the limitations of one-place
trustworthiness and three-place trustworthiness. Section II.2 Rich Trustworthiness or
Poor Trustworthiness? addresses the considerable ethical implications of the influential
II Overview of Part II, On Trustworthiness 122
view of Karen Jones, who has written more on the nature of trustworthiness than any
other modern philosopher. Then, just as in I.3 Trust, Section II.3 Trustworthiness draws
again on an example from fiction to highlight some thought-provoking truths about
trustworthiness. This time, I use a lighter example: the Ricky Gervais film The
Invention of Lying to explore the philosophical consequences of a world in which
people cannot deceive one another.
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 123
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature
Just as in the literature on trust, there is currently no clear consensus among
philosophers about the nature of trustworthiness. That said, also as in the literature on
trust, most philosophers take trustworthiness to be a three-place relation; a matter of the
trustee doing what the truster has entrusted them to do:
Three-place trustworthiness: (B does what A entrusted B to do)
Yet a significant number of philosophers instead write as though trustworthiness were
one-place; an immutable personality trait, or a cultivatable character trait, that may or
may not be virtuous:
One-place trustworthiness: (B is trustworthy)
This dissertation understands trustworthiness to be a complex experience the truster has
of the trustee:
Two-place trustworthiness: (B is trustworthy to A)
While there is some preliminary movement towards two-place trust in the literature as
acknowledged in Section I.1, no equivalent move towards two-place trustworthiness is
evident in the current philosophical literature.
In contrast to the literature on trust, there is far less literature available on
trustworthiness, with very few philosophers examining the notion in any detail. Indeed,
a recently published collection of essays by philosophers working in this area, edited by
Paul Faulkner and Thomas Simpson, contains ‘trust’ in the title of twelve of fifteen
essays and yet only one that mentions trustworthiness in the title, i.e. “Trustworthy
Groups and Organisations” by Kathrine Hawley (2017). Of the hundreds of works cited
in this research project, only a handful contain any detailed discussion of the nature of
trustworthiness. Reflecting this, the Stanford Encyclopaedia contains an entry on trust
dating back to 2006; yet more than a decade later, it still does not contain an entry on
trustworthiness. Furthermore, each year a number of conferences and workshops on the
philosophy of trust take place at universities around the world, such as: the Trust &
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 124
Belief Workshop, Cambridge 2016; the conference ‘Trust’, at the University of
Manchester in 2014; the ACU Workshop on Trust, ACU 2017; and the Workshop and
Conference on Social Trust, BGSU 2018. Yet I was unable to find any during my
candidature (2014‒2019) devoted to the philosophy of trustworthiness. Philosophers
clearly find the notion of trust more stimulating. As demonstrated in Part I, this is likely
due to the tendency to view trust as posing problems for our epistemic and practical
rationality.
Given the lack of obvious literature, this section will begin in subsection II.1.1 by
demonstrating how the symmetrical nature of trust and trustworthiness means one can
‘find’ ideas about trustworthiness embedded in the trust literature, thus establishing the
very possibility of the current enterprise. Subsection II.1.2 presents literature that
appears, or claims to be, one-place. Subsection II.1.3 presents literature on three-place
trustworthiness. Subsection II.1.4 presents literature that aims to fix three-place
trustworthiness with the addition of various motivating factors, the ‘three-place
trustworthiness plus’ accounts. Subsection II.1.5 provides a summary of the
philosophical literature on trustworthiness.
II.1.1 Symmetricity of trust and trustworthiness
The project of reviewing the literature on trustworthiness when there is apparently so
little of it may appear futile. Yet Karen Jones suggests that we may succeed in
understanding any particular philosopher’s position on trustworthiness by “glimpsing
backward” from their stance on trust, thus making it possible to discover literature on
trustworthiness already embedded in the trust literature:
Philosophers have written a lot about trust, but we have been surprisingly silent about
trustworthiness. There are scattered remarks about it in discussions of trust, so the silence is
not complete, but the problem of understanding trust and trustworthiness has been pursued
largely from the trust side. Despite this comparative silence, we can discern what
philosophers must have been thinking about trustworthiness from what they have said about
trust, since accounts of trust typically contain reflections of an implicit account of
trustworthiness, glimpsed backward like writing viewed in a mirror. (2012: 61)
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 125
Elsewhere, Jones advises that reversing the focus of the approach may in fact prove
more fruitful:
Part of the point of switching to approach the problem of understanding trust and
trustworthiness from the trustworthiness end is that the normative role of these concepts
comes more clearly into view when approached from this direction. (2012: 61)
Jones would be right about the possibility of glimpsing trustworthiness from trust only
if it were true that most philosophers write as if they share important symmetries, a
prospect which Russell Hardin disagrees with. Hardin says that philosophers often
mistake trustworthiness for trust (1996: 28), and that trust and trustworthiness are not
reflective of one another, but rather, are deeply dissimilar:
… trust and trustworthiness are not analogous or symmetrical…, because one can be
disposed to trustworthiness without any risk… A relationship cannot make you worse off if
you are merely trustworthy in it. It can, however, make you substantially worse off if you
are trusting in it… (2002: 37)
On a two-place view of trust and trustworthiness as put forward here, Hardin’s
assessment of differing risk profiles is not correct (see I.3.5). There have always been
risks associated with trustworthiness, and these risks are no less significant than the
risks associated with trusting. Indeed, the risks are of a similar type. Namely,
pessimism, bitterness, resentment, insecurity, self-loathing, the loss of relationships,
etc., that can occur when, for example, trustworthy trustees are not afforded the trust
that they deserve. Moreover, even if there were differing risk profiles to trust and
trustworthiness, this alone cannot suffice to show that they are not symmetrical in other
important respects.
Either way, for the purposes of reviewing the literature, it does not matter whether
trust and trustworthiness are in fact symmetrical. Since most philosophers do adopt
mirroring accounts of trust and trustworthiness, it is possible to ‘glimpse’ many
philosophers’ stance on either trust or trustworthiness from their corresponding account,
as Jones says. In my own exploration of the literature, I found numerous instances of the
symmetry Jones refers to. For example, Nickel says that it is not possible for us to trust
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 126
a person to do something, if we think it is optional or supererogatory, and so, trusting
involves an obligation ascription to the trustee. Once we understand his position on
trust, it becomes clear that being trustworthy for Nickel is performing a task that we
have an obligation to perform, ascribed to us by the ‘act’ of trust (2007). Also, because
Baier provides the following formula for trust– (A trusts B with valued thing C), she
takes trustworthiness to be a matter of (B looking after valued thing C for A) (1986:
236). Similarly, Trudy Govier takes self-trust to be a necessary condition for both
autonomy and self-respect, and so self-trustworthiness on her account is necessary for
autonomy and self-respect as well. This becomes clear when she says, “to trust a friend
is to believe her motivations (toward oneself) emerge from affection, care, and concern
and not from dislike, ambition, or egoism” (1993: 104), and so the “motives of
trustworthiness” for Govier are – unsurprisingly – affection, care, and concern.
Explaining the symmetry in his view, Stephen Wright says:
My account of what it is to be trustworthy follows from what it is to trust someone because
when I accounted for trust, I was careful to distinguish it from examples of expectation or
reliance, arguing that trust had a higher value than either of these. My account of
trustworthiness also maintains the distinction between cases of trust and reliance,
distinguishing between being reliable or corresponding with expectations and being
trustworthy. The key link between my account of trust and my account of trustworthiness is
the trustee’s ability to freely choose whether or not to disregard the trust that has been
invested in them. (2010: 622)
Jones herself, though she has more recently expressed doubts about the symmetry of
trust and trustworthiness (2017: 103), takes trust to be a three-place relation and adopts
a corresponding three-place account of trustworthiness (see II.3). And, the two-place
version of trustworthiness presented in Part II mirrors that of trust presented in Part I.
Such symmetry, it is suggested here, reflects a widespread appreciation that trust, and
trustworthiness are partial concepts in need of their other halves.
Indeed, Hardin’s own Hobbesian accounts of trust and trustworthiness mirror one
another as well. Hardin says, “I trust you because I think it is in your interests to attend
to my interests in the relevant manner” (2002: 4), and so, predictably, trustworthiness
for him is a matter of attending to the trustee’s interests because it is in our interests to
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 127
do so. We know this because he argues that trustworthiness can be augmented or
diminished by things like institutional backing and formal contracts– things that help to
eliminate the risk of cooperation. Such assurances, he says, make us more rather than
less trustworthy (1996: 31-32). As Stephen Wright explains:
essentially, according to Hardin’s theory, as the opportunity for the trustee to act against the
trustor’s wishes decreases, the trustworthiness of the trustee increases. Hardin’s theory is
underpinned by a belief that if people are trustworthy then they will do what we want them
to. (2010: 621)
The symmetry that exists between the various accounts of trust and trustworthiness is
the product of the constraints of logic interacting with the ontological commitments – as
well as the question of interest – of each philosopher. If a philosopher is concerned with
an epistemological ‘problem of trust in testimony’ for example, then trustworthiness
will be a matter of speaking truthfully. If a philosopher is concerned with the ethical
problems introduced by trust, then trustworthiness will be seen as a moral imperative.
If, like Hardin, the philosopher sees the world as a nasty and brutish place where self-
interested actors play games with one another as they play out their own mercifully
short lives, then trust and trustworthiness will be calculated plays aimed at maximising
self-interest. This symmetry creates a convenient situation for anyone trying to
understand a philosopher’s stance on either trust or trustworthiness, but it also hints at
something more tangible; unless we are all totally wide of the mark, it is likely that this
prevalent symmetry in accounts of trust and trustworthiness does reflect some genuine
symmetry in the world.
II.1.2 One-place trustworthiness
Though a small number of philosophers endorse the idea that trust is an emotion, one-
place trust is not a common view to be found in the trust literature, as we saw in
subsection I.1.1. A few philosophers do acknowledge that there is a sense in which trust
can be one-place – being an inherently trusting person – though most tend to move
quickly past this sense to a three-place sense, taking the latter to be the philosophically
interesting notion: for example, Faulkner (2017). Discussion of one-place
trustworthiness, however, is much livelier. Still, identifying one-place views is not
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 128
straightforward. In the literature, one-place trust and trustworthiness are also sometimes
called ‘thick’ trust and trustworthiness, in contrast to ‘thin’ or three-place trust and
trustworthiness. Jones and McLeod have adopted these terms, but reference to ‘thick’
and ‘thin’ trust/worthiness is most prevalent in other disciplines, such as political and
social science. To make matters more confusing, there are other terms in play as well.
Eric Uslaner, for example, refers to this kind of one-place trust as ‘moralistic
(generalized) trust’ (2003). Following Holton and Faulkner, this dissertation uses the
terms one-place trust and one-place trustworthiness for two reasons. First, these terms
capture best the essential and most basic difference between the various views, and
second, unlike ‘thick’ and ‘thin’, they allow for a natural intermediate concept– two-
place trustworthiness, which is the one endorsed here.
As should be familiar from I.1.1, on one-place trust and trustworthiness there is no
object of trust and trustworthiness: no particular person or action that our
trustworthiness attaches to. Rather, trustworthiness is a property of an individual:
(B is trustworthy)
This bare construction leaves many questions unanswered: is trustworthiness an
emotion, character trait or virtue, good or bad, desirable or undesirable, stable or
momentary, etc. Philosophers adopting one-place accounts usually take trustworthiness
to be a virtue and so morally good, and also relatively stable. For example, Collin
O’Neil draws a distinction between moralised-trust and non-moralised trust, where
moralised-trust puts the trustee under a moral obligation to do what they have been
entrusted to do (2017: 70-88). He says that this kind of trust can make a moral
difference because it can “aggravate a prior wronging by making its consequences
worse for the truster, thus making the wronging more serious” (2017: 80). Both Jones
(2004) and Walker (2006) have also provided accounts of how trust can make us more
vulnerable to moral harm through failures of trustworthiness, though Jones has since
argued that the “norms of trust and trustworthiness” have the potential to sit uneasily
with moral norms. Jones now takes it to be the case that there is a distinct set of norms
for trust and trustworthiness, and these answer to the “pressing interest we have in their
being people whose agency we can directly recruit to enhance the effectiveness of our
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 129
own” (2017: 97). Few philosophers have argued explicitly, as Jones does, that
trustworthiness is not a moral notion, another recent exception coming from Edward
Hinchman, who says that the obligation at the heart of trustworthiness is rational, and
not moral (2017). Instead most philosophers either explicitly endorse or make
comments to suggest that they support what can be considered a ‘moralised version’ of
trustworthiness, including: Baier (1986)(1986), Cogley (2012), Frost-Arnold (2008),
Horsburgh (1960), Lagerspetz (1998), Løgstrup (1956), McLeod (2002), Pettit (1995),
Potter (2002), Nickel (2007), O’Neil (2012), Hardin (2002), and Rose and Mishler
(2011).
Yet even among philosophers who agree that trustworthiness is a moral notion,
accounts still differ considerably from one another in detail, making assessment of the
merits of one-place trustworthiness overall challenging. This is further complicated by
the fact that many philosophers take virtues in general to involve both character and
action. In terminology familiar to this dissertation, such accounts make trustworthiness
a sort of hybrid one/three place notion. For example, Nancy Potter thinks of
trustworthiness as an Aristotelian conception of virtue, defining a trustworthy person
both in terms of their actions and their inherent qualities, as:
one who can be counted on, as a matter of the sort of person he or she is, to take care of
those things that others entrust to one and (following the Doctrine of the Mean) whose ways
of caring are neither excessive nor deficient. (2002: 16)
“As a matter of the sort of person he or she is” suggests that Potter takes trustworthiness
to be one-place, yet “to take care of those things that others entrust to one” suggests a
three-place interpretation. Like Potter, many philosophers speak at times as though
trustworthiness were a matter of doing what we are entrusted to do, and at other times,
as though it were something more inherent and immutable. Some, like Philip Pettit, are
helpfully clear about their intention to adopt a hybrid account. Pettit explicitly
articulates that trustworthiness is “trust-reliableness”, which is being three-place
trustworthy, plus possession of the relevant one-place qualities, which he takes to be:
loyalty, virtue and prudence (1995: 208-12). More recently, Pettit, along with Victoria
McGeer, has provided yet another hybrid account, where trustworthiness is both a
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 130
“standing sensitivity” and a “situational sensitivity” (2017: 31). They describe
trustworthiness as a “standing sensitivity to reasons of trust that you (the trustee) bring
to the encounter” (2017: 26), though this is to be coupled with a situational sensitivity to
the presence of the truster that “enhances trustworthiness” and increases the likelihood
that we will do as the truster bids. Basically, their idea is that we may have some
underlying trustworthiness in us, but by manifestly relying on us the truster increases
both the dependability of our reliance as well as its durability: we are both more likely
to comply, and more likely to comply durably in the face of any disruptors:
How trust-responsive you are in dealing with me may be a function of many factors: my
nature, our relationship, and the company that we share with others, such as others who
serve as witnesses to my relying on you in a certain way. In short, it may be a function of
the context in which you operate as well as a function of your inherent character. It may be
a context dependent or ecological capacity, not a capacity that is fixed only by how you are
in yourself. (2017: 28)
Like McGeer and Pettit, Paul Faulkner also explicitly states that trust, (A trusts B to do
X), is a “metaphysically hybrid notion, in that it describes an action, that is done with a
certain attitude, which is best described as trustful” (2017: 119). Though Faulkner is
speaking here of trust, it is likely that he would endorse a corresponding view of
trustworthiness (see II.1.1).
Regrettably for our purposes, most others adopting a hybrid account do not do so
explicitly, and, given that we are already at a disadvantage in trying to glean a
philosopher’s stance on trustworthiness from their thoughts on trust, when it comes to
reviewing the merits of apparently one-place accounts of trustworthiness, it is not
always possible to say whether it is the trustworthiness itself that is supposed to be a
matter of a person’s actions, or the underlying qualities of a person that serve to
motivate those actions, or both. Potter’s idea that it is both fits with a common
understanding of virtues whereby possession of a virtue is not just some latent quality
‘in us’ but requires us to expect, value, desire, feel, act, and react in certain
characteristic ways (Hursthouse and Pettigrove 2016). Yet even if it is right that it is not
enough to feel and think like a trustworthy person unless we also act like one, a problem
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 131
arises when we try to say what happens to our trustworthiness if we are ‘trusted to do
something untrustworthy’. This possibility does not arise on a two-place account.
However, on a hybrid account it leads to the following impasse: the three-place element
seems to require that we do what we are trusted to do, but the virtue element seems to
require that we do the right thing, which may not be what we have been entrusted to do.
This is a problem that Karen Jones has considered. She has argued that, if we think
of trustworthiness as a virtue, then we must think of untrustworthiness as a vice, but
since it is conceivable that conflicts would occur where being trustworthy to one person
requires being untrustworthy to another, the virtue account seems to demand that we
exhibit a vice, and so cannot be correct (2012: 84). Stephen Wright makes the same
point (2010: 626). And relatedly, Carolyn McLeod, worries that virtue accounts are ill-
equipped to deal with the problem of unwanted trust, as since we can be trusted to
commit a crime or conceal a murderer, then surely it would not be virtuous to take care
of those things that others have entrusted to one (2015).
Essentially, Jones, Wright and McLeod are aligned in their contention that
‘trustworthy action’ sometimes requires us to act immorally in a way that destroys any
chance of maintaining our virtue, hence, trustworthiness cannot be virtuous. Notice,
though, that this problem appears only when we take it to be the case that actions are a
part of our trustworthiness – when we assume that trustworthiness is at least partly
three-place. This problem is not a problem for one-place trustworthiness but a problem
for hybrid accounts that remain ambiguous as to whether a person’s virtue is in them –
in some immutable sense – or in their actions. Not all those who embrace a virtue
account would agree that actions are a part of the assessment of virtue: for example,
(Kawall 2009; Watson 1990). As Hursthouse and Pettigrove note:
Whereas consequentialists will define virtues as traits that yield good consequences and
deontologists will define them as traits possessed by those who reliably fulfil their duties,
virtue ethicists will resist the attempt to define virtues in terms of some other concept that is
taken to be more fundamental. (2016)
If this assessment of virtue is correct then those who think doing what is entrusted is a
part of our trustworthiness – Nancy Potter, Phillip Pettit, and Paul Faulkner – may be
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 132
making consequentialist claims rather than virtue-theoretic claims. McLeod’s, Jones’s
and Wright’s criticisms will fail to undermine trustworthiness-as-virtue. This is because
we cannot be ‘entrusted’ to commit morally dubious acts as McLeod suggests, and we
cannot get into conflicts over whether our trustworthiness requires that we do A or B as
Jones and Wright suggest, since we cannot be entrusted to do anything at all.
Trustworthy-as-virtue, on such a conception of virtue, is what we are. What this would
mean – among other things – is that trusters lose any ability to determine our worthiness
of trust. We could go our whole lives failing to do what others have ‘wrongly entrusted’
us to do and still be trustworthy, in the same way that we could go our whole lives
failing to do what others wrongly think would be the courageous thing to do and still be
courageous. Yet one might be critical of this result. As H.J.N. Horsburgh nicely put it:
once one has decided to distrust someone in one respect that distrust tends to spread to other
aspects of one’s dealings with him and one’s attitude tends to settle into a rigid mould of
distrust. (1960: 351)
The point here being that trusters appear to have some ability to give and to strip a
person of their trustworthiness, in the sense that, if a trustee lets a truster down in a
significant way, perhaps they are not worthy of that particular truster’s trust, even if
they were acting virtuously. The best of friends isn’t always on the side of right; rather,
they are always on our side. If effective arguments are to be levelled against virtue
accounts of trustworthiness, then they must meet them on their terms. To do this, we
must first sort out precisely what is meant by the claim that trustworthiness is a virtue.
This is a difficult thing to do, given that there are several differing interpretations of
what virtues are, for example: eudaemonist, agent-based, exemplarist, target-centred,
and Platonic. Second, reviewing the literature on trustworthiness fails to give any clear
sense of whether trustworthiness is supposed to be a simple virtue in and of itself, or
whether it is supposed to be made up of several underlying virtues, and if so, then which
ones.
For example, Silvers and Francis (2005) – in contrast to Pettit’s loyalty, virtue and
prudence – identify the relevant characteristics as consistency, reliability and honesty,
while Paul Faulkner at one point identified sincerity and accuracy (of speakers) as
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 133
requirements for trustworthiness (2007a: 310); and trustworthy individuals, according to
Hardwig, are those who are truthful, competent, conscientious, and have adequate
epistemic self-assessment (1991: 700), while Becker identifies three key areas of
trustworthiness as: benevolence, conscientiousness, and reciprocity, or “meaning well,
playing by the rules, and playing fair”. Becker dismisses loyalty, honesty, courage and
temperance on the basis that they are not part of the core traits that are connected with
our ability to feel secure, and hence to trust (1996: 53). This disagreement is actually
quite telling; like the disagreements in the literature on trust, what it suggests is that
trustworthiness is complex, involving potentially many things, at different times.
Again, because we are usually working from an account of trust and not
trustworthiness, it can be hard to say in many instances whether the philosopher is
proposing that trustworthiness is a virtue in and of itself or whether it is some sort of
‘composite virtue’. This challenge aside, mention of things like honesty,
conscientiousness, loyalty, and prudence makes trustworthiness seem like a moral
concept, and thus the purview of ethicists. Yet some have argued that trustworthiness is
an epistemological or intellectual virtue. Intellectual virtues are characteristics that
promote intellectual flourishing, or which make for an excellent cognisor (Turri et al.
2017). When trustworthiness is understood as ‘saying what we mean, meaning what we
say, and doing what we say we will do’, as it is in the philosophical literature on
testimony (Adler 2013), it is easy to see how it might come to be considered necessary
for intellectual flourishing both in an individual and within an intellectual community,
as a number have claimed, see for example: Morton (2010), Stocker (2013), Kashdan
and Silvia (2009).
Understood as an intellectual virtue, trustworthiness facilitates the transfer of
knowledge, while as a moral virtue, trustworthiness facilitates moral action. Yet these
are two very different things, and they can put us into conflict with ourselves, and with
each other as we go about our practical lives. While they no doubt interact with one
another, it is doubtful whether any single concept – trustworthiness – could adequately
capture both the phenomenon of being a morally good person, and the phenomenon of
being a good knower. Especially seeing as sometimes doing the right thing requires us
to forgo knowledge, for example, if others are gossiping about a third party it may be
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 134
that we ought to walk away and not listen, even if by doing so we miss out on acquiring
information.
In reality, navigating the competing requirements of our intellectual and moral lives
is an ongoing and deeply intertwined process. In philosophy, the argument over who
gets custody of trust and trustworthiness in the philosophical divorce between
epistemology and ethics has led to some intriguing attempts at rapprochement. Paul
Faulkner has called trustworthiness an “ethical virtue” with “epistemic consequences”
(2014a: 204). This conception has led him to speak of the trustworthiness not of a
person, but of a “piece of testimony” (2014a: 191). Understood as a property of
language and not of persons, language itself becomes ethically virtuous: a rather odd
result.
In another attempt at unifying the apparent epistemological and ethical elements to
trustworthiness, Stephen Wright argues that trustworthiness is a “virtue of rationality”
that requires us to consider the value of the trust that has been placed in us in deciding
how to act:
here are what I take to be the necessary and sufficient conditions for ‘Q is trustworthy’ to be
true: 1. Q acknowledges the value of the trust that is invested in them. 2. Q uses this to help
rationally decide how to act. (2010: 622)
Wright shows concern that a trustee might do what they were entrusted to do but only
for selfish, hence potentially unethical, reasons– a situation he finds intolerable:
Because I have set up a characterisation that for Q to be trustworthy all that Q has to do is
appropriately value his truster’s trust in him and decide how to act accordingly, one possible
objection might be that if Q was such a selfish person that they recognised that P was
trusting them to do something that might not be in Q’s own interests but after weighing
everything up decided that they did not want to do as P asked them to then they could prove
themselves to be (under my account) trustworthy, but we would generally want to say that
in such a case Q has not demonstrated trustworthiness at all. (2010: 622)
The obvious solution is to simply stipulate that any action fails to be trustworthy if it is
motivated by selfishness. Yet Wright notices a problem with the obvious solution:
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 135
acting rationally sometimes requires acting selfishly. But if acting in a trustworthy
manner requires us not to be motivated by selfishness, then, at least in some situations,
it seems we cannot hope to be both trustworthy and rational.
Unhappy with this result, Wright proposes an alternative solution. He goes ahead
and precludes any selfish act from being trustworthy yet maintains that all trustworthy
acts are rational, by arguing that when we prioritise self-interest, we fail to acknowledge
the value of the trusting relationship:
I think that by prioritising his own selfish interest, Q has not fulfilled the requirement of
acknowledging the value of the trust placed in him, part of clause 1 of my account. The
reason for this is that I think that for him to be considering the value of the trusting
relationship appropriately (and therefore being trustworthy under my account) Q must
consider the trusting relationship appropriately in relation to other motivations. By arriving
at a conclusion that it seems that no rational person would end up at- that lazy self interest
would be more valuable than or should take priority over a trusting relationship, I think that
Q has set himself up for the charge of not considering the value of the trust properly. (2010:
623)
For Wright, the trustworthy thing and the rational thing are always one and the same
because trust is so valuable that it naturally trumps self-interest. Wright thus takes
himself to have established trustworthiness as a virtue by aligning it with rational action
(2010: 625). The problem this dissertation finds with Wright’s solution is that
selfishness is not an on/off thing. Many of the things we altruistically do for others have
benefits to self. Requiring trustworthy trustees to be wholly unselfish will likely
preclude us all; I provide argument for this claim in II.1.4.
To summarise, one-place trustworthiness is a view that says that our worthiness of
trust takes no object. It is not about actions, nor the consequences of those actions, nor
the people involved in those actions and what they may want from us. It is instead an
inherent characteristic of a person, often moralised. This subsection demonstrated that
most accounts that may at first appear to be one-place, such as those that take
trustworthiness to be an ethical or epistemological virtue, are not one-place at all, but
are in fact hybrid one/three-place views. Hybrid views take actions – doing what we
were entrusted to do – to be an essential factor in determining our trustworthiness. For
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 136
better or worse, hybrid views thus make the opinions, wishes, desires and expectations
of the truster, as well as the trustee’s ability to satisfy those desires and live up to those
expectations part of their trustworthiness. As they contain the three-place element,
hybrid views of trustworthiness face the same limitations as standard three-place
trustworthiness.
II.1.3 Three-place trustworthiness
When taken to include the ‘hybrid’ one/three-place views identified in the previous
subsection, three-place trustworthiness is the dominant view to be found in the
literature, in the sense that most philosophers speak, at least at times, as though
trustworthiness is a matter of the trustee doing what the truster has entrusted them to do.
At its most basic, whether or not character or motives are taken to be a part of
trustworthiness, three-place trustworthiness, like three-place trust, is the view that
trustworthiness involves these same three elements: a truster, a trustee, and that which is
entrusted.
On the strong version of three-place trustworthiness, the trustee must successfully do
what the truster has entrusted them to do. On the weaker version, the trustee is only
required to be competent and committed to doing what the truster has entrusted them to
do. The weaker version thus allows us to remain trustworthy in circumstances where we
are prevented from doing what we were entrusted to do through no fault of our own.
Importantly, both the strong and the weak versions of three-place trustworthiness makes
a specific act, entrusted to us by the truster, a part of our trustworthiness. The strong
version requires that we successfully execute that act, and the weak version requires just
that we have the relevant ability to execute it (competence), and intention to do so
(commitment). Which version – strong or weak – is preferred, tends to vary from
discipline to discipline. In philosophy, the strong version is less popular than the weak
version, but some still do adopt it, for example T. W. Simpson (2017) and Hinchman
(2017).
Outside of philosophy, the strong version is dominant. For example, trust and
trustworthiness are recognised as central concepts in science (Whyte and Crease 2010);
but more precisely, it is strong three-place trustworthiness that is adopted in relation to
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 137
science. When scientists and philosophers of science speak of the need for scientists to
be trustworthy, they tend to mean that it is essential that scientists successfully do what
they are entrusted to do, not just be competent and committed to doing it. What this
means in practice is contentious, and it is not necessary to go into details here, but in
short it involves adhering to certain standards of method and accuracy (for an overview
see Andersen and Hepburn (2016). As an example of how the concept of
trustworthiness takes on various roles in the philosophy of science literature, take the
following passage, which comes from a feminist perspective on epistemology, an
anthology entitled Engendering Rationalities:
The dependency of scientists on other scientists – of peers on peers within shared
institutional settings – while less obviously irrational needs to be called into question in the
light of what are widely acknowledged to be the problematic ways in which power and
privilege shape the workings of the practices meant to ensure trustworthiness. But there is
an additional and deeper problem than those involving the trustworthiness of scientists and
scientific practices. All along those who have been the authorised knowers have been, in
subtle and complex ways dependent on those whom they would not have acknowledged,
except, perhaps, in the most purely theoretical of terms as their peers; and those forms of
dependency have gone unacknowledged and unaccounted for in assessing the
trustworthiness of knowledge claims (Scheman 2001: 41).
As this passage demonstrates, problematically, there is an ambiguity in the way the
concept of trustworthiness is applied in the philosophy of science literature. Sometimes
trustworthiness is understood as a property of scientists – reliable testifiers, as in (Lang
and Hallman 2005), and at other times as a property of scientific knowledge – reliable
testimony, as in (Millstone and van Zwanenberg 2000). Whether trustworthiness is
taken to be a property of scientific knowledge or of scientific knowers, discourse to the
effect that science/scientists must ‘be trustworthy’ has become the norm since 1985,
when John Hardwig articulated the philosophical dilemma posed by large teams of
researchers. As the body of knowledge in science grows too large for any one person to
possess, the members of scientific community are not in a position to evaluate the
results of other members' work. This creates a situation in which the members must take
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 138
one another’s results ‘on trust’. The framing of this issue as an issue of trust and
trustworthiness is evident in Hardwig’s wording:
Modern knowers cannot be independent and self-reliant, not even in their own fields of
specialization. In most disciplines, those who do not trust cannot know; those who do not
trust cannot have the best evidence for their beliefs. In an important sense then, trust is often
epistemologically even more basic than empirical data or logical arguments: the data and
the arguments are available only through trust. (1991: 693)
“Those who cannot know; those who cannot trust.” For Hardwig, trust and
trustworthiness are clearly cognitive epistemological notions, and he places them at the
centre of knowledge. If ‘trustworthiness’ as he uses it is understood as reliability, then
there is no problem. However, because unlike trust, trustworthiness is often understood
to be a moral or social notion (see II.1.2 and II.1.4), Hardwig’s claim risks being
confused with a requirement that scientists be friendly with one another, or good moral
citizens. Yet Hardwig is saying something far less contentious: science cannot progress
unless scientists follow the scientific method, collaborate, and accept one another’s
results. Given Part I of this dissertation, we can see that the ‘trustworthiness of
scientists’, in Hardwig’s sense, is just the reliability of scientists at doing science.
Hardwig’s point is about evidence and how the sheer amount of it now available
outstrips any one person’s ability to absorb and assess it. It is not about scientists
becoming friends. It is not about scientists ‘doing what the good man would do’. It is
about scientists being reliable and cooperative and accepting one another’s testimony.
Hardwig’s use of the terms ‘trust’ and ‘trustworthiness’ to capture this situation has
had significant downstream effects. Today, his Epistemology of Mass Collaboration
problem is not the only one discussed as if it were a problem of trust and
trustworthiness. Other related problems, such as those to do with reproducibility and
replicability, testimony, peer disagreement, epistemic relativism, evidence, and
judgement aggregation, are currently framed as problems of trust and trustworthiness as
well even though they too are epistemological problems to do with knowledge. What’s
more, these important epistemological problems are discussed not only by philosophers
of science but also by philosophers of law such as Talbott and Goldman (1998) and
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 139
Laudan (2006); as well as by social epistemologists such as List and Pettit (2011),
Coady (1992), Gilbert (1989), and Goldman (2001, 2011). Examples of questions posed
in this arena include:
1) Can a layperson justifiably identify which (professed) expert to trust?
2) Is a speaker S trustworthy for hearer H only if H has positive evidence or
justification for the reliability of this particular speaker S?
As should be familiar from Part I, we can reframe these epistemic questions without
reference to trust and trustworthiness without any conceptual loss, thereby reserving the
concepts trust and trustworthiness for their vital roles in accounting for our experience
of one another in our close interpersonal relationships:
3) Can a layperson justifiably identify which expert to believe?
4) Is a speaker S reliable for hearer H only if H has positive evidence or justification
for the reliability of this particular speaker S?
These questions come into view as epistemological and not ethical or interpersonal,
when we consider that those working on solutions to them have tended to propose
epistemically-targeted solutions. Michael Blias for example, argued that trustworthiness
can be modelled as a strategy– the correct strategy for all members of a scientific
community (1987: 370). And Philip Kitcher has proposed a prescriptive decision
theoretic models as solutions to ‘trust problems’ (Kitcher 1993). Today, such decision
theoretic solutions are commonly applied to numerous areas of academic inquiry. Many
of those concerned about ‘trustworthiness’ as it relates to governments, financial
institutions, and trans-national corporations adopt a risk-assessment position on
trustworthiness, and so naturally adopt decision theoretic solutions, where self-interest
is presumed to be the norm (Coeckelbergh 2012; Govier 1997; Hardin 2002; Potter
2002; Taddeo and Floridi 2011; Townley and Garfield 2013).
Such epistemically-targeted solutions will not solve interpersonal issues of trust and
trustworthiness, and, they are not always adequate even in these domains. Torsten
Wilholt has argued that scientific inquiry – his argument would naturally extend to
legal, social, political and medical settings – engages ethical norms as well as epistemic
norms and a ‘deeper attitude of trust’ based on shared values is required for things to go
well (2013). Wilholt’s proposal echoes Nancy Daukas’ distinction between epistemic
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 140
trustworthiness, which is “a character trait that supervenes on a relation between first-
and second-order beliefs, including beliefs about others as epistemic agents” (2006:
109), and moral trustworthiness, which is one who is “benevolent, and they sincerely
believe what they say, say what they believe, and behave consistently with those
beliefs” (2006: 110). Though Wilholt addresses his concern to science and Daukas to
politics and society, the key point made by both is that strong three-place
trustworthiness is unsatisfactory, even as it is applied to these domains. Their point is
highly pertinent: when it comes to certain human endeavours, epistemically targeted
solutions may not suffice to ‘fix’ things, since good outcomes can require more than
good information. We can have moral deficits, and interpersonal deficits, and in some
arenas – government, academia, international relations, medicine and science – these
deficits may cause just as many problems as truth deficits. To secure good outcomes in
medical contexts for example, doctors no doubt need to be knowledgeable. But they
may also need a decent moral compass and good interpersonal skills. If we separate out
these three requirements: 1) knowledge and expertise, 2) an ethical conscience, and 3)
trustworthiness (understood as one half of an interpersonal relationship shared with their
patient), rather than using ‘trustworthiness’ to refer ambiguously to all three, then it will
be easier to identify precise deficits and propose targeted solutions.
Looking briefly even further afield, many studies in relationship marketing have
been based upon the Commitment-Trust Theory developed by Morgan and Hunt (1994).
Within this theoretical framework trust is described as “confidence in the exchange
partner’s reliability and integrity” and trustworthiness described as “the desire or
intention to maintain a valued relationship into the future” (1994: 23). The Commitment
Trust Theory is aimed at supporting mutual advantage in exchange relationships.
Similarly, the now famous Trust Game, designed by Berg et al. (1995) is an experiment
of choice in behavioural economics designed to measure so-called trust in economic
decisions. Yet what the Trust Game actually reveals is our tendency to disregard crude
self-interest and instead pay attention to an equally crude ideal of fairness under a very
limited range of controlled conditions. The Trust Game is not a game of trust, but a
game of prediction and punishment.
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 141
So far, we have been discussing the application of strong three-place trustworthiness
to communities (political, social, scientific) where epistemic agents need to rely on
other epistemic agents for information. Yet, as philosophers have long noticed, it is not
only other agents that agents must rely on in this way, as discussed already in relation to
self-trust (I.4.5). Edward Hinchman and Trudy Govier are interested in how the problem
of epistemic reliability in others applies to our selves, and both utilise strong three-place
trustworthiness in their discussions. Hinchman says that if you are not trustworthy, or if
you have good evidence that you are not, then you should not, by the norms of
rationality, trust yourself, since “trust presupposes trustworthiness in the trusted” (2003:
26). Similarly, Govier says that “A is trustworthy if and only if A is disposed to behave
[when contextually appropriate] as though her epistemic status is S if and only if her
epistemic status is S” (1993: 111). For Govier, the problem is that:
We have to make judgements about what is going on, make decisions and implement them,
and do this ourselves. If we are insecure about our own values, motives, and capacities, we
cannot think and act effectively. (1993: 106)
To solve this problem, she uses the notions of trust and trustworthiness in an extensive
sense, so that:
One may be called upon to trust one’s perception and observations, interpretation of events
and actions, feelings and responses, values and evaluation, memory, judgement, instinct,
common sense, deliberation, choice, will, capacity to act, flexibility, competence, talent,
and ability to cope with the unexpected. (1993: 108)
For Govier, trust in another, and so knowledge gained from others, can only be
maintained so long as a person is “self-trustworthy” (1993: 117). In opposition to this,
and resonating with Descartes, Mark Owen Webb implies that self-trust is not required
for self-knowledge when he says “trust is necessary if one wants to have knowledge of
anything other than [my emphasis] one’s own immediate experience” (1993: 260).
Whatever the merits of Webb’s contention, what is important to recognise for our
purposes here, is that the worry about being “self-trustworthy” in Hinchman and
Govier’s sense is a worry about how, for our reliance on ourselves to be rational, we
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 142
ourselves must have reliable perceptive, observational, and deliberative methods and
systems. This should be uncontroversial. Just as it is used by Hardwig and others, the
strong three-place sense of ‘trustworthy’ employed in discussions of self-
trustworthiness, is so close to the idea of being a reliable epistemic agent that it is
indistinguishable. The terms are interchangeable without conceptual loss. The central
contention in such ‘problems of trustworthiness’ is that successful knowledge
acquisition and transfer requires reliable knowledge acquisition and transferring
systems. This dissertation poses no contrary argument to this; the argument here is that
this problem is not a problem of trust or trustworthiness because the assumption that it
involves trust and trustworthiness is mistaken.
Being strongly three-place trustworthy is the same as being reliable. Such
conceptual overlap is ill-advised, because the concept of reliability does not capture all
there is to care about when it comes to dependency relations involving human beings.
The socially and morally determined way in which we interact and hold one another
(and ourselves) to account explains why some have instead adopted the weak version of
trustworthiness, where it is enough that the trustee be both competent and committed to
do what they have been entrusted to do (Dooley and Fryxell 1999; McLeod 2015; M. J.
Smith and desJardins 2005, 2008). According to this view, what matters is not success
as such, but a combination of ability and intention. This would not fit the conception of
trustworthiness as it is commonly used in science, as being competent and committed to
conveying reliable scientific information is not commonly taken to be enough to
produce trustworthy science. In that context, success is what matters, not intention
(Ioannidis 2005; Nyhan et al. 2014). Yet while strong three-place trustworthiness may
capture perfectly well the importance of accuracy to the scientific enterprise, it is
limiting as to what it can capture about the inherently fallible practitioners of science –
scientists – as it makes no distinctions between 1) a scientist who engages in
premeditated scientific fraud for personal gain, 2) a scientist who innocently publishes
misleading information, and 3) a scientist who published false information to save their
colleague and friend from public humiliation. If we think such distinctions matter to
how we treat and understand the people who are scientists, then we are better served by
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 143
reserving a more nuanced and ‘restricted’ version of trustworthiness so that we can
respond appropriately.
Weak three-place trustworthiness finds trustworthiness where there is competence
and commitment, even if accident, adverse circumstance, mistake, or confusion
sometimes results in a kind of blameless failure of accuracy. Being weakly trustworthy
is distinct from being reliable; this is a good thing, as we now have two distinct
concepts that serve to explain two distinct phenomena. If we adopt weak three-place
trustworthiness, then we can have a trustworthy scientist (competent and committed)
who, due to the unforeseeable, produced an unreliable result. In contrast, if we adopt
strong three-place trustworthiness, all we can get out of the same scenario is an
untrustworthy scientist.
Yet weak three-place trustworthiness is not without its critics. One problem for the
competency condition in particular, noted by Karen Jones, is that it does not seem
enough that we are competent at doing something if we fail to let others know that we
are. To fix this problem, Jones distinguishes between three-place trustworthiness and
“rich trustworthiness”, which she takes to require:
not only competence in a domain, but also competence in assessing my own competence, so
that I neither signal competences I do not have, nor hide my light under a bushel. I need to
engage in ongoing reflective self-monitoring of my own competences so that I know them
and their limits. (2012: 76)
This dissertation addresses Jones’ rich trustworthiness in detail in II.3. For now, I will
say that once again, what Jones is picking up on here is that possession of the relevant
knowledge or skill may not be enough if we cannot know that we possess it, and do not
have the skills to competently signal this to ourselves and to others. It is again the same
observation that Hardwig, Govier, Hinchman, and countless others have made, only on
a meta level. Possessing and transferring knowledge successfully requires reliable
possession and transfer structures and systems all the way up and down for things to go
well. What so many are framing as a ‘problem of trust’ is just the pervasive reality that
epistemic problems will arise when certain parts of a system rely on other parts to
transmit and receive information, and errors and faults (both intentional and accidental)
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 144
are possible at multiple levels throughout the system. This describes the situation we are
in regarding knowledge of ourselves (since our senses can deceive us) and knowledge
gained from others (since others can deceive us), hence it is the status quo in self,
scientific, social, political knowledge… indeed all knowledge.
The risks that both strong and weak three-place trustworthiness emphasise are taken
to stem from the fact that we have relationships with others whose behaviour we can
neither predict nor control (Gambetta 1988; Luhmann 1979) and not from the fact that
we have relationships with others whose complex selves are, at least to some extent,
veiled from us (and probably to some extent from themselves as well). The commitment
condition in weak three-place trustworthiness may at first seem to fix this problem, by
taking the trustworthiness away from the agent’s success and putting it back in the
agent, in their intentions. However, as some have noticed, a trustee can be committed to
doing what they have been entrusted to do for many different reasons. The commitment
condition alone does not specify that a trustee be committed for the sorts of reasons we
would ordinary think of as trustworthy.
For example, some philosophers identify the force of norms or social constraints as
compelling the commitment of a trustworthy trustee (Dasgupta 1988; Hardin 2002;
O’neill 2002). As Carolyn McLeod recognises, on this view, what she calls the social
contract view, the commitment stems from the social norm itself and not from, say,
benevolence or care. The problem with social contract views, McLeod says, is that
while social constraints “can shore up trustworthiness, they cannot account for
trustworthiness altogether” (2015: Section 1). She points to Nancy Potter’s argument
that, on the social contracts view, a sexist employer – the kind who treats female
employees well only because he thinks he would face legal sanctions if he did not –
would be trustworthy (2002: 5), which seems counterintuitive. McLeod tells us that:
An alternative to the social contract view is a view [the encapsulated interests view]
according to which those who are trustworthy are motivated by their own interest to
maintain the relationship they have with the trustor, which in turn encourages them to
encapsulate the interests of that trustor in their own interests. (McLeod 2015: Section 1)
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 145
This is the view adopted by Russell Hardin, discussed already in II.1.1. Yet, as McLeod
points out, it too is problematic:
Consider how it applies to the sexist employer. He is not motivated by an interest to sustain
his relationships with female employees: if he could easily fire them, or even avoid hiring
them altogether, then he would do that. He is therefore not trustworthy. (2015: Section 1)
Both the social contract view and the encapsulated interests view are instances of weak
three-place trustworthiness, since both contain the commitment condition. And yet, they
are both instances of “risk-assessment views” of trust or trustworthiness, as Jones calls
them (1999: 68), which do not require the commitment to stem from what we would
ordinarily think of as trustworthy motives. This means that they allow for no distinction
between being trustworthy and merely acting in a trustworthy manner or pretending to
be trustworthy. Responding to this intuitive limitation, several philosophers require of
the commitment condition that the commitment be of a certain type, a certain kind of
motive. These views will be discussed in the following section.
Lastly though, while almost no accounts challenge directly the assumption that
trustworthiness is three-place, one notable exception can be gleaned in the work of Lars
Hertzberg. In a 1988 paper “On the Attitude of Trust”, Hertzberg observed that reliance
has a more or less specific content: one relies on a person for particular purposes.
Reliance is like factual belief in the sense that “my relying on someone is conceptually
independent of whatever attitude I take him to have in other respects” (1988: 312),
whereas “when I trust someone, it is him I trust; I do not trust certain things about him”
(1988: 315). Given these comments, Hertzberg can perhaps be viewed as a proponent of
two-place trustworthiness, recognising as he does that trust is placed, and so presumably
trustworthiness must reside, in persons, not in their actions. It is telling that he is rarely
cited in the three-place trust/worthiness literature.
To summarise, this subsection addressed literature on three-place trustworthiness.
Three-place trustworthiness is a view that says trustworthiness involves the trustee
doing for the truster, that which is entrusted. It splits into two versions: strong and
weak. The strong version is adopted in the science, and social and political science
literature, and it is indistinguishable from reliability. The weak version is more
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 146
prevalent in the philosophical literature on trust, and it allows that the trustee might fail
to do what they have been entrusted to do through no fault of their own. Yet by itself,
the weak version says nothing about the underlying character or motivations of the
trustee, and so, without further specification, counterintuitively counts trustees with
untrustworthy motives as worthy of trust.
II.1.4 Motives and trustworthiness
Motives are thought to be relevant to trustworthiness in the following way: a trustee
might appear to be trustworthy, in the sense that they are helpful, cooperative, share
accurate information with us, and generally do what we entrust them to do, yet such a
trustee may be committed to behaving in this manner only for reasons that are
incompatible with trustworthiness: Mr Fox, in the Beatrix Potter story “Jemima Puddle-
Duck”. At least according to our common-sense platitudes, the intentions of the trustee
matter to their trustworthiness. Indeed, this is how we make that important conceptual
differentiation between false and true friends, who may appear to us – at least at first –
as indistinguishable in their behaviour. Yet both the strong and weak versions of three-
place trustworthiness say nothing about the sorts of motives a trustworthy person must
have. The trustee does not have to like the truster, care about them, want the best for
them (or not be planning on eating them). The strong version requires just that the
trustee successfully does what they were entrusted to do, and the weak version requires
just that they are competent and committed in doing it. Both versions are compatible
with the trustee having selfish or even malicious motives for doing what we ‘entrust’
them to do. This subsection discusses accounts of trustworthiness which are not entirely
behaviouristic.
Among those who recognise and try to address this limitation with three-place
trustworthiness, there is little agreement in the literature as to what kind of additional
motive a person needs to possess (or lack) for doing what is entrusted. Aligning
trustworthiness with morality, Carolyn McLeod says that a sense of duty is a sufficient
motivator to ensure trustworthiness. This is because – she argues – all we need to have
to be able to trust strangers to be decent is the presumption that they are committed to
common decency (2002: 21-27). Elsewhere she summarises her own view “ultimately,
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 147
what I am presuming about the stranger is moral integrity, which has been thought of as
the relevant motive for trust relations” (McLeod 2015: Section 1). She then goes on to
identify others, i.e. (Cohen and Dienhart 2013; Nickel 2007), who similarly classify the
relevant motive as duty or moral obligation.
Some talk not of a sense of moral obligation, but of a recognition of dependency.
For example, Paul Faulkner says:
A trusted party S is trustworthy, in a circumstance defined by A’s (affectively) trusting S to
φ, if and only if S sees A’s depending on his φ-ing as a reason to φ and φs for this reason.
(2011: 148).
And similarly to Karen Jones who I shall discuss in detail in II.4, Amy Mullin argues
that those who are genuinely trustworthy can be motivated by a different sort of non-
moral commitment– a commitment to a particular social norm (2005: 316). Being
motivated by a commitment to a social norm, sense of duty, or recognition of
dependency though, strikes some as inadequate, since one could be committed in these
ways and still feel ill-will towards the truster (which seems to preclude trustworthiness).
Will-based accounts say that trustworthy trustees are always motivated to do as they are
entrusted out of goodwill.
Discussion of the relevance of goodwill to moral philosophy finds its origins in
Plato (Protagoras and Republic, Book 4) and Aristotle (De Anima, see esp. III.10), see
also Price (2011), but application of the concept of goodwill to trust and trustworthiness
originates in the work of Annette Baier. Baier’s own motivation for applying the
concept of goodwill is very clearly to use it to distinguish trust/worthiness from
reliance/reliability:
What is the difference between trusting others and merely relying on them? It seems to be
reliance on their good will toward one, as distinct from their dependable habits, or only on
their dependably exhibited fear, anger, or other motives compatible with ill will toward one,
or on motives not directed on one at all. (1986: 234)
Today, broader issues to do with goodwill are taken up under the heading Moral
Motivation, and debate is lively with wide-ranging implications (Rosati 2016). It is no
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 148
surprise to see the familiar arguments of moral motivation playing out in the literature
on trust/worthiness. Much of the contention when it comes to the concept of goodwill
involves agreeing on precisely what ‘having a good will’ involves: is it a cognitive
notion or a non-cognitive notion?
For example, on the cognitive side, some have claimed that a good will is the will of
one who is committed only to make decisions that she holds to be morally worthy and
who takes moral considerations in themselves to be conclusive reasons for guiding her
behaviour (Johnson and Cureton 2017). One example of such cognitive goodwill
applied to trustworthiness comes from Colin O’Neil, who takes goodwill to not include
any benevolent feelings, just respect for our “rights”:
By “good will,” I do not mean that the trustee’s will is benevolent, but merely that it is
responsive to the trustee’s obligations. We can trust those who do not care how things go
for us—we can even trust enemies who hate us—so long as we expect them to be
responsive to our rights. (2012: 309)
Cognitive views align trustworthiness with moral action rooted in reason rather than
emotions or desires. Because of the emphasis on obligation and respect for rights,
cognitive views can render trustworthiness indistinguishable from moral action. They
tend to be adopted by those who view the alternative as too narrow, precluding us from
being parties to trusting relationships with, as O’Neil says, those “enemies who hate
us”. If we apply the reasoning of Part I of this dissertation to O’Neil’s contention, then
‘trusting enemies who hate us to be responsive to our rights’ is instead understood as
relying on enemies who hate us to behave in morally appropriate ways.
Like O’Neil, according to Jones the goodwill involved in trustworthiness is
cognitive and involves no “friendly feeling”:
We are not to take 'goodwill' as synonymous with 'personal friendly feeling', or will-based
accounts would be obviously too narrow. Sometimes those we trust have the relevant
goodwill just in virtue of being morally decent, or honest, or caring about fulfilling their
duty. (1999: 68)
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 149
If we are talking about people doing the right thing, morally speaking, without any
interpersonal factors at play, then it may make sense to adopt cognitive goodwill, since
in this case we may not care whether those people care (affectively) about us, as long as
they compliantly respect our rights. However, as Stephen Wright has pointed out with
regard to Jones’ cognitive trustworthiness, it is similar to Hardin’s risk-assessment
view, since both make trustworthiness essentially a matter of compliance:
In order to be trustworthy I must act because you are counting on me and I believe the fact
that you are counting on me to be a compelling reason to act according to Jones. The reason
that I find this unsatisfactory is that this response can lead Jones to a position similar to the
one that Hardin is in, in that she demands compliance in order for someone to be
trustworthy, in Jones’ case being motivated by the fact that someone is trusting them. If
someone being trustworthy means that they take the fact that someone is trusting them to be
a reason that compels them to do whatever they are being trusted to do then trustworthiness
is associated for Jones with compliance. If Jones associates trustworthiness with acting as a
trustor would like then her view of trustworthiness becomes similar to Hardin’s view that
being trustworthy is doing what someone has trusted you to do. The reason that I believe
that Jones’ view becomes closer to Hardin’s is because their end products become the same
(compliance) and it is just the method of getting there that differs. (2010: 623-24)
Compliance (doing what we are entrusted to do) is potentially problematic, as it can put
us into conflict with morality, and Jones herself worries about this implication, as we
saw in II.1.2. Those applying a cognitive version of goodwill to trustworthiness may not
avoid the intuitive problem laid out at the beginning of this subsection. This is because
we do not want those whom we trust just to be concerned with fulfilling their duties or
respecting our rights. We want them to be ready to abandon those norms/duties/rights
for us if the need arises. This seems to require that they care about us, for, what else
could enslave our reason (including our moral reasoning) in the way it is commonly
enslaved in our interpersonal relationships but genuine affection?
David Hume at least thought that goodwill and benevolence – in the affective sense
– come together. In An Enquiry into the Principles of Morals, Hume says:
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 150
It may be esteemed, perhaps, a superfluous task to prove, that the benevolent or softer
affections are ESTIMABLE; and wherever they appear, engage the approbation, and good-
will of mankind. (1751: Section II, Part I)
If we apply Hume’s non-cognitive (or not wholly cognitive) goodwill to
trustworthiness, requiring as it does an element of affective-benevolence, then this gets
us closer to our goal of distinguishing those who are committed to doing what we have
entrusted them to do from a place of trustworthiness, and those who are committed from
a place of untrustworthiness. Sadly though, Hume’s non-cognitive goodwill is not the
conception most philosophers applying the notion of goodwill to trustworthiness intend.
This is puzzling, since the primary point of employing the notion of goodwill in an
account of trustworthiness is to distinguish a trustworthy person from a reliable person
who may be acting out of maliciousness/selfishness. At least, this was Baier’s original
intention, as we have seen.
Hume’s conception of goodwill gets us closer, but goodwill as it was understood by
Aristotle may not be able to serve to make the distinction we need between false friends
(who may be reliable) and true friends (who are trustworthy). In Nicomachean Ethics,
Book VIII, Aristotle reflects on three-types of friendship: those based on utility,
pleasure and the good. All three require goodwill, though the first two kinds of
friendship are self-serving, since under these circumstances, friends are motivated by
their own utility and pleasure, not by anything essential to the nature of the friend.
Hence, Russell Hardin’s position, for example, where “motive” just refers to “…the
interest we have in maintaining particular relationships that makes it in our interest to be
trustworthy” (1996: 52) is compatible with the trustee having that motive only for self-
interested reasons, just as in Aristotle’s first two examples of friendship.
Goodwill is – or has become at least – a moral concept, and aligning trustworthiness
with moral action will always bring us back to the same problem Stephen Wright saw
with Jones’ view, i.e. what happens when a truster trusts us to do something immoral?
In that case it seems, we are ‘damned if we do and damned if we don’t’. Wright avoids
using the notion altogether, arguing that trustworthiness need not involve any goodwill
since the kind of vulnerability goodwill is a response to is not a part of trust: “I see no
reason for an account to include goodwill as Baier suggests, or even the absence of ill
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 151
will” (2010: 619). Instead he talks of the difference between “I value you”, versus “I
value my relationship with you”, with only the former “I value you” being understood
by him as trustworthy (2010: 622).
Valuing a person in and of themselves is a step in the right direction. However, in
Part I (I.4) this dissertation has argued that even more is needed: trusters and trustees
must become special to one another. It is not enough to value a truster or trustee as a
person, for their personhood, because they have ‘inalienable rights’. We can value a
stranger in this way. In trust and trustworthiness, we must value the object specifically,
in a way that makes it irreplaceable not in a general sense, but irreplaceable to us.
In relation to Wright’s view, we could be in the position of valuing a person more
than we value our relationship with them, but still be valuing them for selfish or
underhanded reasons (a result Wright himself aims to avoid – see II.1.2). This is
plausibly true of employer/employee associations in larger companies, where there may
not be any relationship between the parties to speak of (they may not even know one
another) and yet, the employee is still valued by the employer for the specific role they
fulfil. This point may be purely terminological though, as Wright could potentially
counter that what the employer values in such cases is his relationship with his
employee, in the sense that he values being an employer and having an employee (in
that role), and not the person that is the employee.
Like Wright, Philip Pettit addresses the relationship between trust/worthiness, and
the motive of selfishness in his 1995 paper “The Cunning of Trust”. Pettit is working
from a three-place epistemic conception of trust and trustworthiness, whereby both are
ubiquitous (1995: 218) responses to reasons. He says:
Trust materializes reliably among people to the extent that they have beliefs about one
another that make trust a sensible attitude to adopt. And trust reliably survives among
people to the extent that those beliefs prove to be correct. Trustors identify reasons to trust
others and trustees show that those reasons are good reasons. (1995: 202)
Showing that “those reasons are good reasons” for Pettit means showing ourselves to be
reliable. When it comes to trustworthiness, or “trust-responsiveness” as he calls it, Pettit
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 152
identifies that one of the reasons we have to be trustworthy (to do what we are entrusted
to do) is intrinsically selfish:
the trust-responsiveness that I have in mind is not a trait that many will be proud to
acknowledge in themselves. It is the desire for the good opinion of others and it counts by
most peoples' lights, not as a desirable feature for which they need to strive, but rather as a
disposition – a neutral or even shameful disposition – that it is hard to shed. The fact that it
[trust] can be supported by such a disposition shows a certain cunning on the part of trust.
Trustors do not have to depend on the more or less admirable trustworthiness of others; they
can also hope to exploit the relatively base desire to be well considered. (1995: 203)
Pettit is drawing our attention here to those situations in which we ‘do what we are
being trusted to do’ out of a desire for the good opinion of others. Given that this
‘reason to be trustworthy’ is frequently present, we seem often to have a selfish (and so
potentially untrustworthy) reason to be trustworthy. If we think this reason is generally
motivating, then, trusters seem to have a corresponding (potentially untrusting) reason
to trust. The ‘reasons to trust and be trustworthy’ that Pettit identifies here are not
denied in this dissertation’s two-place trust/worthiness. Instead, they are reframed as a
reason to behave reliably and a reason to believe that others will behave reliably.
Both Wright and Pettit address trustworthiness as it relates to selfish motives from a
three-place perspective. Wright displays concern that selfish motives may underlie
doing as we are entrusted to do, and Pettit views selfishness as an additional motivating
reason to do as we are entrusted to do. Also addressing trustworthiness and selfishness
from a three-place perspective, Jones argues that selfish motives for doing as we are
entrusted to do are not incompatible with trustworthiness. She says that a concern for
maximising the wellbeing of the truster over one’s own wellbeing cannot underpin and
indeed can sometimes invalidate trustworthiness, since the truster may not value their
own wellbeing, or value other things – such as the trustee – more highly (1996: 10). She
says “one is not trustworthy unless one is willing to give significant weight to the fact
that the other is counting on one, and so will not let that consideration be overruled by
just any other [my emphasis] concern one has” (1996: 8), suggesting that selfish
motives can play a part, but they must be measured. For Jones, a trustworthy trustee
must consider the expectations of the truster and use this as their primary motivation
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 153
when deciding how to act (1996: 6). Jane Mansbridge agrees with Jones and recognises
“altruistic trust” and “self-interest trust” as both legitimate kinds of trust and suggests
that altruistic trust is actually more fragile since people are more likely to balk if they
have no self-interest at all in the trust/trustworthiness (1999: 290-309).
Though this dissertation does not recognise “altruistic trust” and “self-interest trust”
as kinds of trust, with regard to the general point this dissertation is in alignment with
Mansbridge. This is because, for one thing, sustaining relationships of trust is inherently
good for us: the stress that can result from living with betrayal and distrust is bad for our
health (DeLongis et al. 1988; McEwen 2008; Rasmussen et al. 2009). For another thing,
the presence of self-interested ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ agreements in
trusting relationships may actually be essential to maintaining them, particularly when
responsibilities are shared– such as in parenting. Indeed, successful close interpersonal
relationships require a kind of long-term reciprocity that is rooted in each party
successfully communicating and getting their own selfish needs met (Buunk and
Schaufeli 2011; Knudson-Martin 2013). And lastly, as H.J.N. Horsburgh has pointed
out there are moral benefits to trustworthiness as well:
one of the main ways in which one individual can affect the moral growth of another is by
trusting or distrusting him for each instance of distrust erects barriers to intercourse and
cooperation, thereby limiting the scope – and with it the moral opportunities – of the
distrusted person’s life. (1960: 350)
Though trustworthiness may at first intuitively seem incompatible with selfishness,
being trustworthy is rationally self-interested. It is good for our health, the health of our
relationships (which confer benefits to us), and it is good for our moral development.
But these reasons cannot serve to explain why we are trustworthy. Trustworthiness is
also, at heart, stunningly selfless. Yet the fact that trustworthiness can be both selfless
and selfish should not lead us to think that there is both “altruistic trustworthiness” and
“selfish trustworthiness”. There is just us, people who are trustworthy, and we are both
altruistic and selfish in our interpersonal relationships. My daughter, who sometimes
makes my heart sing with her courageous protectiveness and generosity towards her
younger brother, also manipulates him into giving her his lollies and slams her bedroom
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 154
door in his face. The selfish/selfless nature of the sibling relationship does not
undermine its status as trustworthy. Often our selfish siblings are the most trustworthy
individuals any of us are lucky enough to encounter in our lifetimes.
To undermine two-place trustworthiness, just as to undermine two-place trust, what
is needed is a significant and prolonged change in the trustee’s experience of the truster
(see I.4.6). The presence or absence of a single motive underlying a single act, will not
do it. On two-place trustworthiness, because doing what we are entrusted to do is not
part of our trustworthiness, trustees can have multiple and even incongruous motives for
their reliability without their trustworthiness necessarily being affected. This fits with
the contemporary idea that a complex of motivational elements underlies even relatively
simple behaviour. As neurobiologist Eleanor Simpson notes:
Many different factors influence motivation, including the organism’s internal physiological
states, the current environmental conditions, as well as the organism’s past history and
experiences. (2016: 4)
In assessing a person’s trustworthiness, this dissertation is not suggesting that motives
are unimportant. Indeed, in II.2, we will see various ways in which they can affect
trustworthiness. But given the sophistication and changeability of our motivational
landscape, motives over time are what matter. For example, deep underlying intractable
motives, not surface level ones like the passing desire to be well-regarded by those
watching us as we do what we are being ‘entrusted’ to do, right here, right now. And,
being only one part of trust and trustworthiness, motives are only ever one part of what
matters.
In summary, this subsection demonstrated that a number of philosophers agree that
doing what we have been entrusted to do, or being competent and committed to doing it,
may not be enough for trustworthiness. In particular, selfish motives are thought to be
of concern. Yet rather than abandoning three-place trustworthiness, various additional
motivational elements have been added to three-place trustworthiness: possessing a
sense of duty, goodwill, benevolence, lack of selfishness, consideration of the value of
the relationship, responsiveness to dependency, willingness to give significant weight to
being counted on, etc. Much in the same way that trust is often viewed as reliance plus
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 155
something else (hope or belief) as identified in I.2.1., motive accounts view
trustworthiness as reliability plus something else, though there is little agreement – once
again – on what must be added to three-place trustworthiness (reliability) to rescue it
from any intuitively untrustworthy underpinnings. If we adopt three-place
trustworthiness, discussions of how motives matter to trustworthiness risk being taken
in the immediate sense, as relating to a specific act of reliability, instead of in that
deeper ongoing sense that actually matters to our worthiness of trust.
II.1.5 Summary of the literature on trustworthiness
Subsection II.1.1 began with a demonstration that trustworthiness is symmetrical with
trust, in the sense that a philosopher’s stance on trustworthiness tends to mirror their
position on trust, thus confirming that the project of reviewing the literature on
trustworthiness was possible, despite an apparent lack of it. Subsection II.1.2 considered
literature that takes trustworthiness to be a one-place relation – a virtue or character trait
– revealing that truly one-place accounts are rare. Most apparently one-place accounts
are in fact hybrid one/three-place, and as such will be liable to all the same problems
that standard three-place views face. Subsection II.1.3 considered literature on three-
place trustworthiness, which separates into strong and weak versions. Both versions,
however, failed to make trustworthiness incompatible with intuitively untrustworthy
motives. The final subsection, II.1.4, considered literature that aims to fix this problem
with the addition (or preclusion) of various motivational elements as necessary
conditions.
Overall, Section II.1 confirmed that most philosophers consider trustworthiness to
be a three-place relation, or a hybrid one/three-place relation: it involves a truster doing
what the trustee entrusts them to do, sometimes because of the sort of person that the
trustee is, sometimes because of the sort of motivation that they have. Section II.1 has
demonstrated that this research project makes an original contribution in its conception
of trustworthiness as a complex two-place relation. Again, as in Part I, I suggest that the
many disagreements about trustworthiness that this literature review highlighted, rather
than being evidence that ‘definitions and intuitions differ’ and so there are multiple
‘kinds’ of trustworthiness, is instead evidence of the very complexity of the thing under
II.1 Trustworthiness: in the Philosophical Literature 156
investigation, with most philosophers correctly identifying a part of this inherently
complex and contradictory facet of our lives.
II.2 Dominant Views on Trustworthiness: Problems 157
II.2 Dominant Views on Trustworthiness: Problems
This section further explores the limitations of framing trustworthiness as a one, or as a
three-place relation. Though some limitations were already discussed in the previous
Section, as my primary aim in Part II of this research project is to change the dominant
view from one in which trustworthiness is conceived of something that we do, or
something we are, to something that we have in relation to a specific other (the truster),
additional arguments are provided here. To that end, subsection II.2.1 explores
problems with one-place trustworthiness. Since one-place trustworthiness is most often
understood as a virtue (see: II.1.2), I address my discussion to the idea that
trustworthiness is a moral notion, though the primary argument, that trustworthiness
cannot be one-place because it takes an object, applies to the proposal that
trustworthiness is a non-moral character trait with equal force. Together, subsections
II.2.2 and II.2.3 explore the limitations of three-place trustworthiness, namely, all
versions of three-place trustworthiness cannot handle the complex realities of trust and
trustworthiness as they actually present themselves in human relationships.
II.2.1 One-place trustworthiness: virtue
On a personal note, when I began this research project, I was sympathetic to a virtue
account of trustworthiness, since virtues, many have recognised, are complex, in the
sense that they encompass many aspects of ourselves:
A virtue is an excellent trait of character. It is a disposition, well entrenched in its
possessor—something that, as we say, goes all the way down, unlike a habit such as being a
tea-drinker—to notice, expect, value, feel, desire, choose, act, and react in certain
characteristic ways. To possess a virtue is to be a certain sort of person with a certain
complex mindset. A significant aspect of this mindset is the wholehearted acceptance of a
distinctive range of considerations as reasons for action. (Hursthouse and Pettigrove 2016)
This description of virtue shares some striking similarities with what I have said already
in Part I about trust: it ‘goes all the way down’, involves a ‘complex mindset’, engages
our reason and emotion, and is ‘well entrenched’. Moreover, as was touched upon in
II.1.4, and will be argued for further in Sections II.3 and II.4, trustworthiness requires us
to have a certain motivational landscape, rather than a single precise motivation, and
II.2 Dominant Views on Trustworthiness: Problems 158
this is something which is often held to be true of virtue (Slote 2001: 99-100; Zagzebski
2004: 154-60).
Still, although there is much to a virtue account that fits with trustworthiness as it is
presented in this dissertation, two significant irreconcilabilities remained: virtues do not
take an object, and when taken to involve phronesis or practical wisdom, virtues result
in action that is, morally speaking, the right thing to do. When I say that virtues do not
take an object, or that virtues do not discriminate, what I mean is that – at least in their
ideal forms – virtues are one-place. If we are honest then this is a description of the sort
of person that we are (or aim to be), to all (or most) people and in all (or most)
circumstances. Though we may fall short of the ideal, virtues are not ‘pegged’ to
specific others in the same way that trust and trustworthiness are. Because of this,
unlike virtues, trustworthiness can compel immoral action.
We often use ‘trustworthy’ as a synonym for ‘virtuous’ in everyday conversation,
and, trustworthiness so often calls upon our virtue, so often requires that we embody or
act in ways that are morally praiseworthy, or which have ethical consequences, that it is
easy to see why one might be convinced of the idea that trustworthiness itself must be
morally good. This reflects the situation in the trust literature, where ‘trust’ is often used
as a synonym for ‘rely’, and this, coupled with the fact that trust often causes reliance,
leads us to confuse trust with reliance (see: I.3.3). Indeed, a significant number of
philosophers writing on trust speak as though it were uncontentious that trustworthiness
is virtuous, as we saw in II.1.1. Many who do so, take trustworthiness-qua-virtue to
involve doing what we have been entrusted to do, interpreted as a form of moral action.
As Paul Faulkner has recently explained:
trustworthiness is more than reliability in that it is evaluative as well as descriptive. The
trustworthy act, like the opportunistic one, is done in response to someone’s depending on
one in certain ways, but unlike the opportunistic act, it is the appropriate thing to do – where
“appropriate” here amounts to a quasi-moral evaluation. (2017: 110)
Yet the idea that trustworthiness really does have some kind of intrinsic moral value has
been the subject of some criticism, as Faulkner himself has noted (2017: 117). The most
obvious criticism, which Philip Nickel pointed out over a decade ago, is that
II.2 Dominant Views on Trustworthiness: Problems 159
trustworthiness flourishes among the non-virtuous just as fiercely as it does among the
virtuous. As Nickel put it, this is similar to how “the bad do love selflessly their own
kind” (2007: 309). Recently, Karen Jones has elaborated on this theme, arguing that the
“norms of trust and trustworthiness” have the potential to be in conflict with morality
(2017: 102). She says:
You can be perfectly trustworthy with respect to some people without being a good person;
indeed, being trustworthy with respect to some people requires [her emphasis] that you not
be a good person… What can be demanded of friends is not subject to a moral filter and
morally bad people can be good friends… Being trustworthy might require you to do the
morally wrong thing and there may be no broader perspective from which to adjudicate the
conflicting normative perspectives to arrive at a judgement as to what, all things considered,
is the thing to do. (2017: 102-07)
So, while Jones and Nickel observe that trustworthiness cannot be virtuous because
trustworthy people can do immoral things (and do so in the name of trustworthiness),
Stephan Darwall provides us with a different reason to reject a moralised view of
trustworthiness. For Darwall, trustworthiness (again like love) cannot be a moral
attitude, as even in a friendship it is “nothing we can claim from someone or hold her
accountable for” (2017: 47). In demonstration of this, Darwall points us to the
difference between trust/worthiness, and promising. He says:
While it is possible to accept someone’s promise without trusting that the promise will be
kept, it is not possible to accept an invitation to trust without trusting. Nothing else could
count as accepting such an invitation. Unlike the relation between promiser and promise,
that between trustor and trustee is not a(n impersonal) relation of right. It is a kind of
personal relationship in which the trustor and trustee make themselves vulnerable to one
another personally [his emphasis] rather than juridically. […] the kind of mutual
recognition that is most distinctive of personal relationships like friendship and love is not
intrinsically deontic or juridical. It is a mutual openness to forms of personal relation,
including trust, that we have no authority to demand of one another, but that we nonetheless
hope for and are understandably personally hurt or let down when it is not reciprocated.
(2017: 46)
II.2 Dominant Views on Trustworthiness: Problems 160
On trust and trustworthiness as they are presented in this dissertation, Darwall’s
observation that it is possible to accept someone’s promise without “trusting that the
promise will be kept”, is taken to mean that it is possible to accept someone’s promise
without believing that the promise will be kept, or without relying on the promise. This
reframe though, is not vital to his point – unlike the relation between promiser and
promisee – that the relation between truster and trustee is one we have no right to
demand of one another. This is partly because, as complex two-place relations involving
beliefs and emotions, trust and trustworthiness are not wholly voluntary (see: I.6.4), but
it is also because they are historically determined, and intrinsically special.
If we accept them, then together the above observations contributed by Nickel,
Jones, and Darwall should lead us to strongly doubt that trustworthiness is a virtue. To
these, this dissertation adds a related observation: unlike the virtues (and unlike non-
moral character traits), trustworthiness takes an object, trustworthiness discriminates.
As the argument here contains what should be by now familiar ideas and relatively
uncontroversial claims, I shall make it brief. This dissertation has already stated its case
(see: I.3) that trust discriminates, or ‘takes an object’ (the trustee). Trust is, at the very
least, a two-place relation, and – given the symmetrical nature of trust and
trustworthiness (see: II.1.1) – we can expect trustworthiness to be two-place as well,
taking as its object the truster. Yet it is worthwhile exploring this proposal further here,
with the added insight that the current contrast with virtue can bring.
From section I.3, remember, in one-place accounts there is no object of
trust/worthiness. Trustworthiness is just something trustees have, it is just something
that they are, similar to a mood or temperament (B is trustworthy). If trustworthiness
were one-place then it might well be a virtue, since virtues are one-place; virtues do not
take specific things (individuals) as their objects. If we are honest or kind then this is the
sort of person we are, expressed in the way we notice, expect, value, feel, desire,
choose, act, and react in characteristic ways (Hursthouse and Pettigrove 2016). If I only
display kindness towards my friends, or towards people of my own cultural background,
then I do not possess the virtue of kindness. We cannot attribute a virtue to an agent
based on a single observed action or even a series of similar actions (Sreenivasan 2002).
II.2 Dominant Views on Trustworthiness: Problems 161
This does not mean that to possess a virtue we must exhibit it infallibly. Possessing
a virtue is a matter of degree, and most of us fall far short of the ideal (Athanassoulis
2000). But if we show kindness predictably in relation to some people and not others
then this is not kindness but favouritism. If we are gentle with the cat but kick the dog,
then we are not gentle, but instead cruel (and fond of cats). If the King seeks fairness
and justice only for his companions, shirking fairness and justice otherwise, then he
cannot be said to be a fair and just ruler. Virtues can be weak, and akrasia, or a lack of
control, may preclude them from being exercised appropriately on occasion, but they do
not – or at the very least aim not – to discriminate in these ways. At least in their ideal
forms, virtues do not take particular objects but apply indiscriminately, whoever
happens to be involved. The virtuous king is honest, benevolent, fair etc. to all his
subjects, the virtuous nurse to all his patients, the virtuous teacher to all his students.
Yet, unlike the disturbing idea that my virtue might apply discriminately, there is
nothing inherently upsetting about the idea that my trust applies discriminately. I can
trust only my doctor and not this doctor, my sister but not my brother, the dog but never
the cat. The discerning nature of my trust does not seem to undermine it, in fact, it
seems to be one of its most distinguishing features. The reason we trust some people
and not others, is – as we all know – because only some people are worthy of our trust.
Trust discriminates, because trustworthiness discriminates.
Like the virtues, trustworthiness is a ‘well-entrenched complex mindset’, involving
reason and emotion, which goes ‘all the way down’. But unlike the virtues, both trust
and trustworthiness are ‘pegged’ to a specific individual. This leads to both epistemic
and practical consequences. It means that you and I can disagree about who is worthy of
our trust and both be right. Your dear old school friend Simon is worthy of your trust:
you could ring him up in your hour of need and he would heed the call. But your dear
old school friend Simon is not worthy of my trust. Though I am sure, as you say, he is a
good person, I have never met him. If I were to ring this stranger up and disclose my
deepest darkest secrets or beg him to advocate for my innocence, he would probably
hang up on me.
Where discrimination leads us to doubt a person’s virtue, a lack of discrimination
leads us to doubt a person’s trust and trustworthiness. Consider the person who treats
II.2 Dominant Views on Trustworthiness: Problems 162
everyone as their best friend: confiding in strangers, becoming emotionally attached to
work-colleagues, expecting loyalty from outsiders, reacting with resentment when their
lofty relationship expectations are not matched. We know this person as one who lacks
mastery of trust and trustworthiness. We identify them instead as naïve, gullible,
troublesome. Insensitive to the time, history, attention, care – specialness – that
genuinely close interpersonal relationships require, such a person is potentially
dangerous, or else, they are dangerously vulnerable.
That trust and trustworthiness are discriminating, discerning, selective, does not
entail that we regard those we do not trust, those who are not worthy of our trust, with
suspicion or hostility. Positive everyday interactions with most people do not require
trust and trustworthiness but are very well facilitated by nothing more than a general
optimism and openness, and an adherence to the relevant social and cultural norms. It is
vital, as we shall see (II.3), that mastery of local social/cultural norms are not confused
with trust and trustworthiness. Just as not all those who can love and be worthy of it are
skilled in the relevant social/cultural norms associated with romance/courting, so not all
those who can trust and be worthy of it are skilled in the relevant social/cultural norms
associated with reliance/reliability. In II.3 it is argued that we must not deny
trust/worthiness (love/worthiness) to those who struggle with the local behavioural
norms surrounding them.
Though trustworthiness is not a virtue, the interplay between trustworthiness and
morality is intimate, and interesting in its own right. Trustworthiness interacts with the
moral realm in several ways, for example: 1) by requiring virtue or moral action, 2) by
introducing genuine moral conflict into our lives, 3) by introducing struggles between
morality and trustworthiness, and 4) by changing moral dilemmas into trustworthiness
predicaments, with ethical consequences. It is beyond the scope of this research project
to discuss all the ways in which our trustworthiness intersects with our morality in
detail, though, before moving on, I shall elaborate on 1 to 4 very briefly.
1) Our trustworthiness can require morality, as the ability to sustain close
interpersonal relationships often demands that we exhibit virtue, and engage in moral
reasoning, moral action. Lacking a good moral compass can damage trusting
relationships just as surely as anything can. Yet trustworthiness can also require that we
II.2 Dominant Views on Trustworthiness: Problems 163
exhibit a vice, as Jones says (2012: 84), and as I shall explore further in the remainder
of II.2. If it is a requirement of trustworthiness that we possess a moral sensibility, then
it is also a requirement of trustworthiness that we know when to ignore that moral
sensibility.
2) Our trustworthiness can introduce moral struggles between virtue and vice,
courage and fear, generosity and self-interest, into our lives. When this happens, our
trustworthiness itself is not involved directly in the struggle. In this role, trustworthiness
is an initiator, a catalyst. Analogously, there is a pressing moral choice that requires a
captain’s decision. The captain, and only the captain, has the authority to make this
moral choice. The role of trustworthiness, like the role of captain, can introduce moral
dilemmas, moral choices, and moral consequences into our lives that we cannot ‘fob
off’ onto anybody else.
3) Our trustworthiness itself can conflict with our morality. When this happens, we
find ourselves in a struggle between the pressures of trustworthiness – the pressures of
interpersonal relationships – and the pressures of morality. Again, analogously, the
captain may be put in a position of having to decide between doing the right thing,
ethically speaking, and following the admiral’s orders. The right thing to do is obvious
and uncontroversial. The decision she needs to make is not between right and wrong,
but between morality and the captain’s burden. Like this, our trustworthiness can place
us in situations where we know what we ought to do, but this does not settle for us what
to do. Trustworthiness is a force at least as strong as morality, and their winds can blow
in opposing directions.
4) Our trustworthiness has the power to help us decide on moral dilemmas, by
changing them into trustworthiness predicaments with ethical consequences. The
captain must decide between saving two crew members, ensign Reicher and ensign Kim
(she cannot save both). These kinds of situation are identified as symmetrical moral
dilemmas (Sinnott-Armstrong 1988: Ch.2), the quintessential example being Sophie’s
Choice (Styron 1979). The bald ethical question underlying our captain’s choice is–
given that I can save only A or B, ought I save A or B? Obviously, this question is
hopeless, and provokes no moral intuitions– a true dilemma. Our captain’s two-week
II.2 Dominant Views on Trustworthiness: Problems 164
intensive ethical training module undertaken back at the academy cannot help her here.
She might as well go ahead and resort to eeny, meeny, miny, moe.
Mercifully though, in real life, things are not usually so devoid of any relational
content. Hopeless symmetrical moral dilemmas are rare. In real life, it is not A and B, it
is our sister and our brother, our friend Susan and our friend Sarah. The choice is
between two different individuals with whom we share two different relationships.
Because no two relationships are exactly alike, no two instances of trustworthiness are
exactly alike: there is no such thing as a ‘symmetrical trustworthiness dilemma’ as there
are symmetrical moral dilemmas. Sometimes, when we are in a symmetrical moral
dilemma, we can use the trustworthiness difference to make the choice. Our choice can
be the right choice, maybe not ethically speaking, but ‘trustworthily’ speaking.
Whatever we choose, we will walk away with dirty hands, but that was always going to
happen anyway. Moral dirt just gets everywhere.
This subsection began on a personal note, and so I shall end it on one. My personal
hope is that instead of viewing trustworthiness as a virtue, as a moral imperative, the
curious manner in which our close interpersonal ties to one another can shift, shape and
break our morality will be explored more by philosophers in the future. Iris Murdoch
said “anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity,
and realism is to be connected with virtue” (1997: 104). To be trustworthy is not to have
our consciousness altered in the direction of selfishness, subjectivity, or illusion, but it
is to have it altered in the direction of those few special others who have (subjective)
significance for us. Yet though they face their imperfect objects and not some ideal
morality, it is in our acquaintance with trust and trustworthiness, with loving and being
loved, that we learn the first and the hardest moral lessons. Trust and trustworthiness are
where our moral selves begin. With them we acquire care, forgiveness, gratitude, and
hope. Trustworthiness is not virtue, not the mountainous heights of our morality. It is
the sun and rain on the plains of our moral selves: flooding and scorching, but
ultimately, giving life to our moral landscape
To summarise: philosophers have made important contributions regarding the ways
in which trustworthiness conflicts with morality: trustworthiness can require that we
take immoral action, and it is not something we have any right to claim from anybody
II.2 Dominant Views on Trustworthiness: Problems 165
else. To these, this dissertation has added a related observation, that unlike the virtues,
which are (or aim to be) one-place, trustworthiness discriminates, it takes an object.
That said, trustworthiness and trust interact with morality, with our moral selves, in
several interesting ways. Four of these ways, were briefly outlined.
II.2.2 Three-place trustworthiness: scenarios
To recapitulate, strong three-place trustworthiness is the view that a person is
trustworthy just when they do what they have been entrusted to do, and a person is
untrustworthy just when they fail to do what they have been entrusted to do. Weak
three-place trustworthiness is the view that a person is trustworthy just when they are
competent and committed to doing what they have been entrusted to do and are
untrustworthy when they are either incompetent or are not committed to doing what
they have been entrusted to do, or both (see II.1.3). Various versions of three-place
trustworthiness also require the trustee have, or lack, certain motives (see II.1.4). The
aim of this section is to provide some good reasons for thinking that all versions of
three-place trustworthiness cannot handle the complex realities of trust and
trustworthiness as they actually present themselves in human relationships.
To accomplish this aim, this subsection introduces two ordinary characters: Rasmus,
playing the part of the trustee, and Iris, playing the part of the truster. These two
characters are placed into ten different scenarios. In each scenario, certain facts remain
the same: 1) Iris and Rasmus are having a telephone conversation. 2) Iris asks Rasmus
where he is: “Where are you?” she says. 3) Rasmus is in a pub named The Prancing
Pony. 4) Iris ‘trusts’ Rasmus to tell her the truth, namely, that he is in The Prancing
Pony. According to strong three-place trustworthiness, Rasmus counts as trustworthy
only in those scenarios in which he tells Iris that he is in The Prancing Pony. According
to weak three-place trustworthiness, Rasmus counts as trustworthy only in those
scenarios in which he is both competent and committed to telling Iris that he is in The
Prancing Pony. According to motive accounts, Rasmus is trustworthy when he, in
addition to doing or being competent and committed, possesses the motive relevant to
the account: goodwill, a lack of selfishness, etc. While these four basic facts remain the
same, in each scenario additional contextual information will be introduced. As this
II.2 Dominant Views on Trustworthiness: Problems 166
happens, all versions of three-place trustworthiness begin to fail to consistently secure
the intuitively correct result regarding Rasmus’ trustworthiness.
Scenario 1 Selfish Lie
Rasmus is in The Prancing Pony. Iris calls to ask him where he is, as she is hoping to
meet up with him for a drink. Rasmus, cowardly and not as keen on Iris as she is on
him, lies, saying that he is in another pub, The Dancing Dolphin. Iris goes to The
Dancing Dolphin expecting to meet Rasmus, only to find that she has been stood up.
In Scenario 1, Rasmus did not do as he was entrusted to do, and though we assume
he could competently have done so, he was not committed to doing it. He also acted
selfishly, spinelessly avoiding the awkward encounter. Rasmus comes out as
untrustworthy in both the strong and the weak versions, and any version of three-place
trustworthiness that requires him to have unselfish/benevolent motives. So far, so good.
Scenario 2 Honest Mistake
Rasmus is in The Prancing Pony. However, having been given false information by a
sober-enough and friendly-seeming patron, he mistakenly believes himself to be in The
Dancing Dolphin. Rasmus is desperately trying to meet up with his dear old friend Iris,
but alas, he unwittingly conveys his false belief to her – an honest mistake. When they
eventually figure out the error and find one another, these two old friends share a good
laugh, and there ae no bitter accusations of betrayal or earnest appeals for forgiveness.
Counterintuitively, strong three-place trustworthiness renders poor Rasmus
untrustworthy in Scenario 2, since according to the strong version, remember, Rasmus
is worthy of Iris’ trust only when he actually succeeds in doing what she entrusts him to
do. Between Scenarios 1 and 2, we see how strong three-place trustworthiness is unable
to distinguish between someone who is cowardly and deceitful, and someone who is
just excusably confused. On the weak version, Rasmus is certainly committed to telling
Iris where he is, so he satisfies that condition, and we assume that he can normally tell
people accurate information about his location even though he failed to do so this time.
So here in Scenario 2, we see the weak version successfully doing what it is meant to
do, rendering Rasmus trustworthy despite his honest mistake.
II.2 Dominant Views on Trustworthiness: Problems 167
Scenario 3 Recurrent Inattentiveness
As in Scenario 2, except that Rasmus has a habit when he is drinking of getting
preoccupied chatting and often fails to bother to get his facts straight. Rasmus is both
competent and committed to doing what Iris entrusted, and he had no selfish or ill
motives towards Iris. However, this is not the first time his inattentiveness has meant
that Iris has ended up spending half her night going from pub to pub trying to find him
because he provided her with false information. Understandably, she is beginning to
feel resentful and wonders if he really does care about her at all.
Rasmus fails in this instance to be strongly three-place trustworthy, and some may
hold the intuition that this is the right outcome. However, he may end up being weakly
three-place trustworthy (a result that may unnerve us), since he has both commitment,
and competence. One benefit of strong three-place trustworthiness is that – because it
condemns every failure as untrustworthy – it never accidently lets off any guilty party.
Weak three-place trustworthiness, though it saves some innocent versions of Rasmus
from the unfair charge of untrustworthiness as we saw in Scenario 2, can fail to
condemn some guilty versions. Moreover, requiring Rasmus to have benevolent
motives underlying his behaviour, in this instance did not work to get us to the right
outcome. This is because a trustee’s motives are not all that trusters care about. Our
relationships have history, and that history partly determines the weight of any current
transgression. Rasmus has been letting Iris down in small ways for years. Without
reference to the history between two people, Rasmus’s motives in a single-instance
snapshot cannot tell us all we need to know about his worthiness of Iris’ trust.
Scenario 4 Accidental Trustworthiness
In Scenario 4, Rasmus tells Iris the truth… but only because he believes himself to be
talking to someone else. Iris is calling from their mutual friend Fia’s phone. Rasmus has
historically been a diligent, caring, and reliable friend to Fia, and his commitment to
telling her that he is in The Prancing Pony is right now wholly benevolent. However,
The Prancing Pony is a busy and loud establishment and Rasmus does not realise that he
is actually speaking with Iris – a girl he loathes and would have lied to if he had known
he was speaking to her.
II.2 Dominant Views on Trustworthiness: Problems 168
Counterintuitively, in Scenario 4, Rasmus is trustworthy on all accounts. As
discussed already in relation to three-place trust (I.2.3), three-place trustworthiness is,
like the Gettier cases, subject to a form of ‘accidental success’, where we want to say
that a person fails to be trusting/trustworthy to their trustee (Iris), but our account leaves
us with no way to do it.
Scenario 5 Benevolent Lie
As in Scenario 1, Rasmus has no commitment to telling Iris the truth at all. Again, he
outright lies, this time saying that he is still at work when he is in fact drinking merrily
at The Prancing Pony with a group of their mutual friends. Yet, unlike in Scenario 1, in
Scenario 5 Rasmus has a good reason for lying. Iris’ friends have all met up in secret
this evening with the express purpose of organising a surprise birthday party for her,
planned for the following weekend.
Rasmus has failed to tell the truth and was never committed to it, so in Scenario 5 he
is unjustly rendered untrustworthy on both strong and weak three-place trustworthiness.
Sadly, the exonerating reasons behind his lack of commitment seem to make no
difference. Specific motivations are requirements added to three-place trustworthiness;
being unselfish or benevolent does not serve to make a person worthy of trust according
to three-place accounts if they were never even remotely committed to doing what the
truster entrusts. This is highly counterintuitive, since Rasmus’s failure to do what Iris is
entrusting him to do, far from making him unworthy of her trust, seems to be an integral
part of what it is to be a decent trustworthy friend to her.
Scenario 6 Misidentified Untrustworthiness
In Scenario 6, as in Scenario 5, Rasmus lies to Iris when she calls and asks him where
he is. Only this time, he went along to the surprise-party-planning-gathering to get all
the details so that he could later ruin the happy surprise. Rasmus, rubbing his hands
together in wicked glee, intends to wait for the most devastating moment to let slip to
Iris about the surprise party in order to get back at her for some imagined slight.
Here, both strong and weak three-place trustworthiness positively identify Rasmus
as untrustworthy. This is some small victory. The problem is, neither version can
II.2 Dominant Views on Trustworthiness: Problems 169
identify the reason why Rasmus is not worthy of Iris’ trust. The strong version tells us
that Rasmus is untrustworthy because he failed to do, and the weak version because he
was not committed to doing, what Iris entrusted him to do. Yet Rasmus is untrustworthy
not because he lied to Iris (her true friends did that), nor because he was uncommitted to
truth (again, neither were her true friends), but because he is out to get her! If Rasmus is
lying with malicious intent, then the strong and weak versions might succeed in
rendering him untrustworthy (which is what we want) but for the wrong reason.
Scenario 7 Manipulative Honesty
In Scenario 7, Rasmus finds himself at The Prancing Pony this evening on a disastrous
blind date his mother has set up for him. Rasmus excuses himself from the table and
shares this mortifying truth with Iris when she unexpectedly calls for a chat. Iris thinks
her dear sweet friend Rasmus is confiding in her. Yet she could not be more wrong.
Rasmus despises Iris and wants her fired from their mutual workplace (preferably with
considerable humiliation). He has reckoned that the best way to make this happen is by
befriending her, so that he can learn some incriminating facts about her that he can use
against her in the future. His openness, honesty and friendliness towards Iris are false…
a ticking time bomb…
The strong version of three-place trustworthiness can find no fault with Rasmus
here, yet neither can the weak version, since Rasmus is both competent and committed
to doing what Iris entrusts him to do… for now. If we require Rasmus’ actions to be
underpinned by benevolent motivations, then we may potentially secure the right
answer in Scenario 7, but as we have already seen, these additional motivational
requirements will not fix things in every case (Scenarios 3,4,5), and, there are others…
Scenario 8 Untrustworthy Truster
In Scenario 8, Rasmus is Iris’ employee, and, having worked hours of unpaid overtime
every night this week, he has left the office a few minutes early and headed to The
Prancing Pony to enjoy a well-deserved pint. When Iris calls to ask him where he is,
Rasmus desperately wants to lie, yet he is utterly terrified of Iris and has not the guile to
do it. Iris is not a trustworthy truster. She does not engender genuinely loyal, honest,
II.2 Dominant Views on Trustworthiness: Problems 170
caring employees. Her aim is unquestioning obedience, and she secures
‘trustworthiness’ with fear-tactics.
Unable to discriminate between an unwilling subordinate and a willing trustee, both
strong and weak three-place trustworthiness render Rasmus trustworthy in Scenario 8.
And, since his motivations for telling Iris the truth were not malicious, here again, as in
Scenarios 3, 4, and 5, the addition of this motivational requirement makes no difference.
In Scenario 8, all versions of three-place trustworthiness result in the wrong outcome.
The outcome is wrong, because Rasmus is not trustworthy here, but compliant. Cruel
masters cannot trust their slaves, which is why they need their iron fists.
Scenario 8 highlights two important things. 1) When evaluating trustworthiness, we
consider the counterfactual: would Rasmus have lied, if he could have brought himself
to it? Such counterfactuals, though, are not considered relevant in any accounts of
trustworthiness I have seen; 2) Trust and trustworthiness are qualities of relationships;
the truster’s intentions, personality, and habits, i.e. their trustworthiness can disturb the
trustee’s worthiness of trust too.
Scenario 9 Moral Trustee
In Scenario 9, Rasmus is largely indifferent to Iris. He does not know her very well and
means her neither good nor ill will. Moreover, he is a conscientious person, and has
thought long and hard about right and wrong. He has made diagrams, done moral
calculations, read all the great philosophers, and has come up with a rule – always tell
the truth so long as the benefits of doing so are not outweighed by the costs. This time,
circumstances were such that his moral calculations happened to be in favour of doing
what Iris entrusted him to do, so, that is what he did.
Rasmus, fully competent and genuinely committed, with no ill or selfish motives,
did what Iris entrusted him to do. As such, according to all versions, he is trustworthy.
However, had his moral calculations come out differently, Rasmus would have lied, and
(this is the important bit) he would have done so no matter what the consequences of his
lie would have been for Iris. Although Rasmus can be ‘trusted to do the right thing’, can
Iris trust him? I think not. A devout consequentialist like Scenario 9 Rasmus will do the
II.2 Dominant Views on Trustworthiness: Problems 171
right thing by their trustee very often, but the astute truster knows that friendships with
devout consequentialists (devout anything) are potentially dangerous.
Scenario 10 Social Norm-follower
Finally, in Scenario 10, Rasmus does not much like Iris – he finds her boring – but
again he tells her the truth, harbouring a general sense of human goodwill towards her.
But this time it is not because he thinks it is the right thing to do, but simply because it
is what people do. Rasmus is not a morally virtuous person. He is a common or garden
variety social chameleon, and he has found himself living among people who are for the
most part friendly, polite, helpful and prone to telling the truth unless there is a good
reason not to. When Iris called and asked him where he was, he reflexively told her…
because… that’s what people do.
Rasmus did, and was competent and committed to doing, what he was entrusted to
do, and he lacked any ill motive. All versions render Rasmus trustworthy in Scenario
10, and some might agree with this assessment. Still, my sense at least is that Scenario
10 Rasmus, though he is not made untrustworthy by these actions, has not done enough
to deserve trustworthiness, since his doing what Iris entrusted him to do had nothing to
do with her. He was just behaving normally, according to the behavioural norms of his
society. Would those norms have been different, if his society underwent a social shift,
he would have behaved differently.
In summary, it is surprisingly easy to produce scenarios that draw out the seemingly
endless limitations of three-place trustworthiness. In addition to the ten presented, there
are more complex Gettier-like scenarios in which Rasmus tells the truth but only by
accident; mistaken identity scenarios in which Rasmus has no ill-will but only because
he has wrongly believed the person before him is his friend; moral dilemma scenarios
where Rasmus lies but only because telling the truth would betray someone else; mental
illness/confusion scenarios where Rasmus harbours ill-will that is wholly irrational;
truster-fault scenarios where Iris is to blame for Rasmus’ failure; compulsion scenarios
where Rasmus does what Iris entrusts but did not seem to have any choice in it;
unavoidably self-interested scenarios where doing what Iris entrusts benefits Rasmus.
As this subsection demonstrated, when we actually apply three-place trustworthiness to
II.2 Dominant Views on Trustworthiness: Problems 172
the complex linguistic, ethical, social, cultural, technological, emotional, interpersonal,
and historical conditions under which human beings operate in and weigh their dealings
with one another, all versions of three-place trustworthiness routinely produce
counterintuitive and conflicting results.
II.2.3 Three-place scenarios: discussion
Subsection II.2.3 discusses how the failure of three-place trustworthiness to handle the
everyday contextual complexities presented in the previous subsection, provides us with
reason to doubt that it can do the job of accounting for trustworthiness as it actually
exists in human relationships. Regarding the proposition that the concept of
trustworthiness should instead be framed in such a way as to provide a wide-scope
explanatory device suitable for use in multiple areas of academic inquiry, this
dissertation once again suggests that there are other concepts better suited to this task.
What we need is an account of trustworthiness that can differentiate between what we
do, and who we are in relation to special others. Such an account would have no
necessary and sufficient conditions, no particular motivational requirements, no set
formulae. It would amount to a discussion about trustworthiness, not a definition.
This Subsection presents a handful of philosophers whose intuitions diverge
significantly from my own as I have offered them in the previous subsection, with the
aim of shedding some light on the distinct nature of the phenomena each of us is
speaking to. Before proceeding with this though, it is with regret that I feel I must
defend my approach. Recently, in the philosophy on trust literature, it has become
popular to shy away from thought-experiments such as the one provided in II.2.2,
precisely since ‘intuitions differ’ about them. Those who have made arguments along
these lines include Hardin (2006), Faulkner (2017), Jones (2017), Nickel (2017), and T.
W. Simpson (2012). Instead of inquiring as to what trust and trustworthiness are, the
current fashion is to ask what role we want the concepts of trust and trustworthiness to
play in our conceptual scheme.
For example, Paul Faulkner provides an account, not of trust and trustworthiness as
such, but of “our understanding of these notions” (2017: 117), while Karen Jones
provides a “conceptual role argument” that “begins by looking at the normative point of
II.2 Dominant Views on Trustworthiness: Problems 173
having such concepts”. She asks “what conceptual role do we want [trust and
trustworthiness] to do?” (2017: 99). Russell Hardin says that the only valuable account
of trust and trustworthiness is the one which can yield “explanations of behaviour and
social institutions” (2006: 16), and Philip Nickel advises that we should grade accounts
of trust based on their “explanatory potential”, where those accounts that “explain”
more phenomena being more highly rated (2017: 195-213). Lastly, Thomas Simpson
contends that because of the multiplicity of definitions of ‘trust’, we cannot say that
trust/worthiness is this, since counterexamples can always be found. He says that all we
can do with a notion like trust is to give a genealogical account of what is presumably a
“family of concepts” sharing a “single ancestor” which he identifies as cooperation
(2012: 551).
Philosophy, as it is understood in this dissertation, is the business of asking what
there is (and how do we know that we know it), and not asking what we want there to
be (and how do we define it). Whether or not this dissertation succeeds, it has set out to
say something of value about trust and trustworthiness and takes this project to demand
the examination of human relationships. Though Rasmus and Iris are imaginary, they
have not been forced into any incredible ‘purely philosophical’ (meaning purely
imaginary) thought experiments. There are no zombies, brains in vats, homunculi, or
wretched little girls locked away in black-and-white rooms. They are ordinary people
doing ordinary things such as accidently providing false information, telling little lies to
conceal surprises, and engaging in moral reasoning and social norm-following. What
our intuitions tell about how these contextual influences affect their worthiness of trust,
we can take to tell us something about what sort of thing trustworthiness is, and, where
our intuitions diverge can tell us where our assumptions diverge, not where
trustworthiness branches off into another kind.
For example, Domenicucci and Holton (2017: 152) discuss a scenario similar to the
ones I have presented, taken initially from Hieronymi (2008b). This scenario involves
Jim and Jules, who have agreed to meet at a restaurant. Jules thinks – quite
unreasonably – that Jim will not show up. Domenicucci and Holton hold the intuition
that if Jim does show up, then he could rightly complain that Jules’ lack of confidence
betrays a lack of trust. Yet if Jim does not show up, then, according to them, he forfeits
II.2 Dominant Views on Trustworthiness: Problems 174
his right to the complaint (2017: 154). Here, my own person intuitions diverge from
theirs. By my lights, a trustee’s entitlement to the complaint that they are not really
trusted depends always on why they failed to show up, not whether or not they actually
did. If Jim’s failure to show up was not his fault, then Jules’s complaint that the failure
signals a lack of trustworthiness is undeserved. Once we get a handle on the different
intuitions that such thought experiments draw out, our assumptions become clearer. In
this case, I hold the intuition that I do because I assume that our trustworthiness is not
negated by events well beyond our control. Once this assumption is clear, reasons for
thinking that it is sound can be provided, such as: in the actual world, in our actual
interpersonal relationships, events beyond our control tend not to strip us of our
worthiness of trust. Jim loses the entitlement to complain about Jules’s lack of trust only
if his failure was the result of a lack of trustworthiness, not when it was the result of,
say, sudden illness or accident.
The fact that there is a difference between Domenicucci and Holton’s intuitions and
my own, reflects our different assumptions about trustworthiness, and, as this
dissertation has argued, the complex reality of trustworthiness, and not the reality that
there are “many kinds of trustworthiness”. It is not evidence that we should give up the
game and just decide what we want trustworthiness to be. It is an indication that one of
us is right about trustworthiness and one of us is wrong (or that neither of us knows
what we are talking about). The point is, such disagreement is valuable. If your own
intuitions about my ten scenarios differ from those presented here, then good: tell me
why, and we shall be doing some philosophy.
Moving on, given the inability of strong three-place trustworthiness to secure (what
I take to be) the correct result in so many of our ten scenarios, those whose intuitions
agree with mine might wonder why it exists as an account of trustworthiness at all. As
the Danish philosopher Knud Ejler Løgstrup put it, trustworthiness cannot be “merely a
matter of fulfilling the other person’s expectations and granting his or her wishes”
(1997: 7) as the strong version has it. In answer to this, this dissertation has already
provided a historical explanation for the existence of strong three-place trustworthiness
stemming from the way the word ‘trustworthiness’ has been used synonymously with
‘reliability’ in academic discourse in the philosophy of science (see: II.1.3).
II.2 Dominant Views on Trustworthiness: Problems 175
Yet even in the most recent (2017) philosophy on trust literature, strong three-place
trustworthiness has a number of active proponents. Edward Hinchman has said that in
all cases other than the special case of promissory trust, trust cannot be what he calls
“disappointed yet unbetrayed” (2017: 59-63). In our language, Hinchman takes it that a
trustee cannot fail to do what they have been entrusted to do and still be worthy of trust,
since failure quite literally constitutes betrayal. Giving an example of a trustor (Andrew)
entrusting the safekeeping of a leaf to a trustee (Bernice) he says:
Could trust be disappointed yet unbetrayed? No. If Bernice disappoints his trust by failing
to produce the result – keep the leaf safe – that Andrew is relying on her to produce, then
she betrays his trust. (2017: 59)
For Hinchman, success is a necessary condition for trustworthiness. He qualifies this
with a further necessary condition that a trustee must “manifest concern” for the needs
of the trustor. Yet, he clarifies that this concern “need not be felt”, only make us
“disposed to act” (like automaton) as if we are concerned (2017: 59). He says:
Two conditions are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for unbetrayed trust: (i) the
trusted must actually produce the result that the trusting is relying on her to produce, and (ii)
the trusted must do so in a way that manifests appropriate responsiveness to a subset of the
trusting’s needs: specifically, those needs recognition and acknowledgement of which
inform the agreement at the core of the trust relation. (2017: 60)
If we apply Hinchman’s framework to Scenarios 6 & 7 Rasmus – the Rasmus who
ruined the surprise party and the Rasmus who is trying to get Iris fired – then, both
Rasmuses are trustworthy. While Scenario 2 Rasmus – the Rasmus who is
understandably lost – is not trustworthy. In fact, Hinchman’s account finds
trustworthiness where there is none, and untrustworthiness where there is
trustworthiness, in every single one of our ten scenarios. Disagreement with regard to
outliers or ambiguous cases is one thing, and this subsection began by explicitly
welcoming the clarity it can bring. But Hinchman’s intuitions diverge from my own to
such an extent that we simply cannot be speaking of the same phenomenon. The
question is, which one of us has identified trust/worthiness, and which one of us is
speaking to something else (assuming one of us has got things more or less right). By
II.2 Dominant Views on Trustworthiness: Problems 176
my own reasoning, if Rasmus’ failure was innocent, honest, or for Iris’ own benefit, or
if his success was malicious, underhanded, or part of some greater scheme to harm her,
then such details must make a difference to his trustworthiness according to whatever
account we adopt, again, since such details would make a difference to whether or not
we trusted Rasmus if we were Iris. We may still rely on him, take his word as true, or
cooperate with him, but such acts can be accomplished in the absence of trust.
Colin O’Neil, though, clearly sides with Hinchman:
A betrayal of trust violates an obligation to do specifically as trusted. If you trust me to pick
you up, it is possible for me to betray your trust by failing to pick you up, even if I take
steps to ensure that your interests are protected by `arranging another ride for you, or by
giving you a timely warning. For this to be the case, the relevant obligation (in being
trustworthy) must be to do specifically as trusted. (2017: 71)
He also says:
A betrayal of trust is only a failure to do as trusted. If you trust me to pick you up, but don’t
trust me not to steal from you, then only my failure to pick you up can betray your trust.
The obligation (again, in being trustworthy) must be exclusively an obligation to do as
trusted. (2017: 71)
According to O’Neil, then, Rasmus does betray Iris if, for example, he successfully
arranges for their mutual friend to call instead and tell her that they are in The Prancing
Pony because his own phone is out of battery, but he does not betray her trust if he tells
her (truthfully) that they are in The Prancing Pony but plans to murder her shortly after
she arrives. In O’Neil’s view, our dear thoughtful friends who go out of their way to
ensure someone else supplies us with correct information when they cannot provide it
themselves are untrustworthy, but our murderers, if we are trusting them to murder us
and they manage it, are worthy of our trust.
Surely Hinchman and O’Neil, and others who adopt strong three-place
trustworthiness, are speaking not of trust and trustworthiness, but of credibility,
reliability, predictability, expectedness. In “Being Pragmatic About Trust”, remember
(I.2.2), Philip Nickel recommends the adoption of an analysis of trustworthiness that
II.2 Dominant Views on Trustworthiness: Problems 177
makes no mention of the trustee or trustor’s thoughts, emotions, or intentions, so that
the concepts may be more broadly applicable (2017: 195-213). Specifically, by
removing private mental content that is difficult to determine empirically from the
account, Nickel hopes the concept of trustworthiness will become useful to science. A
compelling (though stale) idea, this is just what the radical behaviourist B.F. Skinner
(1974) and his contemporaries tried to do mid-last century – though not with trust –
with the whole of psychology. The notion that trust can be described and explained
without making reference to inner mental events or internal psychological processes is
straight out of the behaviourist textbook. As Wilfred Sellers said, all a person needs to
be described as a behaviourist is that they insist on confirming “hypotheses about
psychological events in terms of behavioural criteria” (1963: 22); this is just what
proponents of strong three-place trust and trustworthiness are insisting we do.
Thanks to the cognitive revolution, radical behaviourism is no longer how we do
psychology. It should no longer be how we do philosophy. The result of stripping
trust/worthiness of all their complex veiled humanness, is the lumping together of
innocent and culpable failures, both moral and interpersonal, and identifying all of them
as betrayals of trust. The upside of this, as we saw in Scenario 3, is that by condemning
every failure as untrustworthy, we will not accidentally exonerate any guilty party. But
the unacceptable downside is that we condemn many innocent parties and give away the
ability to make an important conceptual distinction that we in fact do make in our
dealings with one another in the actual world.
Moreover, without considering the private inner world of the trustee, close
counterfactual scenarios, and the history the trustor and trustee share, we severely limit
what we can say about the nature of their innocence or culpability. In many instances, a
trustee’s innocence or culpability will have nothing to do with their failure per se, and
everything to do with why they failed or succeeded, or what has happened between them
and the trustor in the past. Determining trustworthiness is no straightforward affair: it is
more art than science, being not an investigative activity, but a creative one. Science has
many other concepts at its disposal that are far more appropriate to the task than
trustworthiness. Concepts that do not suggest any relationship: precise, accurate,
predictable, certain, consistent, and of course reliable, to name a few. With so many
II.2 Dominant Views on Trustworthiness: Problems 178
concepts better suited, we need not make trustworthiness ‘valuable to science’. Instead,
along with love, trust, and forgiveness, trustworthiness must remain one of the
illustrative and clarifying devices of the humanities. These concepts, left vague and
imprecise, can capture what is imprecise, complex, inconsistent, and contradictory.
They can explain us to one another as they always have done.
Not all those who favour a three-place account of course, favour the strong version.
But as we have seen, ‘fixes’ to what is still a three-place account – requirements of
benevolence, unselfishness, competence, or commitment – still often fail in common
everyday examples. Unlike Hinchman and O’Neil’s accounts, Stephen Wright’s
account, for example, allows that a trustee be able to disregard the trust that has been
placed in them, when it is appropriate to do so, without losing their trustworthiness
(2010: 622). Accordingly, in many of our scenarios in which strong three-place
trustworthiness fails, Wright’s account does manage to secure the intuitively correct
outcome for Rasmus. Yet because Wright’s account locates trustworthiness not in the
consideration of the value of the trustee, but in the value of their trust (see II.1.4) it
makes Scenario 7 Rasmus – the one who is out to get Iris – trustworthy, since he no
doubt values her trust (albeit for underhanded reasons).
Somewhat absurdly, what solves the problem in accounts which have specific
motivational requirements in some cases, becomes the problem in others. For example,
Wright’s account precludes a trustee from having any selfish motives, but again, though
this condition helps sometimes to secure the correct result, in others, it leads us to
preclude the trustee from being counted as worthy of trust on rather spurious grounds.
Wright says we must include a no-selfishness clause in an account of trustworthiness
since no rational person would end up at the position that “lazy self-interest would be
more valuable than, or should take priority over, a trusting relationship” (2010: 623).
While this dissertation is in agreement with Wright’s assessment that trusting
relationships are always more valuable than lazy self-interest, the reality is that we
regularly end up acting in a contrary manner, and often, it is our reason – our ability to
rationalise – that got us there. Failing to do what we have been “entrusted to do” just
does not equate to a failure to weigh the value of a relationship appropriately on most
occasions. The reason why we do not weigh our relationships when we make decisions
II.2 Dominant Views on Trustworthiness: Problems 179
about what to do in most everyday circumstances is that we know our relationships are
not in jeopardy in most everyday circumstances. Countless small failures of selflessness
do not manage to strip us of our worthiness of trust (or for that matter our worthiness of
love). What long-term relationship has not survived a letdown, has not survived the
charge ‘but I was counting on you’? Trust and trustworthiness, ongoing complex
experiences, in one way are the ability to endure such lapses and not to be made or
broken by them.
When a three-place account is adopted, even when it is tempered with motivational
requirements as Wright’s account is, we always end up back at the same place with
single-instance failures. Failures of benevolence or care, failures of selflessness or
honesty, failures of competence or commitment, failures of morality or sociality,
failures to do what we are entrusted to do – all are capable of destroying our
trustworthiness. This dissertation is not suggesting that this never happens. Some acts
are so egregious that they do, in an instant, destroy any chance we might have of
remaining worthy of our trustee’s trust. Even when this happens though, it is not the act
itself, but what the act reveals – an unforgivable lack of care. Our trustees are not
transformed from worthy to unworthy if they put themselves first now and then, or if
they do not always manage to texture our interactions with palpable goodwill (‘no, for
the last time I do not know where your bloody socks are… you can bloody well go to
school without them… I don’t care if you get bloody blisters… now get in the car!’).
Here, I think, is a good point to say something about the practice, so connected to
trust/worthiness, of demanding explanations. Demanding explanations of those we trust
is a crucial intermediary step between our epistemic-update (‘you didn’t do what I
entrusted you to do’) and our ‘trust-update’ (‘you betrayed me in an unforgivable way’,
cue resentment, betrayal, grief, and withdrawal from the relationship). When we share
history, share a relationship with someone, and they blunder, we pause, and we usually
ask them why. When it comes to our trust-updates as opposed to our epistemic-updates,
there is so much more to consider. One way we can frame the problem with three-place
trustworthiness is that it is too set in the public world. It is interested only in what
actually happened in the publicly-observable phenomena: did the trustee do what they
were entrusted to do? Three-place trustworthiness does not permit the consideration of
II.2 Dominant Views on Trustworthiness: Problems 180
what might have come to pass. This is an unacceptable failing, as in determining
trustworthiness, we are not just interested in what actually happened, as we are when we
make epistemic updates. Trust does not pass judgement on so little information, but
always asks the question “what was it you were trying to do”?
II.2.4 Summary of dominant views on trustworthiness: problems
Section II.2 highlighted the limitations of one-place trustworthiness and three-place
trustworthiness. Subsection II.2.1 observed that unlike the virtues, which are (or aim to
be) one-place, trustworthiness takes an object, and briefly outlined some ways in which
trustworthiness and trust interact with morality. Subsection II.3.2 demonstrated that
although various versions of three-place trustworthiness do manage to pick-out
trustworthiness in some scenarios, they cannot do so consistently, or without error. In
II.2.3, I defended the utility of such ‘thought experiments’ and debated what it means
that intuitions vary with regard to them. This dissertation proposes that those whose
intuitions vary considerably from those presented here, are speaking to some other
phenomenon, such as cooperation, expectation or reliability.
II.3 Rich Trustworthiness or Poor Trustworthiness? 181
II.3 Rich Trustworthiness or Poor Trustworthiness?
Since Karen Jones has written more on the nature of trustworthiness than any other
modern philosopher, her influential view – rich trustworthiness – warrants special
consideration. While Jones has contributed a number of important insights to the
growing philosophical literature on trust and trustworthiness, in this section I want to
draw attention to an unexpected and worrying result of her view: specifically, that it
precludes certain groups of people from being considered as candidates for
trustworthiness based on their communication differences or difficulties alone. This
problem is part of a wider one; the consequence of providing narrow definitions of
concepts like trustworthiness, concepts that have historically been used to demarcate
and establish our very personhood and place in a shared humanity, is that we risk
excluding those whose experiences and expressions do not fit our definitions,
potentially contributing to their dehumanisation.
This section contains two separate arguments for rejecting Jones’ view. In
subsection II.3.1, I provide an overview of rich trustworthiness, underscoring that rich
trustworthiness is a three-place account of trustworthiness. In the case of rich
trustworthiness, what is expected of the trustee over and above being competent and
committed to doing what they have been entrusted to do, is that they successfully signal
their competence and willingness to be counted on. It is proposed that this is more
accurately described as rich reliability, rather than rich trustworthiness. In II.3.2, I
provide an ethical argument against accepting rich trustworthiness, on the basis that
accepting it as an account of what it is to be worthy of trust incorrectly and potentially
harmfully precludes many individuals from the possibility of being counted as
trustworthy, and, no one should be considered untrustworthy for lacking the kind of
social skills that figure in Jones’ account of rich trustworthiness. To be clear, my ethical
argument here does not render trustworthiness itself a moral notion. Like trust,
trustworthiness is an interpersonal notion. The argument that follows regards the ethical
consequences of treating trustworthiness as a matter of our reliability.
II.3 Rich Trustworthiness or Poor Trustworthiness? 182
II.3.1 Jones’ rich trustworthiness (rich reliability)
Let us first examine Jones’ motivations for rich trustworthiness. We saw in II.2.1, that
Jones is one philosopher who is awake to the problems associated with moralised
trustworthiness. She provides an account of trustworthiness that distances itself from
“moralised norms” by describing what she takes to be the distinctly non-moralised
“norms of trust and trustworthiness” captured by the complaint “but I was counting on
you”:
‘But I was counting on you!’… is the signature complaint of those who think that their trust
has been betrayed. Thus, by coming to understand when and why the complaint has
normative force, we can explore the shape, source, and force of central norms governing
trust and trustworthiness. Many moralize those norms [of trust and trustworthiness] and
analyse trust as ascribing, or even grounding, an obligation to be trustworthy. Against such
moralizing moves, this chapter argues that the norms of trust and trustworthiness are not
themselves moral, have the potential to sit uneasily with moral norms, and require external
moral regulation. Nevertheless, these norms [of trust and trustworthiness] have genuine
normative force, a force that derives from the pressing interest that we have as finite,
reflective, and social creatures in being able directly to recruit the agency of another. (2017:
90)
As this passage demonstrates, Jones’ general overarching motivation is to separate
trustworthiness from morality and instead highlight its apparent role in human agency.
This aim makes sense, given that she sees the primary purpose of trust and
trustworthiness as devices that extend our agency via the non-coercive recruitment of
the agency of others (2017: 101-03). As Carolyn McLeod nicely summarises:
Jones argues that the concepts [trust and trustworthiness] exist essentially because of the
need we have to be able to count on one another. Hence, in her view, trustworthiness
involves a willingness to factor into our practical deliberation the likelihood that others are
counting on us; and it can even require that we signal this willingness to others. (2015:
Section 1)
This provides us with the background motivation we need. Now for the background
assumptions. As we know, what all three-place accounts have in common is that they
II.3 Rich Trustworthiness or Poor Trustworthiness? 183
share the same underlying logical construction, taking trust and trustworthiness to
involve minimally 1) a truster, 2) a trustee, and 3) that which is entrusted. Jones
endorses her own version of weak three-place trustworthiness, whereby the trustee must
be both competent and committed to doing what they have been entrusted to do, by the
truster (2012: 70-1; 2017: 99).
Yet because she also takes trustworthiness to be a device the very purpose of which
is to extend our agency, Jones astutely recognises a problem with her own version of
three-place trustworthiness. The trustee’s competence and commitment alone are not
enough to ensure that dependency relations run smoothly in the way that they
commonly do. To extend our agency via dependence on the trustee, to take advantage of
our trustee’s competence and commitment, we need to know about it. The trustee must
also be competent at signalling their particular competencies and willingness to be
relied upon to the truster, otherwise such dependency relations may never be realised, as
she explains:
we want the competent who can be counted on in the ways we need to identify themselves,
and we want those who are not up for a particular form of dependency, whether because
they lack the competence or the inclination, to identify themselves before we count on them
in ways that are apt to be disappointed. We want those we can trust regarding a particular
domain to signal their trustworthiness to us, so we can work out where—and where not—to
turn. (2012: 74)
Jones rightly identifies that “counting on” one another in the way she describes is a non-
moralised way in which we extend our agency via recruiting the agency of others, and,
as she says, it is impeded if we do not signal (communicate) effectively to one another.
In short, Jones’ observation can be summed up as: ‘what use is it that I could have
counted on you, if you didn’t tell me that I could?’ Hence, she distinguishes
trustworthiness (weak three-place trustworthiness) from rich trustworthiness, and
defines the latter in the following way:
B is richly trustworthy with respect to A just in case: (i) B is willing and able reliably to
signal to A those domains in which B is competent and will take the fact that A is counting
on her, were A to do so, to be a compelling reason for acting as counted on and (ii) There is
II.3 Rich Trustworthiness or Poor Trustworthiness? 184
a non-trivial number of relatively central domains in which B will be responsive to the fact
of A’s dependency in the manner specified in (i). (2012: 74; 2017: 94)
About this definition, notice that being both competent and committed in a particular
domain and able to reliably signal that competence and commitment, precisely because
it still pertains to a particular domain, is still just to be three-place trustworthy (reliable);
it is simply to be better at it. Like all three-place accounts, Jones’ rich trustworthiness
makes trustworthiness a matter of the trustee’s success or failure. What rich
trustworthiness adds, over and above our success in simply being competent and
committed, is our success in signalling as much.
In contrast, the two-place trustworthiness endorsed here involves only the truster
and a trustee (A and B), and how they experience one another over time. It is not a
requirement of two-place trust that the truster signal their intention to count on the
trustee, and it is not a requirement of two-place trustworthiness that the trustee signal
that they can be counted on. The fundamental difference between the two-place account
argued for here and any three-place account, is that according to a two-place account
‘what is entrusted’ or ‘what we are being counted on to do’ does not form any part of
what it is to trust or be worthy of it. What distinguishes trust from reliance then on a
two-place account, is that reliance involves the third-place X (‘counting on’, ‘depending
on’ or ‘entrusting’ to do something specific), while trust, does not.
For Jones though, counting on and being counted on, with regard to a specific
domain, are what differentiate trust and trustworthiness from reliance and reliability.
This distinction is similar to Stephen Darwall’s distinction between ‘expectations of’ (B
to do X) and ‘expectations that’ (B will do X) (see I.3.1):
To count on something or someone is to embed in your plans and goals an expectation that,
if false, means you risk being left worse off than you otherwise would have been. Counting
on is related to the notion of predictive expectation, or expectation that (Hollis 1998), but
having a predictive expectation is neither necessary nor sufficient for counting on
something or someone. The toppling of predictive expectations can be met with mere
surprise, even pleasant surprise. Not so when the things that we count on coming to pass fail
to occur. That failure comes, by definition, at a cost and so is met with disappointment,
II.3 Rich Trustworthiness or Poor Trustworthiness? 185
frustration, let down, or—in cases where what we are counting on is the agency of another
and our relationship is one of trust—with feelings of betrayal. (Jones 2012: 91)
According to Jones – and others (see I.1.1) – if we trust someone, and they fail to do
what we are counting on them to do, then we will by definition experience “feelings of
betrayal”. What distinguishes trust and reliance for Jones isn’t that one is two-place and
the other is three-place. Instead, it is betrayal, which is supposedly a reaction we
necessarily have when we were trusting, and the trustee fails to do what we were
counting on them to do.
Yet, as we have seen many times now, we can trust someone and be counting on
them, and they can fail to do what we are counting on them to do without this leading to
any feelings of betrayal, and without it in any way impacting their worthiness of our
trust. In certain circumstances good trustees will fail to do what we are counting on
them to do because of their worthiness of our trust, and bad trustees will succeed in
doing what we are counting on them to do because of their unworthiness. This is
because we are not always best-placed to know where to place our normative
expectations: trusting, moral, predictive, or otherwise (see II.2).
Jones’ rich trustworthiness does not avoid any of the pitfalls we saw in II.2, since all
the complicated contextual realities, which we observed in the scenarios apply equally
to our failures at signalling. In many normal everyday circumstances, our success or
failure at signalling correctly what others can count on us for will simply have nothing
whatsoever to do with our trustworthiness. Mistakes, misunderstandings, and
misinterpretations are commonplace, and though they no doubt impact our ability to
extend our agency, they usually do not make anyone “feel betrayed” or strip anyone of
their worthiness of trust. Moreover, in many circumstances we can fail to signal
correctly what we can be counted on for because we are worthy of trust, and we can
succeed in signalling correctly because we are unworthy. Such situations are captured
when we say things like:
I was always coming to get you, but I didn’t tell you that you could count on me to pick you
up because I wanted it to be a surprise!
II.3 Rich Trustworthiness or Poor Trustworthiness? 186
I told her she could count on us to pick her up, now she’ll be waiting there for us like a lamb
to the slaughter!
There are ‘trustworthy bad signallers’ and ‘untrustworthy good signallers’ just as there
are ‘trustworthy immoral people’ and ‘untrustworthy moral people’. When he was in his
last months with us, my father-in-law was unable to signal reliably. He would tell us
that we could count on him to pick up something for dinner, and then he would forget.
In the end we could not count on him for anything much at all. He did not even know
who my children (his grandchildren) and I were. He would say to us “Who are you? It
doesn’t matter… I know that you are someone that I love”. Somehow, he held on to the
strong sense that we were special to him, and as this sense continued to guide his
conduct towards us, he remained worthy of our trust to his last notwithstanding his
declining social communication abilities. My mother-in-law, in contrast, with all her
faculties and adept at social communication: “You lot can expect to count on me for
nothing!” (and she was right) has never been worthy of my trust, and never will be.
With rich trustworthiness, Jones has identified social-communication norms, norms
related to our shared interest in extending our agency, and she has distinguished them
from other moralised norms. But she has not identified trustworthiness and trust. Being
au fait with the norms of social communication does not guarantee anything in terms of
our worthiness of trust, just as being au fait with the moral norms does not.
Jones makes a failure to signal correctly what we can and cannot be counted on for a
failure of rich trustworthiness. But a failure to signal correctly is a failure of social
communication, not a failure of trustworthiness. As ever, complex enigmatic trust and
trustworthiness continue to defy philosophical attempts to define them and neatly carve
them up. When we start from the wrong place to begin with, with a three-place
conception, then tagging a condition or two on such as requiring the trustee possess
‘goodwill’ or in the case of rich trustworthiness, ‘good signalling’ will not do. Though
being able to recruit the agency of others is often a valuable upshot of trusting
relationships as this dissertation has acknowledged (I.3.2), this is not what trust and
trustworthiness are. After all, we can non-coercively recruit the agency of those we do
not know, those we do not like, those we do not trust– that is precisely what currency
and contracts are for.
II.3 Rich Trustworthiness or Poor Trustworthiness? 187
With rich trustworthiness, Jones has drawn our attention to the significance of
successful social communication in dependency relations. She has reminded us that if
we are to effectively extend our agency via others, then we must avoid any confusion
about what we can, and cannot, be counted on for. She has also demonstrated that we
hold one another to account for failures of social communication in a non-moralised
way. What rich trustworthiness can do is provide a framework to conceptually separate
moral norms and social-communication norms, and appreciate the conditions required
for those social-communication norms to extend our agency successfully. But it cannot
sort out those who are worthy from those who are unworthy of our trust. What Jones has
identified in rich trustworthiness is a kind of ‘second-order reliability’, whereby the
chances of extending our agency via dependence on others are improved by successful
communication. For accuracy, just as we must understand trustworthiness as reliability,
we must understand rich trustworthiness as rich reliability.
In this subsection, I have referred to arguments made in previous sections to support
my claim that we must reject Jones’ rich trustworthiness as an account of
trustworthiness. To accept rich trustworthiness as trustworthiness is to make a category
error. I instead suggested that Jones’ important contribution is better understood as rich
reliability. I turn now to providing an ethical argument against rich trustworthiness.
II.3.2 The ethical problem with rich trustworthiness
Only months before her death aged 99, in a debate with Simon Blackburn and the
neuroscientist Colin Blakemore, Mary Midgley commented on Blakemore’s attempt to
gain traction on what it means to be human by excluding some people such as those
with advanced dementia:
I’m shocked and appalled by the move, of making definitions of what it is to be human such
that you can cut some people out. Being human is a very complicated thing, and as it is a
kind of compliment, if you start taking it away, you exclude a person from the group of
which we are all a part. This is no trivial matter. I don’t know what makes anybody want to
do it. (Midgley et al. 2016)
Those who see it as their place to do so, have tended to define humanness via a process
of exclusion, rather than inclusion. Those who are excluded, and so dehumanised, are
II.3 Rich Trustworthiness or Poor Trustworthiness? 188
done so on the basis of what they supposedly lack: intelligence, rationality, self-
determination, autonomy, individuality, integrity, subjectivity, sentiment, violability,
morality, pain-sensitivity, and worthiness of trust (Haslam 2006). As Caroline Howarth
wrote in “Race as Stigma: Positioning the Stigmatized as Agents, not Objects”:
The stigmatising representation of black youth as untrustworthy [my emphasis] and so
criminal pervades these boys’ everyday encounters – as they see that they – or more
precisely their skin is seen and treated in a particular way. This… leads to elaborate systems
of social exclusion and marginalisation. (Howarth 2006: 447)
As many political and social scientists have recognised, calling our enemies
‘untrustworthy’ has historically been used as a way to dehumanise them, and so justify
their murder:
Over time, prejudice paves the way for demonization and dehumanization. Name calling
begins. Enemies describe each other as animals, aliens, or witches. Yesterday's neighbours
become untrustworthy dogs... uncivilised savages without morals or ideology. Gradually,
enemies cease to be human; they become a scourge that needs to be expelled or "cleaned"
away. (Carter et al. 2015: 306)
And:
The foreigner, for instance, is seen at once as "wicked, untrustworthy, dirty," and "uncanny,
powerful and cunning." Similarly, according to the cannons of race prejudice, contradictory
qualities of exceptional prowess and extraordinary defect - ascribed to Orientals, Negroes,
Jews or any other group - together make them a menace toward whom customary restraints
on behavior do not obtain. The main conscious emotional concomitants of partial
dehumanization, as with prejudice, are hostility and fear. (Schwebel 2003: 66)
Rhetoric to the effect that an out-group ‘lacks trustworthiness’ helps them be seen as
subhuman, and, this can escalate a conflict by promoting prejudice and violence
(Cassidy et al. 2017; Kassin et al. 2014). In contrast, the charge of unreliability has not
been used to dehumanise in the same way. This is not surprising. While both can be
pejorative, ‘untrustworthy’ is chosen over ‘unreliable’ to describe those we wish to
justify violence towards because the former capitalises on our intuitive sense that one
II.3 Rich Trustworthiness or Poor Trustworthiness? 189
who is unworthy of my trust is one who is unworthy of me, below me, less than me,
whereas one who is unreliable might still be worthy of me (for example, children). So,
while ‘unreliable’ is still a negative charge, it does not carry the same weight, and is
unlikely to have the significant adverse implications that follow a charge of
‘untrustworthy’.
In this dissertation, I have been arguing that confusing trust with reliance, rich-
trustworthiness with rich-reliability, is likely to have deleterious consequences for our
theoretical understanding of a number of diverse phenomena. But this is only a
consequence for our clear-thinking. There is a far more insidious danger of adopting
strict three-place accounts of trustworthiness that find trustworthiness not in us but in
our behaviour, and one that is becoming all too prevalent in philosophy at that. By
narrowly defining the parameters of how fundamentally humanising qualities like
trustworthiness are expressed, we can unethically and unjustifiably contribute to the
dehumanisation of entire groups of individuals. We have a pressing obligation to reject
any three-place accounts that, via their definitions, formulae, and necessary conditions,
exclude in these ways.
To see how this all-too-familiar wrong has played out in relation to rich
trustworthiness, observe how – to ensure the signalling process between truster and
trustee runs smoothly – Jones says that trusters and trustees must adhere to the ‘norms
of trust and trustworthiness’ (social-communication norms). She identifies these, on the
trust side, as:
I. Pay attention to the signalling of others regarding the kinds of dependencies that
they may be up for from people like you.
II. Be aware of the different understandings of the background network of social
assumptions that form part of the standing fabric in which signalling takes place so
that you don’t misinterpret signals.
III. Take responsibility for communicating those dependencies, responsiveness to which
cannot be assumed given shared understandings of who can be counted on by whom
for what.
While on the trustworthiness side:
II.3 Rich Trustworthiness or Poor Trustworthiness? 190
I. Be aware of the trustor’s location in standing social systems of signalling and, as
required, counter-signal.
II. Be aware of different understandings of the background network of social
assumptions that form part of the standing fabric in which signalling takes place and
of what will be counted as counter-signalling.
III. Do not explicitly invite trust and then fail to follow through.
IV. Develop reflective awareness of capacity so as to avoid overly optimistic signalling.
(2017: 106).
Though this list is not meant to be comprehensive, the significance of our adherence to
these norms cannot be overstated. They supposedly govern our very entry into trust
relationships (2017: 106). Most concerningly, Jones claims that:
Because we [individuals who have no impairments in social communication] have a theory
of mind, we can make decisions that take into account the mental life of others. There is
thus available to us [but not to those who are impaired] a distinctive way of responding to
the fact of other agents’ dependency through recognising that very dependency. (2017: 99)
For Jones, the norms of trust and trustworthiness are possible only for those who
possess a ‘Theory of Mind’ (ToM). Jones goes so far as to call this ability the “heart of
trust” (2017: 100). She also claims that the connected ability to pay attention to
instilling and maintaining sensitivity to the fact that others are counting on us is one of
our “core people-making practices” (2017: 97), suggesting that deficits in this regard
risk ‘unmaking’ us as persons. At another point, she proposes that being able to count
on people meeting us in our dependency “makes possible the distinctive vulnerability of
intimacy” (2017: 100), again suggesting that one who is impaired in their ToM would
find intimacy impossible. So, why is this a problem?
To answer this, we need to understand something about the theory Jones makes
central to her account of trustworthiness. For those who are not familiar with it, the
ToM theory, adopted in philosophy by the drolly-dubbed ‘theory-theorists’ and
accepted widely in social and cognitive psychology, asserts that attributions of mental
states to other people are explained by each of us possessing a naïve theory of
mentalising. For example, if I know that you are counting on me to buy you a copy of
II.3 Rich Trustworthiness or Poor Trustworthiness? 191
The Guardian and leave it on your desk for you, then I can infer that you will not buy
your own copy of The Guardian, and also that you will be surprised and annoyed if I
were to instead buy you a copy of my own preferred reading material, The London
Review of Books. An impacted ToM supposedly explains why some individuals have
difficulty making the correct inferences in situations like this, and a functioning ToM
supposedly explains how we can ‘read one another’s minds’ to, among other things,
count on one another to do things for us, and so extend our agency. Given that Jones
sees trustworthiness as a device the purpose of which is to extend our agency (2017:
100-03), it is not surprising that she has linked this apparent ToM ability to our ability
to be worthy of trust.
The potential harm from using a ToM model to delineate the trustworthy from the
untrustworthy comes in the detail that there are any number of groups who struggle with
social communication and so may not – typically through no fault of their own – be able
to reliably adhere to Jones’s ‘norms of trust and trustworthiness’. Indeed, the seemingly
benign list of seven norms of trust and trustworthiness Jones provides turns out to be
highly exclusionary. For example, it is widely taken to be the case that ToM deficits
explain the social communication difficulties found in: autism (Baron-Cohen et al.
1985); schizophrenia (Sprong et al. 2007); attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
(Korkmaz 2011); major depressive disorder (Lee et al. 2005); various specific language
impairments (Nilsson and de Lopez 2016); certain traumatic brain injuries (Bibby and
McDonald 2005); alcoholism (Uekermann and Daum 2008); dementia and Alzheimer’s
patients (Gregory et al. 2002); blind children (Bedny et al. 2009); minimally verbal
children with cerebral palsy (Sandberg and Hjelmquist 2003); children with Down’s
Syndrome (Zelazo et al. 1996); Parkinson’s patients (Saltzman et al. 2000); frontal lobe
patients (Rowe et al. 2001); and children with specific language impairment (Miller
2001).
These are pathologised populations, and some may agree with the consequence of
Jones’ account that human beings belonging to these groups are excluded from the set
of those who might count as worthy of our trust. However, ToM delays also occur in
otherwise perfectly ‘normal’ deaf children who are late signers because their parents do
not sign (Woolfe et al. 2002), and, oddly enough, in children born in Iran and China,
II.3 Rich Trustworthiness or Poor Trustworthiness? 192
though they appear to acquire other mentalising abilities at an earlier stage, which has
been taken as suggesting that different cultures may prioritise different mentalising
abilities (Shahaeian et al. 2011), though this explanation is not endorsed here.
As for those of us who thought we were off the hook, ToM deficits are found in
those who are sleep-deprived (Erwin 2016), those experiencing significant or chronic
emotional or physical pain (Zunhammer et al. 2015); and lastly, a decline in the social
communication abilities attributed to ToM is also part of the normal ageing process
(Duval et al. 2011). As Jones would have it, untrustworthiness comes to us all in the
end. If we add these groups together, then a significant proportion of the population is at
any one time excluded from the possibility of being counted as trustworthy based on a
set of largely irrelevant measures ranging from age to culture to exhaustion.
This dissertation is not arguing against the proposal that we should be cautious of
relying on or counting on those who are exhausted, grieving, experiencing cognitive
problems, or clinically depressed etc. to do things for us. However, there are many
things wrong with the idea that an impacted ToM makes a person unworthy of trust.
First, for decades now the very idea that normal human social cognition (if there is such
a thing) involves the utilisation of a Theory of Mind has been drawn into serious
question by philosophers and cognitive scientists (Ferrari et al. 2003; Gallese and
Goldman 1998; Iacoboni and Dapretto 2006; Oberman and Ramachandran 2007;
Rizzolatti and Arbib 1998; Rizzolatti et al. 2001; Rizzolatti and Craighero 2004; Umilta
et al. 2001). As John Duffy and Rebecca Dorner say in their paper ‘The Pathos of
Mindblindness’:
At present, there is no empirical evidence to support or disprove ToM hypotheses. A grand
search in the neuroanatomical literature for the locus of the autistic ToM deficiency has
been inconclusive, which is perhaps inevitable given that no one really knows where the
seat of the “mind” exists in the brain, if it does exist after all. The absence of empirical data
means that the degree to which ToM is accepted by researchers and the general public
ultimately comes back to the rhetorical power of a story that asks us to accede to its rational,
emotional, and moral views of the world. (2011: 205)
II.3 Rich Trustworthiness or Poor Trustworthiness? 193
Binding a theory of trustworthiness to a suspect theory of mentalising is itself a suspect
move. Setting this awkward truth aside though, the fact remains that even if such a
capacity exists, and even if some groups of people lack it, this must not automatically
disqualify them from the possibility of being worthy of trust. Firstly, a lack of
trustworthiness has been used to dehumanise certain groups in the past as already
discussed. This is itself enough of a reason for us all to steer well clear of providing
exclusionary definitions of it. Secondly, the evidence. Those individuals who do have
difficulties with social communication – difficulties with Jones’ norms of trust and
trustworthiness – are simply not thereby untrustworthy. The sheer number of groups
implicated by Jones’ account means that this dissertation cannot review the evidence
regarding the potential trustworthiness of every one of them. Given this, a pertinent way
to proceed is to take on the strongest case – the group with the most severely impacted
ToM – and see what the evidence for untrustworthiness is among this population.
Autistic persons, by diagnostic stipulation, are impaired specifically and
significantly when it comes to Jones’ so-called ‘norms of trust and trustworthiness’. For
this group, things like ‘being aware of the different understandings of the background
network of social assumptions’ and ‘being aware of your location in standing social
systems of signalling’ are impacted to a greater or lesser extent (Baron-Cohen et al.
1985; Tomasello et al. 2005; Wing and Gould 1979). As this is the group most
associated with ToM deficits (Happé 1994), autistics are most implicated as unworthy
of trust according to Jones’ account and all other accounts which view behaviour,
especially communicative or socio-normative behaviour, as the defining feature. This
implication is potentially serious, since the charge of untrustworthiness adds weight to
an already large body of work dehumanising autistics, as written about extensively by
Melanie Yergeau (2013, 2017), and as captured in these two quotes by well-known
autism researchers:
It’s as if they [persons with autism] do not understand or are missing a core aspect of what it
is to be human. (Falcon and Shoop 2002)
[Autistics lack] one of the quintessential abilities that makes us human. (Baron-Cohen
1997)
II.3 Rich Trustworthiness or Poor Trustworthiness? 194
In philosophy, the dehumanisation of autistics typically occurs in the process of
attempts to define humanising concepts, such as personhood, the self, and – as in Jones
– agency. Philosophical discourse that uses autistics to attempt to explicate various
concepts is present in, for example, Goldman (2006), Currie and Ravenscroft (2002),
Blair (1996), Kennett (2002), and Farkas (2017). The extension of the dehumanising
implication to philosophy is to be expected, given that denying the autistic person
personhood via rhetoric to the effect that they lack certain humanising attributes has
been routine since the very conception of the condition. The ‘founding father’ of the
current Gold Standard behaviourist treatment for autism (Applied Behavioural
Analysis) is the Norwegian-American psychologist and professor at the University of
California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Ivar Lovaas. In an interview with Psychology Today
in 1974, Lovaas described his approach to a distressed autistic child named Beth who
was under his care. When Beth resorted to self-harm in an effort to self-regulate, Lovaas
recounts:
I just reached over and cracked her one right on the ear. She was a big fat girl, so I had an
easy target… I let her know that there was no question in my mind that if she hit herself
again, I was going to kill her. (Chance 1974: 78)
Such violence, which was routine in his practice, was no doubt enacted with a clear
conscience by Lovaas, given his beliefs about autistic people generally. In the same
interview, this founding father of their ‘treatment’ said:
You see, you start pretty much from scratch when you work with an autistic child. You have
a person in the physical sense – they have hair, a nose and a mouth – but they are not people
in the psychological sense. One way to look at the job of helping autistic kids is to see it as
a matter of constructing a person. You have the raw materials, but you have to build the
person. (1974: 76)
Such attitudes sadly, have not died with the passage of time. At the Judge Rotenberg
Centre in the United States, autistic people are still today made to wear back-packs that
deliver to them a painful electric shock of 41 milliamps – 10 times the amount used in
most stun guns – when they ‘misbehave’ (Pilkington 2018). Yet the evidence for the
widespread mistreatment of autistics is nowhere more apparent than in research that
II.3 Rich Trustworthiness or Poor Trustworthiness? 195
looks into the autistic life expectancy. While autism as a condition itself does not
shorten life expectancy, the average life expectancy of a person with autism in the
United States is 36, with suicide, infanticide, and medical neglect being some of the
leading causes of death (Guan and Li 2017). Recent research from the Autism CRC of
UNSW Sydney revealed that the mortality rates of those with ASD are more than twice
those of the general population in New South Wales, Australia (Hwang et al. 2019).
Given this ongoing dehumanisation, violence, and injustice, influential thinkers –
especially ethicists! – must proceed with extreme caution when it comes to implicating
this vulnerable group of individuals by denying them anything connected with
personhood, agency, humanity. Jones is most likely wholly unaware of the potential
harm to these individuals of making trustworthiness a matter of social communication.
But others, I think, are not so innocent. In one example, the likes of which is rarely seen
in modern times outside of the extreme dehumanising ‘animalisation’ propaganda of
genocidal conflict (Haslam 2006: 252-53), Steven Pinker, in his book The Blank Slate,
alleged:
together with robots and chimpanzees, people with autism remind us that cultural learning is
possible only because neurologically normal people have innate equipment to accomplish it.
(Pinker 2002: 62)
Pinker’s book was highly influential, being endorsed by the likes of Richard Dawkins,
Francis Fukuyama, and Daniel Dennett. By “cultural learning” Pinker means “equipped
to discern other people’s beliefs and intentions” (Chapter 4) and so “cultural learning”
in Pinker’s sense is comparable to Jones’ social signalling '“norms of trust and
trustworthiness”. Autistics supposedly lack these abilities, and so, according to Pinker,
they are no better than robots or chimpanzees. At least according to Jones, they are only
unworthy of our trust. Such rhetoric, such insinuation, leaves these human beings
vulnerable to those who may wish to justify the inhumane treatment they are receiving.
So far, I have been building an appeal case to cease and desist producing
exclusionary definitions of trustworthiness, purely on ethical grounds. But supposing
that the ethical argument is no good, that it is somehow justifiable to contribute to the
dehumanisation of some human beings if indeed they do not have the equipment for
II.3 Rich Trustworthiness or Poor Trustworthiness? 196
trustworthiness, then, what does the evidence say about the worthiness of trust
regarding the population most associated with ToM deficits?
Taking even just a cursory glance at it, we see that despite their apparent social
communication differences, despite their difficulties in adhering to the supposed “norms
of trustworthiness”, the evidence that autistic people are not proper candidates for
trustworthiness (let alone humanity itself) is not forthcoming. Indeed, despite a
persistent trope to the contrary, autistic people have typical or even excessive emotional
empathy (Brewer and Murphy 2016; Markram et al. 2007), and do not have an
increased risk for violence (Woodbury-Smith et al. 2006). In fact, more recent research
has revealed that autism reduces the risk that an otherwise high-risk individual will be
convicted of a violent crime (Heeramun et al. 2017). Moreover, autistics are frequently
noted as being characteristically fair, loyal, and honest (Attwood 1997: 32), making
them regularly the victims – not the perpetrators – of deliberate and malicious deception
(Bargiela et al. 2016; Brown-Lavoie et al. 2014). Lastly, like the rest of us, autistics
often deeply desire friendship and a sense of belonging, yet unlike the rest of us they
regularly endure both mental and physical exhaustion in their tireless efforts to
camouflage their autism in order to fit in and connect with others who do not experience
the world in the same way as they do, and so do not share their social communication
style (Hull et al. 2017; Livingston and Happé 2017).
If we presume – and I think we can safely presume – that trustworthiness has more
to do with friendship, belonging, care, honesty, loyalty, fairness, non-violence, empathy,
and a tendency to be open and non-deceptive than it does to do with following social
norms or extending our agency, then autistics are no doubt worthy candidates for being
parties to healthy trusting relationships.
Making trustworthiness a three-place matter of our ability to do X, follow certain
norms, or signal reliably to one another, is not only unjustly exclusionary though. It also
runs the risk of being dangerously inclusionary. On tests designed to measure a person’s
Theory of Mind, those with diagnosed antisocial personality disorder (previously known
as psychopaths) – individuals who show a pathological lack of guilt and remorse at
harming or deceiving others – show no ToM deficits, performing significantly better
than those whom Jones’ account excludes (Blair 1996; Dolan and Fullam 2004). This is
II.3 Rich Trustworthiness or Poor Trustworthiness? 197
a group with no trouble signalling, no trouble with Jones’ norms of trust and
trustworthiness. Indeed, their proficiency with Jones’ norms makes them especially
good at lying and manipulation, which require good perspective-taking abilities.
Again though, it is not just these pathologised populations that are bizarrely
implicated. Chillingly, the richly trustworthy are all around us. The deceitful politician,
successful con-artist, corrupt businessman, conniving co-worker, and calculating
‘frenemy’ all adhere closely to Jones’ norms for trust and trustworthiness, as to excel in
these areas one must: ‘recognise the zones of their competence’, ‘monitor new
expectations for compatibility with current ones’, and ‘recognise the expectations
different people are liable to form’ and ‘what they will count as a signal’. Jones may
counter that such individuals would not qualify on her account, as, by harming us, they
could not possibly be doing what we counted on them to do. However, this is to
overlook the insidious danger of master manipulators. As we saw in II.2.2, their very
success lies in their ability to convince us that things which are bad for us are good,
things which will harm us we need, things which are dangerous are benign. Such
individuals count on us counting on them to do just what we are counting on them to
do! We saw an example of this too in the scenarios presented in II.2.2.
Though we should not have needed it, the evidence tells us that rich trustworthiness
condemns innocent groups and renders those with highly questionable qualifications the
standard bearers. Yet this is still not the most disturbing upshot of Jones’ account. Not
only does rich trustworthiness condemn those with social communication problems as
untrustworthy, it also precludes us from being trustworthy towards them. This is
because communication is a two-way street, as Jones herself recognises (2017: 104),
and problems typically go both ways. This situation adheres for all our implicated
groups (i.e. social communication is likely to be strained between two people when one
is grieving and the other is not, one is depressed and the other is not, etc.), but it is again
nowhere more evident than in relations between autistics and non-autistics. Though for
a long time autistics were blamed exclusively for the social communication difficulties
that exist between autistics and non-autistics, emerging research is showing that non-
autistics experience just as much difficulty in taking into account the mental life of
autistics and signalling to them appropriately, and empathising with them appropriately,
II.3 Rich Trustworthiness or Poor Trustworthiness? 198
as the other way around (Milton 2012, 2017; Sasson and Morrison 2017; Sasson et al.
2017; Sheppard et al. 2016). Non-autistics – with no supposed ToM impairments – are
impacted in equal measure when it comes to ‘reading the minds’ of autistics (Heasman
and Gillespie 2018). Indeed, the ‘signalling problem’ between these two groups is two-
sided (Brewer et al. 2016), leading one to muse that perhaps to autistics, Stephen Pinker
looks and sounds much like a chimpanzee, or a robot; taking in data from the
surrounding environment and spitting it back out unreflectively.
Two final pieces of evidence are relevant. In their interactions with one another,
autistics often overcome their apparent difficulties with the “norms of trust and
trustworthiness” by finding novel methods for social communication, thereby achieving
innovative intersubjectivity that is not readily identifiable within the standard normative
framework (Heasman and Gillespie 2018). It has been noted that this is similar to how
Deaf Culture provides a non-standard normative framework for social communication
among the deaf (H. Lane 1989). Lastly, the apparently automaton-like behaviours of
autistics in childhood, many autistic adults now tell us, were actually meaningful
attempts at communication and connection. What were taken to be empty ‘robotic’ or
‘animal’ bodily sounds and movements and so ignored – or worse, violently punished –
were actually displays of emotion or affection, expressions of thoughts and desires,
attempts at humour, expressions of empathy, love, trust, and understanding (Jaswal and
Akhtar 2018). Perhaps, given their vast historical experience of being misjudged,
misunderstood, and underestimated, autistics may have developed the skills required to
afford Stephen Pinker the benefit of the doubt he never gave them.
When it comes to the ToM that Jones places at the centre of our ability to be worthy
of trust, the reason one group gets held responsible for the signalling upsets and not the
other, one group gets dehumanised and not the other, is, as vice president of the Autism
Association of New England Philip Schwarz explained in an interview:
non-autistic people too, are rather lousy at understanding the inner states of minds too
different from their own – but the non-autistic majority gets a free pass because they assume
that the other person’s mind works like their own, and they have a much better chance of
being right. (Szalavitz 2009)
II.3 Rich Trustworthiness or Poor Trustworthiness? 199
We must recognise that we are all rather poor at intuitively understanding – and so
signalling appropriately – to minds that are different from our own. When social
communication fails, this does not mean the person we are trying to communicate with,
trying to reach intersubjectivity with, trying to extend our own agency with, does not
have a mind, does not have agency, is not human, is not worthy of our trust. All the
groups implicated by rich trustworthiness are experiencing the world in a different way.
Successful signalling between individuals who are different is going to be fraught; we
have known this since before we ever encountered other cultures, since diversity has
always been part of humanity, even at home. Diversity in experience and expression can
of course hinder social communication, and as such can encumber our attempts to
extend our agency, count on one another. But it cannot make one unhuman, unworthy of
trust. It is both unethical and, in many instances, false to adopt an account of
trustworthiness that has this implication.
On closer inspection, Jones’ ‘heart of trust’, which supposedly emerges from a
shared Theory of Mind, is more likely not much more than a fluke. Our “distinctive way
of responding to the fact of other agents’ dependency through recognising that very
dependency” seems to hinge on those other agents being like us. What we think of as
the ability to ‘read someone’s mind’, then, is perhaps the rather less impressive
coincidence of happening to possess a similar mind, and what we think of as intimacy
and a shared-humanity is nothing more than mirror-gazing. The fruitful frontiers of trust
and trustworthiness with their characteristically hopeful leaps beyond what is known
and familiar, belong to those who expand beyond these measures, not to those who exist
safely within them. Reaching understanding and intersubjectivity, forgiveness and
optimism, hope and care, with someone who is very different to you and communicates
very differently to you is the highest expression of trust and trustworthiness. Jones
wraps up her account with the maxim that “successful trust relations are those that
match up would-be dependents with those willing and able to be counted on in the way
required” (2017: 103), but one might think that the classifieds section of the local
newspaper does this well enough. There is no need to evoke trust and trustworthiness to
adequately describe this phenomenon.
II.3 Rich Trustworthiness or Poor Trustworthiness? 200
II.3.3 Summary of rich trustworthiness
This dissertation agrees unreservedly with Jones that similar minds may communicate,
and so cooperate, more effectively with one another than those which are dissimilar.
This section has argued that this certainly does not delineate the trustworthy from the
untrustworthy, the human from the unhuman. Given the ethical implications that follow
the charge of untrustworthiness, that have historically been connected to the charge of
untrustworthiness, we must re-frame rich trustworthiness as rich reliability. Then we
can maintain Jones’ important insight without excluding any potentially worthy
candidates. To capture trust and trustworthiness, we need lengthy accounts, not short
definitions. We value simplicity in philosophy, and that is no bad thing. But what we
lose when we define trustworthiness in a line is not just understanding. We leave behind
half of humanity.
II.4 Trustworthiness 201
II.4 Trustworthiness
Like trust, trustworthiness is a two-place relation, involving a truster and a trustee. Of
course, that is not all there is to say about it. Yet given that the concept of
trustworthiness has been used to dehumanise certain groups in the past as we saw in
II.3.2, this Section will not be providing any necessary or sufficient conditions, nor
formulas/definitions of trustworthiness. This dissertation aims not to preclude any group
from the possibility of being counted as worthy of trust based on their inability to meet
my chosen criteria. Because trust/worthiness is a two-place relation, the only person
with any authority to decide if any particular individual is worthy of their trust is the
truster, not any philosopher.
In the counterpart to this section, I.4 (Trust), this dissertation demonstrated how
trust can – not as a matter of necessity or sufficiency but just as a matter of
circumstance – encompass many different things: emotions and attitudes, beliefs and
virtues, thoughts and plans, history and memory. This enterprise was useful in Part I, as
it helped us to appreciate just how complex and involved trust can be. But here, though
they do apply, it is unnecessary to rehash these same arguments in relation to
trustworthiness. Sections II.2 and II.3 adequately demonstrated that, just like trust, our
trustworthiness can involve a vast array of antithetical phenomena depending on
context: truth and lies, assiduousness and reckless abandon, morality and immorality,
norm-following and norm-breaking.
The aim of this Section instead is to develop the surprising link between
trustworthiness and ‘mind-blindness’. Most accounts of trustworthiness, as we saw in
II.1, in one way or another place trustworthiness in opposition to deception/opacity. The
trustworthy do what we: ‘trust them to do’ ‘expect of them’, are ‘counting on them to
do’, provide ‘true testimony’, and ‘signal accurately’. All these are ways of saying that
trustworthiness is about transparency, about knowing what sort of person the trustee is
(one-place), or what they will do (three-place). This interpretation of trustworthiness as
we saw in II.3, carries the implication that people who are different to us and so less
transparent to us are unworthy of our trust. In contrast, this dissertation takes the view
that the lack of transparency that exists between us all provides us all with remarkable
opportunities. What remains hidden between us, all that we might be wrong about with
II.4 Trustworthiness 202
regard to one another, affords us the chance not only to be other than what people think
we are, but also for other people to hope that we might be other than as we appear.
To accomplish this aim, subsection II.4.1 presents some dialogue from the film The
Invention of Lying. The imagined version of humanity portrayed in that film, honest to a
fault, wholly transparent and incapable of deception, is palpably not brimming with
trust and trustworthiness. II.4.2 clarifies the human capacity for ‘mindreading’ or
mentalising; II.4.3 addresses a possible charge of hypocrisy; II.4.3 further characterises
two-place trustworthiness set against the view of the Danish philosopher Knud Ejler
Løgstrup. Finally, in II.4.6, I make some closing comments on the relevance of P. F
Strawson’s insight in “Freedom and Resentment” (1962) to the current discussion. By
the end of this section, my hope is that we have a greater appreciation of the extent to
which the veil that exists between us all is responsible for, and sustaining of, trust and
trustworthiness, and how trust and trustworthiness have to do not with lifting this veil,
but with living with it.
II.4.1 The Invention of Lying
Evidently drawing on his philosophical training gained at University College London
(he intended to study biology but changed to philosophy after two weeks, and received
upper second-class honours), in The Invention of Lying (2009), the British comedian
Ricky Gervais has created a philosophical thought-experiment of some relevance: A
world where not only is lying not yet ‘invented’, but concealment of thoughts, beliefs,
desires, reactions, motives, emotions, attitudes – pretence of any kind – is unheard of.
This is a world where the contents of other minds are not private, not veiled, but public.
Whatever another person is doing, thinking, or feeling, whatever their aim or desire,
whatever they believe to be true is painfully apparent since the private goings-on of
people in this world are reported in all their brutal, revolting, and occasionally poignant
totality.
This subsection contrasts dialogue from the beginning of the film, when the
protagonist is not yet able to lie, with dialogue taken from later in the film, when he can.
These dialogues take place between the protagonist Mark (played by Ricky Gervais)
and his love interest Jennifer (Jennifer Garner), and between Mark and his friend Frank
II.4 Trustworthiness 203
(Jonah Hill). Mark is, the narrator tells us, a “loser”. He is unattractive and has made
little progress in either his personal or professional life. Jennifer is beautiful, good-
natured, and “way out of his league”. Frank is unemployed, lonely, and suicidal.
Mark & Jennifer Without Deception
[Mark knocks on Jennifer’s door for a blind-date.]
Jennifer: Hi. You're early. I was just masturbating.
Mark: That makes me think of your vagina. I'm Mark, how are you?
Jennifer: A little frustrated at the moment. Also, equally depressed and pessimistic
about our date tonight. I'm Jennifer. Come on in. Um... Just wait there. I need to finish
getting ready. While doing that, I might realise I'm still horny and try to finish
masturbating without you hearing.
[Jennifer leaves Mark standing by the door and goes into her adjacent bedroom. The
conversation continues, at a louder volume.]
Mark: I feel awkward now about being early.
Jennifer: Yeah, I'm disappointed that you're early and not really looking forward to
tonight in general, but the thought of being alone the rest of my life scares both my
mother and me equally.
Mark: Sure. I'm thinking you've started masturbating, cause it's like… it's too quiet.
And you said you were going to try and do it without me hearing. I'm worried the
restaurant I've picked isn't expensive enough for you. It's all I can afford in my
situation. I know I'm in my 40s, but I haven't got any financial assets to speak of. Also,
my boss said he's probably going to fire me this week.
[Jennifer walks back into the room, looking refreshed and dressed, ready for dinner.]
Jennifer: I just masturbated. Where are we eating tonight?
Mark: A little place called la Bonisera in West Hollywood.
Jennifer: You obviously don’t have very much money, but that’s not necessarily a deal
breaker.
Mark: I have very little money.
II.4 Trustworthiness 204
Jennifer: I also don’t really care about a guy who knows all the latest hippest
restaurants.
Mark: I don’t know any of them.
Jennifer: In fact, there are very few things in life that I care about all that much. The
only things I have to offer myself or anyone else are my good looks and my affected
sense of quirkiness, which artistically inclined men interpret as intellect. In fact, I think
my best trait is that I’ve made very few mistakes: socially, academically, financially or
romantically. I take very few risks and therefore lead a relatively happy and light-
hearted existence. Mostly though, I’m a kind sweet person with the potential of
becoming a vital and interesting human being the day I take the energy I expend on
hyper self-reflectivity and apply it to actual action in the reality of my life.
Mark: I found that boring and started thinking about this place’s fish tacos.
Mark & Jennifer With Deception (i.e. after Mark has ‘evolved’ the ability to lie)
Mark: I’m happy, you see, like that happy chap over there.
Jennifer: What, sleeping, ugly fatty?
Mark: Well...
Jennifer: He's not happy.
Mark: Well, how do you know?
Jennifer: What do you mean? Look at him. He's a loser.
Mark: You can't tell that from just looking at the guy. He could be the world's greatest
poet. Well, he probably is a loser. Bad example. But I'm saying, it doesn't have to be,
just by... Okay. What do you see when you see this fellow here?
Jennifer: Short, sweaty, bald guy.
Mark: Right. But he's carrying a briefcase. He's in a hurry. He's probably off to a really
important meeting. He's probably a high-powered businessman.
Jennifer: You see more than I do.
Mark: Well, because, if you look... What do you see when you see those guys?
Jennifer: Mmm...Two nerdy losers in hats?
II.4 Trustworthiness 205
Mark: Yeah. Good. Good observational skills. But what I mean is, look beyond just
their appearance and look at them. They're holding hands. They're in love.
Mark & Frank Without Deception
[Mark and Frank meet in the elevator.]
Frank: Hi Mark. How are you?
Mark: Not so good. Last night I went on a date with a girl who I’ve had a crush on for
years who will most likely never call me again and I’m pretty sure I’m going to get
fired today. You?
Frank: I spent the whole night throwing up pain killers because I’m too scared to take
enough to kill myself.
[The elevator door opens.]
Mark: See you tomorrow
Frank: Bye.
Mark & Frank With Deception
Frank: Mark, how's it going?
Mark: Good. How's it going with you?
Frank: Pretty awful. I was up last night researching on the Internet, like, suffocation
suicide. I think that's what I'm gonna do tonight. Well… See you later.
[Mark nods, and Frank begins to walk off. But then…]
Mark: Frank.
Frank: Yeah?
Mark: Don't do that.
Frank: Why? I mean... You know, I'm miserable. I don't think anyone would care.
[Mark hesitates…]
Mark: I'll care. [an obvious lie]
Frank: But you're a loser, which doesn't really count.
[Mark nods, turns away again, but then…]
II.4 Trustworthiness 206
Mark: Things… things are gonna… be okay.
Frank: They are?
Mark: Yeah. You're gonna meet someone. You're gonna be happy.
Frank: I shouldn't kill myself?
Mark: Definitely not.
Frank: Okay, so I don't need to kill myself. Wow! I thought... I thought that like... That
suffocation idea, I thought that was like a really good idea, you know?
Mark: It wasn't.
Frank: Wow! My night has opened up!
The Invention of Lying comes to a close with Mark and Frank beginning to form a real
friendship and Mark and Jennifer falling in love. Mark and Frank’s relationship moves
from an association based on transparency and truth, to a friendship based on
compassion and care. Truth (like morality and rationality) becomes a consideration, not
a command, and it is to be weighed against other considerations, most notably, what is
best for the truster. With Jennifer and Mark, their relationship deepened following an
act of honesty rather than deception, but honesty in the context of his ability to deceive.
Jennifer finds out about Mark’s ‘super-power’ and is so taken with his care in not
deceiving her into being with him (when he easily could have), that she finds him
irresistible. As the two of them struggle to come to grips with the moral/interpersonal
novelties thrown up by his ability to deceive and her knowledge of it, they agree:
“Everything is hard. Nothing is easy anymore.” The narrator closes by telling us that the
ability to deceive eventually spreads through the population, creating “A world without
honesty, a world with pretence, a world with fiction, a world with flattery, and most
importantly, a world with true love – a world very much like our own.”
The Invention of Lying is not a refined work of humanistic genius on par with what
was presented in this section’s counterpart (I.4). George Eliot’s Middlemarch and The
Invention of Lying are not of the same force. As Manohla Dargis of The New York
Times put it:
II.4 Trustworthiness 207
For the most part, Mr. Gervais prefers to shock us with our own brutality...[with]
unvarnished truths [that] begin to feel heavy, cruel. (2009)
Yet as she also points out:
Lying becomes a means to transcendence… [The Invention of Lying] is a melancholic
defence of deceit. (2009)
A defence of deceit. This is a world where none of the quintessentially human forms of
deception are possible. There is no: two-faced pretence, false-modesty, insincerity,
mockery, sarcasm, lying, negging, gaslighting, bullshitting, misdirection, misleading
etc., and yet, it is no social utopia. This film upends any simplistic treatment of what it
means to be worthy of trust by showing us a version of ourselves that is honest, truthful,
transparent, but also ugly, heartless, and bare. In the beginning, all the ingredients for
trustworthiness seem to be there, or at least, none of the obvious ingredients for
untrustworthiness are present, and yet these transparent individuals cannot engage in
anything like the special relationships of trust that we are so familiar with.
Here, the distinction between the public self and the private self is virtually non-
existent. Such radical psychological transparency, the standard story goes, would make
people profoundly more trusting and trustworthy. Yet contrary to what much of the
literature on trustworthiness suggests (see: II.1, II.2, II.3) this transparent version of
humanity, as Gervais imagines it, is neither loving nor trusting. Instead their
relationships are hollow, self-interested, contractual, rational, and immoral. The people
in The Invention of Lying follow Jones’ norms of trust and trustworthiness in an
exemplary manner, signalling to one another their intentions without hesitation or
obfuscation; they know just who they can count on, and for what. Because of this, they
can ‘trust to do’ in that three-place sense with very little epistemic risk, having
unfettered access to one another’s emotions, thoughts, and aims.
Gervais wrote, directed, and starred in the film, and seems to have intended
foremostly to provide a mocking commentary on the role of lying with regard to
religion. But this crass Hollywood rom-com-cum-philosophical-thought-experiment
somehow manages to do something more. The Invention of Lying, at heart, is the story
of one man’s sudden and unexpected psychological emancipation. Yet the less
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significant aspect of the protagonist’s journey is that he gains the freedom to lie to
others. More importantly, the veil between himself and the rest of humanity provides
him with the psychological freedom to imagine, hope, forgive, give the benefit of the
doubt, and challenge his own motivations towards, perceptions of, and beliefs about
others. The relevant message is that where truth and transparency can be prisons, lies
and deception can be liberators. The extension of our agency may be about the ability to
get others to signal reliably and do what we expect, however, being worthy of one
another comes when our own freedom to choose who to be with regard to others, allows
us the freedom to choose how to regard others. I take this theme up again in II.4.5.
In summary, this subsection contrasted dialogue from the beginning of the film The
Invention of Lying, when the protagonist is not yet able to lie, with dialogue taken from
later in the film, when he can. The protagonist’s only friendship and romantic
relationship is greatly improved by the veil that miraculously descends between himself
and the rest of humanity: a veil that the rest of humanity still lacks. Once he lacks
transparency, Gervais’ protagonist begins to show recognisable signs of trust and
trustworthiness: optimistic interpretations of others, giving the benefit of the doubt, a
sensitivity to the truster that overrides any sensitivity to rationality or truth, noble lying
and courageous selfless honesty. The Invention of Lying will continue to be evaluated in
the context of the discussions presented in the following subsections.
II.4.2 Mindreading and deception
You have linked trust and trustworthiness to a “veil” that supposedly exists between people
in our world. A veil, you say, that the people in The Invention of Lying lack. Yet is there
really some mysterious veil that exists between us? Surely, we do have mentalising abilities
and these facilitate us rationally trusting one another.
In our world, the private contents of other people’s minds are sometimes apparent to us.
People often tell us what they are doing, thinking, feeling, desiring, imagining, etc., just
as they do in The Invention of Lying. And even when they do not openly narrate for us
their own inner goings-on, now and then, we can look at another person and come to
know such veiled happenings anyway. This dissertation does not take the view that we
are incapable of possessing any knowledge of other minds.
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The view presented here, is that despite our successes, despite the knowledge we
have of other’s thoughts, beliefs and emotions, we often fail at mentalising (‘reading
other people’s minds’). There are at least two ways we might go about confirming this.
One way is to carry out systematic empirical investigations. As I have touched upon
already (II.3.2), mentalising researchers have postulated a ToM brain-module that is
supposedly responsible for the human capacity for mentalising. The way in which such
research into mentalising has been conducted should be of interest to philosophers,
especially those referring to ToM when making claims about agency, personhood,
trustworthiness, etc.
The most highly regarded investigation into human mentalising by perhaps the most
prominent researchers in the field is described in a paper entitled ‘Do Triangles Play
Tricks? Attribution of mental states to animated shapes in normal and abnormal
development’ by Abell, Happe and Frith (2000). Their method, as described in their
abstract, is as follows:
Computer-presented animations were used to elicit attributions of actions, interactions and
mental states. Two triangles moved around the screen according to one of three conditions.
Descriptions of the animations were rated according to accuracy and type of description.
Adults predominantly used action descriptions for Random animations (e.g. bouncing),
interaction descriptions for Goal-directed (G-D) sequences (fighting), and mentalising
descriptions for Theory of Mind (ToM) sequences (tricking). (2000: 1)
What this study revealed, was that children with autism used mentalising descriptions
less often than typically developing 8-year-olds, and “frequently referred to mental
states that were inappropriate to the animation” (2000: 1). This discrepancy between
autistic and non-autistic descriptions of the triangles, has been widely taken as evidence
that children develop, in the normal case, a Theory of Mind, the ability to ‘mindread’.
To appreciate what is happening here though, note that the triangles lack any
anthropomorphised features (face/colour/voice) and are simply black triangles moving
about on a white screen, occasionally bumping into various other objects, and speeding
up or slowing down. When asked the key question What are the triangles are doing?
Those with postulated ToM deficits had “inappropriate” responses, for example, where
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typically developing children said that the triangles were “coaxing” or “mocking” one
another, atypically developing children would say something else, either providing
precise physical descriptions of the triangle’s movement patters, or else, providing
“false” mentalising interpretations. To be clear, what is purportedly evidencing Theory
of Mind here is the existence of apparently false accounts of the mentality of triangles.
Even more concerningly, the refreshingly literal and creatively divergent responses
of those with supposed ‘ToM deficits’ are being taken as evidence not only that they
lack the ability to understand others’ mental states, but even that they lack inner mental
states of their own. An hypothesis widely (and wildly) postulated long before such
“empirical proof” (Baron-Cohen 1997: 6; Kanner 1943: 242). Though the “evidence” is
both feeble and methodologically frightening, as we have already seen it has proven to
be an irresistibly exciting prospect to philosophers– real-life zombies!
Philosophers could be valuable allies to those with language, communication, and
social differences, if, rather than latching on to popular mentalising research in their
discussions about personhood, free-will, agency, and trustworthiness, they instead
examined its gross methodological, ontological, epistemological, and ethical flaws.
Thankfully, serious concerns are now being raised regarding the validity and soundness
of such investigations from within the discipline itself (Dalton et al. 2005; Gernsbacher
and Frymiare 2005; Kapp et al. 2013). Duffy and Dorner summarise this push-back in
“The Pathos of "Mindblindness": Autism, Science, and Sadness in "Theory of Mind"
Narratives”:
the condition of “mindblindness” is itself an act of imagination, a story told by cognitive
scientists about the evolution of the mind and individuals who have followed that
evolutionary path. In the absence of definitive physiological or neurological markers, ToM
remains a construct, a theory of a theory, its “reality” an outcome of laboratory tests and the
rhetorical efforts to persuade others of the validity of those tests. (Duffy and Dorner 2011:
209)
Given this, we should all be cautious of any supposedly scientific claims regarding our
“ToM brain module” or our “mind-reading abilities”. This is especially so, since further
investigations into mentalising have managed to establish something rather
II.4 Trustworthiness 211
embarrassing– those with ‘typical’ results on standard mentalising tests consistently
overrate their own abilities. As it turns out, it is normal to be not nearly as good at
mentalising as you commonly think you are (Ames and Kammrath 2004; Epley and
Caruso 2008; Hall et al. 2009; Realo et al. 2003). As the philosopher of mind Shannon
Spaulding, who has spent much of her career examining this phenomenon, put it:
We consistently and substantially overrate our ability to accurately judge others’ mental
states and interpret social interactions… whatever the cause, the consensus from the
empirical literature is that mind misreading is very common. (2016: 423)
Philosophers, she goes on, have tended to focus exclusively on the so-called ‘telepathic’
abilities of typical adults while neglecting to focus in any systematic way on the much
more common mind misreading that occurs in all of us. Somewhat ironically –
Spaulding notes – though philosophers do examine mind-misreading as it exists in
chimpanzees, children, and (unsurprisingly once again) those with autism, we disregard
it in ourselves, falling victim to the very same Self-Serving Attributional Bias that
contributes significantly to our mind-misreading in the first place (2016, (2016: 423).
The internal logic of ToM may itself be to blame for this oversight. As David Smukler
writes in his essay ‘Unauthorized Minds: How ‘Theory of Mind’ Theory Misrepresents
Autism’, ToM models of mentalising are inadequate in large part because they fail to
consider what those who supposedly lack this module themselves think and feel (2005:
11-24). In effect, ToM theory is itself “mindblind”.
Had we looked to our own experience instead of the one-sided exclusionary rhetoric
present in current popular mentalising research, we might have come to appreciate all
this better, as the author Philip Roth did:
You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without
unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you
can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them
unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar
treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet
you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the "brain" of a tank. You get
them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them
II.4 Trustworthiness 212
wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the
meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with
you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing
farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of
"other people," which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a
significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another's interior
workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like
the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then
proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we
mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what
living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and
wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. (1998:
35)
We get one another wrong, frequently. There is a veil between us. The significance of
our so-called ‘telepathic’ or ‘mindreading’ abilities is overstated. In the previous section
we saw how Jones, adopting those influential but spurious theories of mentalising,
identified our so-called ‘mind-reading abilities’ as being necessary for trust and
trustworthiness. This rendered many sections of the population unable to be counted as
candidates for trust and trustworthiness. As for everyone else, it now turns out our
frequent failures at mentalising would preclude us too. In The Invention of Lying,
Gervais has created creatures with no veil between themselves and the rest of the world.
This makes them different from us because they can effectively mindread, while we –
all of us – cannot. We can make sound inferences about one another, and this ability
facilitates us rationally relying on one another. But it is the veil between us that
facilitates trust and being worthy of it.
II.4.3 A potential charge of hypocrisy
Aren’t you doing exactly what you have accused others of doing? It seems that in your
account, autistics and others with supposed ToM deficits would be precluded as candida tes
for trust and trustworthiness based this time on their apparent inability to deceive.
II.4 Trustworthiness 213
II.3 presented evidence that those with supposed ToM deficits, such as those with
autism, far from being untrustworthy as was the consequence of Jones’ rich
trustworthiness, are instead characteristically honest, typically learn to lie later than
their non-autistic peers (Peterson et al. 2005), and prefer to engage with others with
candour throughout their lives (Atherton and Cross 2018; Atherton et al. 2018).
Historically, this preference for truthfulness has laid such individuals open to the charge
that they themselves must lack imagination and so the ability for deception (Baron-
Cohen 1992; Oswald and Ollendick 1989).
If one adopts this line of thinking, then one would likely come to view such
individuals as similar to the characters in The Invention of Lying – open-books with
empty pages, “mind blind” versions of the rest of us. As we saw, a number of thinkers
have come to this conclusion, imagining those with ToM deficits as effectively real-life
philosophical zombies. If this picture were true, then I am indeed doing what I have
accused others of doing, only in my account, autistic people (and others with supposed
ToM deficits) would be precluded from being candidates for trust and trustworthiness
based on their inability to deceive.
Hypocrisy is a serious charge, but in this case, it does not stick. First, many of those
who were written off by their performance on ToM tests can in fact both use and detect
deception in natural settings as proficiently as the rest of us (Li et al. 2011; Lombardo et
al. 2016; Martinez-Murcia et al. 2017; Rutherford and Ray 2009), which once again
seriously calls into question the relevance of ToM as a theory of human mentalising
(Atherton et al. 2018; Gallagher 2004). Indeed, autistics – women and girls in particular
– often develop a considerate form of empathetic deception that aims to make non-
autistic people feel more comfortable in their presence (Lai et al. 2017). This ‘autistic
camouflaging’ fools even the experts quite remarkably, as suggested by Livingston and
Happé (2017).
Second, there is mounting evidence demonstrating how grossly the private world of
many of those with apparent ToM deficits has been mischaracterised. The world of the
autistic person, far from being empty and thin, is now known to be significantly more
intense and intricate than typical human experience (Mottron et al. 2009; Remington
and Fairnie 2017). While autistic behaviour and facial expressions can belie these
II.4 Trustworthiness 214
complex depths, a higher perceptual capacity is a core feature of autism, present from
childhood (Swettenham et al. 2014). Furthermore, many of those with apparent ToM
deficits appear to have superior emotional processing when it comes to inferring those
particularly complex counterfactual emotions – regret and relief – that are no doubt
essential for successful moral and interpersonal relations (Black et al.). Many of those
who supposedly cannot mentalise are in fact exceptional ‘deceivers’, in the sense that it
is we who have failed to understand them, more than the other way around.
Yet even if this dissertation had not been able to draw on the substantial empirical
evidence here, it would not have mattered. Trust and trustworthiness as this dissertation
describe them, as two-place relations, are applicable to any individual that has a private
experience of the world that is hidden from the rest of us. This, I take to extend to all
human beings. The only entities that the account presented here excludes are those
which have no private experience (governments, systems, plastic styracosauri) and the
gods. Styro was precluded from the possibility of trustworthiness because he had no
private experience of his truster (II.2.1). The gods, if they existed, would be precluded
because of their omniscience and omnipresence; the gods know all there is to know
about us, which is presumably why they get to judge us, while we are told to refrain
from judging one another:
It is the Lord who judges me. Therefore, do not pronounce judgment before the time, before
the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose
the purposes of the heart. (Corinthians 4:1-21)
Bringing light to things now hidden in darkness. Disclosing the purposes of our hearts.
In a salute of sorts to its own limitations, humanity has long imagined such a being. One
who could lift the veil and see us in our completeness, both in terms of what we did and
what we would have done, what we are and what we may have become. One who
therefore is qualified as ultimate judge, jury, and executioner. Whatever one’s view of
religion, the idea is an important one. It leads us to question – if faith and judgement are
for the gods, then what is left for us mind-blind “mere human beings” (Romans 2: 1-3)?
I say trust and trustworthiness are for us – all of us – and, I say, they are even more
spectacular.
II.4 Trustworthiness 215
II.4.4 Løgstrup and trust/worthiness
Apart from saying that they require the veil and are complex two-place relations, can you do
any more to further characterise the place of trust and trustworthiness in our lives?
It may be of use here to draw on the similarities between trust/worthiness as they have
been presented in this dissertation and the work of the Danish philosopher Knud Ejler
Løgstrup. In ‘Trust is Basic’ (2017), Robert Stern made the connection between the
philosophical literature on Trust and the central role trust plays in Løgstrup’s major
work The Ethical Demand (1956). Note that I refer to the English translations of 1997
and 2007. Stern points out that in contrast to the standard story in modern western
philosophy, Løgstrup has provided us with a thought-provoking examination of the
place of trust and trustworthiness in our lives that, as Stern notes, has been largely
overlooked. Although Løgstrup’s view differs from that presented here in many respects
– most notably in the background religious/moral nature of his discussion and his
‘ubiquitousness’ proposal that trust is “essential to every conversation” (1997: 14)
which I have argued against in numerous places – the similarities are worth mentioning.
Broadly, Løgstrup’s view and my own are alike in that neither of us sees
trust/worthiness as epistemic notions, the purpose of which is to extend our agency.
Instead, we both highlight trust’s unique relation to love, humanity, and
interdependence, and not – as is usually taken to the be the case in contemporary
Western debates – the limits of our rationality, epistemological status, moral status, or
normative practices (see: I.1 and II.1). Løgstrup says in the 1997 English translation:
Not to let the other person emerge through words, deeds, and conduct, but to hinder this
instead by our suspicion and by the picture we have formed of him or her as a result of our
antipathy is a denial of life. (1997: 14)
Løgstrup’s remark that trust is so vital to human beings and their relationships that
distrust is a “denial of life” is not to be taken in the literal sense (as death). Instead, a
“denial of life” is a denial of what a person is or may become. For Løgstrup, trust and
distrust, trustworthiness and untrustworthiness, are not three-place relations. Distrust is
a “picture we have formed” of one another, while trust is a process of letting the trustee
II.4 Trustworthiness 216
emerge over time. In this way, trust is a form of open-minded and open-hearted
monitoring; an ongoing, partly self-reflective process, which involves overcoming our
own antipathy, our own impulse to unreflexively accept the suspicious pictures we form
of one another.
This is very like the position advanced in this dissertation. I have discussed how
trust and monitoring are compatible (I.4.4), and how trusting relationships are those in
which we create one another (I.3.3), and I have presented an example from The
Invention of Lying (II.4.1), where the protagonist’s own ability to be more than as he
appears (to step behind his own veil) grants him the perspective that others may also be
more than as they appear. On a Løgstrupian interpretation of The Invention of Lying, it
could be said that– instead of denying life by accepting the limiting antipathetic ideas he
has formed of those around him, the protagonist Mark learns to let others emerge: “you
can’t tell just from looking at the guy… he could be the world’s greatest poet” he retorts
to Jennifer’s bald observation of “sleeping ugly fatty”.
To this I add, that this trustful ‘watch and wait and see’ approach of letting others
emerge can be passive or active. Sometimes trust requires of us only that we get out of
our own way, overcome our own suspicions and antipathies so that we can see people as
they are already showing themselves to be. This is a passive way of letting others
emerge as it requires us to engage only with ourselves. Yet, at other times, trust is
active, in the sense that our trustful engagement with others comes to play a substantial
role in them becoming who they become. In The Invention of Lying, Mark is active in
the creation of Jennifer and Frank. At first, Jennifer uncritically adopts the normative
framework of the world she lives in, whereby people marry not on the basis of love or
friendship, but strictly appearances. Her ideas about her own preferences on this matter
are stuck fast, as she communicates to Mark:
I do like you and I do enjoy your company. And if we were to get together and procreate, I
would like the offspring that are carrying half my genetic code to be well taken care of,
financially stable. I also think you'd make a good father and a good husband, which I like.
Unfortunately, none of that changes the fact that you'd still be contributing half the genetic
code to our children and I don't want little fat kids with snub noses.
II.4 Trustworthiness 217
Before he is able to lie – to step behind his own veil – Mark can only resignedly accept
Jennifer’s attitude as the unshakeable truth. But armed with his own newfound capacity
to ‘look again’, Mark is able to charitably afford this capacity to Jennifer too, even in
the absence of any evidence that she is capable of it. It is his hopeful rejection of her
antipathy towards him that allows her to eventually come to reject this ‘unshakeable’
truth about herself:
You're chubby and you have a snub nose... but you're smart. You're kind. You're the
sweetest man I've ever met. You are definitely the most interesting person I know. And you
are fun to be with. And you see the world in a way that nobody else sees the world, and I
like the way you see the world. And you're my best friend. You make me happier than
anyone I've ever known. I know what I want. I want little fat kids with snub noses.
Accentuating the two-place interpersonal back-and-forth nature of the trusting
relationship, we see that this capacity to ‘look again’ is one that Jennifer never would
have realised without being first credited it by Mark. Her nascent trustworthiness is the
result of his nascent trust. We see the same active dynamic playing out with Mark and
Frank, with Frank’s own will to live having gone missing in his experience of himself.
Mark is able to find Frank’s will to live for him in the form of a lie, which in this case
has another name– hope (see II.4.1).
If we relate these dynamics back to what Løgstrup says, in The Invention of Lying,
Jennifer and Frank have denied themselves. They have failed to embody self-trust, and
self-trustworthiness (see further discussion in I.4.5) and so it is their own antipathies
and suspicions about themselves that are preventing their emergence. They cannot be
worthy of others’ trust, because they do not have self-trust. But the remedy comes not
from within the self but from outside. It is just as Reverend Long said: “None of us is
complete until there is at least two of us. My centre isn’t in here– it’s between you and
me. It is only when I truly engage with you that I begin to find out who I really am. We
discover that my humanity is made by yours… and yours by mine” (see: Introduction).
When we attribute humanity, morality, or other characteristics or capacities to one
who cannot find them in themselves though, we do not give them the relevant
capacities. To say this is to attribute a mystical, almost god-like, property to ourselves.
II.4 Trustworthiness 218
By repudiating the suspicions and antipathies others have of themselves we do no more
than sweep away the cobwebs, providing them with the freedom to be what they already
are or become what they already always could have been. To fail to do this, to fail to
trust, is not necessarily to be false, socially unacceptable, or even in many cases
immoral. Yet as Løgstrup says, it is always a “denial of life”, as by limiting how we see
others we limit how they see themselves and so limit what is possible for them. When
we limit others, we also limit ourselves, since so much of what makes a person the
irreplaceable individual that they are comes from what happens between them and
others in their close interpersonal relationships. Stern nicely summarises this element of
Løgstrup’s view:
In these [trusting] relations we take people at face value as they present themselves to us
and connect to them directly, rather than forming a certain image or picture of their
character, a theory about what makes them tick, and using that to define them for us. (2017:
289)
“A theory about what makes them tick”… another term for this is Theory of Mind (II.3).
Theorising about what makes people (or animated triangles) tick may very well be
crucial for everyday human social interactions – for analysing, judging, and inferring
others' behaviours. Such theorising this dissertation has acknowledged may be useful
for extending our knowledge and agency (see II.3) and vital to cooperative endeavours
(see I.2.2). Yet because “my humanity is made by yours and yours by mine” theorising
about someone, about who they are or what they will do, always involves an
infringement on their freedom. Not just because we might be wrong, but because even if
we are right, the theory itself denies and limits the person being theorised about.
Trusting and being worthy of it, like loving and being worthy of it, are an important
alternate way of relating to one another without a theory. As Stern says:
(1) As living creatures, we have the capacity for renewal, which must be realized if our lives
are to go well. (2) This capacity cannot be realized if we are confined by the picture or
theory imposed on us by others. (3) Trust involves relating to another without a picture or
theory. (4) So being trusted by others enables us to function in the right way. (5) To distrust
II.4 Trustworthiness 219
is to impose a picture or theory on someone. (6) So to distrust someone is to risk blocking
their capacity for renewal, and thus to prevent their life going well. (2017: 287)
Our trusting hero from Part I (Dorothea) did not have a theory about her trustee
(Lydgate). Her distrustful interlocutors (Farebrother and Sir James) did. She was willing
to ‘watch and wait and see’, and then, if Lydgate proved to have done wrong, Dorothea
was willing to reform him and renew him with her trust, which includes as part of it a
hopeful view of him (see: I.4.1). When we refrain from the “impulse to investigate the
other person’s character” (Løgstrup 1997: 13), we give people the freedom both to be
what they are, and to become something other than what they are. This trustful way of
relating to one another is very close to love (see I.4.2), and according to Løgstrup, close
to all the “spontaneous expressions of life” including sympathy and mercy:
In love and sympathy there is no impulse to investigate the other person’s character. We do
not construct an image of who he or she is … If, on the other hand, we are not in sympathy
with the other person … then we begin to form a picture of the other’s character
… However, when we are in the direct association with that person this picture usually
breaks down; the personal presence erases it … Only where the proof of her unreliability
has in the most positive sense become an ingrown distrust, or where the irritation and
antipathy have shut me off completely, does the picture continue to stand. (1997: 13)
Reverend Long regards his role serving the needs of Sydney’s homeless as one of
meeting people – “seeing them not saving them” (see Introduction) – and this is very
like Løgstrup’s idea of being in “direct association” with one another: the personal
presence erasing the picture we have formed, the theory we have constructed.
In this quotation as well, we find in Løgstrup yet another idea this dissertation has
addressed; that it is not always the trustee’s fault that they are not trusted (I.4.2). A
distrustful picture of the trustee might be sustained either by evidence: “proof of
unreliability” or else by something gone wrong in the truster: “the irritation and
antipathy” which can shut us off completely from one another. Stern comments on why
he thinks Løgstrup finds it essential to emphasise this point:
As someone who lived through the Nazi experience both in Germany and in Denmark, and
the consequent erosion in relations of trust that this entailed, this must be seen as the
II.4 Trustworthiness 220
fundamental lesson Løgstrup learned: not that society could not function in such conditions,
because in some sense it did, but that it is still a pathological form of human life, in which
important goods were lost as different and ‘deficient’ kinds of inter-relations took hold that
required people to be committed to a limited way of understanding one another as living
beings. (2017: 289)
This “pathological form of human life” fed by its “limited way of understanding one
another” is manifest in the world that Gervais imagines too. Society functions in The
Invention of Lying, and on the surface it looks very much like our own: people have
houses, jobs, cars, they get married and procreate. Yet they are palpably devoid of
Løgstrup’s “spontaneous expressions of life”, sympathy, mercy, love and trust. They
have theories of themselves and of one another, granted, based on very good evidence,
but this is all they have to navigate their world. This deficient way of relating to people,
of failing to understand them as living beings, is evident in the historical treatment of
those with autism (see II.3.2) and the historical treatment of minority groups in general.
It is how La Salle’s men related to the Illinois Indians (see I.2.2).
Conventional social norms, including those of honesty, non-violence, and of doing
what we are being counted on to do and signalling so effectively, Løgstrup and I agree
(see II.3.1) are not to be identified as trust and trustworthiness. Stern again summarises
this element of Løgstrup’s trust:
We do not create or bring about trust as a practice or norm, in the way that we bring about
practices or norms like driving on the left, marriage, or even property, which govern our
various social institutions in ways that we hope are for the best. These practices or norms
are brought into being by us in a contractual or quasicontractual manner and are thus goods
that we introduce into the world and over which we have control. But there are other
structures which are fundamental to life itself, of which we are part, that we could not bring
about in this way as without them we could not come to be at all, and trust (along with the
other sovereign expressions of life) are structures of this sort. (2017: 291)
Conventional norms are goods which may induce peace, cooperation, information
transfer, and social stability, but we can be without them. We have been without them.
Many sectors of the world’s population continue to be without them. Without the
II.4 Trustworthiness 221
intersubjectivity gained by trust and trustworthiness and the other sovereign expressions
of life however, we are no longer ourselves. Instead, we are grotesque versions of
ourselves living only in the ghoulish imaginations of warped British comedians. Though
they possess far superior knowledge about one another than we do, the characters in The
Invention of Lying are all dreadfully unhappy, damaged, defeated, and resigned. In
Løgstrup’s view and in my own (see I.2, I.3, I.4), trust does not deny knowledge, rather,
what we know about a person already is quite irrelevant. Trust requires no justification,
and, for Løgstrup, this includes the potential justification that trust is the rational
approach as it can help us to retain a positive view of life. According to Løgstrup, if you
trust the other for the good such trust brings you, then this is just another way to cut
yourself off from the person concerned by focusing in on yourself instead, a point he
develops in relation to mercy:
Mercy consists in an impulse to free another person from suffering. If it serves another
purpose, such as stabilizing society, it is replaced by indifference towards the other person’s
suffering. The ulterior motive transforms mercy into its own opposite. This is why the
spontaneous expressions of life [including trust] defy all justification. The very moment we
seek to give a reason for them, we make them contingent upon that which we present as our
reason, and they become corrupted right then and there. We have made them a means to
obtain a goal other than their own: a means for the goal that is present in the justification.
(2007: 128)
This dissertation has argued that trust and trustworthiness are essentially personal
private experiences (I.4.2), that do not preclude selfishness (II.1.4). This may seem to be
a point of difference between Løgstrup and myself. Yet I have also continuously
maintained that trust and trustworthiness are not inwardly focused. The focus of them
both is always the object of trust/worthiness – the truster/trustee. Being two-place
relations, trust and trustworthiness involve the experience two individuals have of one
another and as such, they are wholly collaborative and interactive (see I.3, I.4.2, and
II.2.1), aside from the pathological case where things go terribly wrong (see I.4.2). In
the normal case, people who trust and are worthy of it emerge together, in response to
one another, and, as Løgstrup says in relation to mercy, their motives can transform
II.4 Trustworthiness 222
them: trusters into distrusters, those who are worthy into those who are unworthy (as I
have argued in II.2.2, and II.2.3).
To summarise, trust and trustworthiness arise, not because of the need we have to
count on one another, but because of the situation we are in: one in which we can never
fully see, never fully comprehend, another person. One in which we can always be
wrong about someone, even if we have got them right today. A situation in which we
have hidden depths, private experiences, and so, the freedom to let one another emerge,
the freedom to help one another emerge. Refraining from letting those other limiting
ways of regarding one another rule, with theories and rationalisations, is trust. Love
gives us this extraordinary capacity too. On these points, the Danish philosopher Knud
Ejler Løgstrup and I appear to be in agreement.
II.4.5 The freedom to look again
But surely it is what a person did that determines their trustworthiness, otherwise, how do
you explain the fact that our trust is broken when people do or fail to do certain things?
To answer this, it the inherently reciprocal nature between trust and the participant stance. In
“Freedom and Resentment” (1962), addressing directly the free-will/determinism
debate, P.F. Strawson showed us that to hold one another accountable in the ways that
we do, we must – in some important sense – be free. My purpose in relating my own
work to Strawson’s is not to make claims about what Strawson would have said of my
trust cases (we cannot know), but to make a new claim– that whatever Strawson’s view,
navigating our trusting relationships does indeed involve the kind of shifting between
the objective and participant stance that I characterise. In the trust cases I am interested
in, which are different from Strawson’s own cases, we shift back and forth between the
objective and the participant stance: indeed, this shifting is part of the trust-process. The
applicability of Strawson’s discussion to cases such as this is bolstered by
interpretations taken from secondary literature, for example, as discussed by Snowdon
and Gomes:
Strawson’s purpose [in “Freedom and Resentment”] is to dissolve the so-called problem of
determinism and responsibility. He does this by drawing a contrast between two different
II.4 Trustworthiness 223
perspectives we can take on the world: the ‘participant’ and ‘objective’ standpoints. These
perspectives involve different explanations of other people’s actions. From the objective
point of view, we see people as elements of the natural world, causally manipulated and
manipulable in various ways. From the participant point of view, we see others as
appropriate objects of ‘reactive attitudes’, attitudes such as gratitude, anger, sympathy and
resentment, which presuppose the responsibility of other people. These two perspectives are
opposed to one another, but both are legitimate. In particular, Strawson argues that our
reactive attitudes towards others and ourselves are natural and irrevocable. They are a
central part of what it is to be human. The truth of determinism cannot, then, force us to
give up the participant standpoint, because the reactive attitudes are too deeply embedded in
our humanity. Between determinism and responsibility there can be no conflict. (2019
Section 8.5)
Setting aside the issue of determinism, one influential view of trust (as discussed in
1.2.1) is that trust is an action that we take (reliance) from the participant stance. To
refresh, on this view, when we trust, we rely, and open ourselves up to experiencing
reactive attitudes – i.e. resentment and betrayal – should our trustee fail to do what we
are entrusting them to do. Richard Holton is celebrated for having first made the
connection between Strawson’s insight and trust in “Deciding to Trust, Coming to
Believe” (1994), but more recently, Stephan Darwall has argued that actually Baier and
Jones share with Holton a similar view of trust as a Strawsonian reactive attitude
(2017). A number of others have since adopted this view.
This has all been discussed already in I.1.1. The new idea explored in this
subsection is that, while Strawson’s insight can shed some light on an interesting feature
of our trusting relationships, the widespread adoption of three-place trust/worthiness has
led the connection between the participant stance and trust/worthiness to be
mischaracterised. Trust and trustworthiness are not ‘actions we take from the participant
stance’; rather, trust and trust worthiness involve experiencing one another, which itself
involves navigating the complex problem of when and when not to take the participant
stance towards one another.
This proposal goes against common wisdom on the nature of the connection,
precisely because those who have made the connection between trust and Strawson’s
II.4 Trustworthiness 224
argument in “Freedom and Resentment” take trust to be, in Darwall’s words, a “species
of reliance” (2017: 35) that is seen ultimately as a kind of reaction toward the behaviour
of others. Indeed, the freedom relevant to trust has been understood as the freedom to
entrust and the freedom relevant to trustworthiness as the freedom relevant to doing
what is entrusted. According to Holton:
You let yourself fall because the others will catch you. Or at least that is what they told you
they would do. You do not know that they will. You let yourself fall because you trust them
to catch you… Resentment and gratitude are examples of the particular attitudes that we
feel towards people when they act [my emphasis] in certain ways… if the people in these
dealing were to hurt us, we would typically feel resentment; and if they were to help, we
would typically feel gratitude. We are ready to take particular reactive attitudes should they
act [my emphasis] in certain ways. (1994: 63-67)
Here, Holton views trust in that classic three-place cognitive sense; something that we
do when we lack knowledge of how others will behave, hence, trustworthiness is doing
what others expect us to do. On any three-place understanding, Strawson’s participant
attitudes are relevant to trust if we understand trust to be an action that we take ‘from
the participant stance’, and so a trustee is worthy of trust when they take action, doing
what we entrust them to do. However, to view trust this way is to ignore, I think, the
important nuance in Strawson’s point. As he says, the participant attitudes reflect:
how much we actually mind, how much it matters to us, whether the actions of other
people—and particularly some other people—reflect attitudes towards us of good will,
affection, or esteem on the one hand or contempt, indifference, or malevolence on the other.
(1962: 5)
What we actually mind is not the actions but what the actions reflect: how others
experience us – with goodwill, affection, esteem, or contempt, indifference,
malevolence. Does our trustee experience us as Dorothea experiences Lydgate, or as Sir
James experiences Lydgate? Is Rasmus telling the truth because he is Iris’ friend or
because he is pretending to be Iris’ friend? Though the language is couched in terms of
action, we do not take the participant stance towards people’s actions, but towards
II.4 Trustworthiness 225
people. We react to what they think and feel about us, or rather, given the veil, our best
guess of what they think and feel about us.
This facet, the veil, again, is all-important. It matters that we might be wrong about
one another, indeed, it is precisely this that allows us the freedom to choose when to
take the objective stance, and when to take the participant stance. We can decide to
adopt objective thinking: ‘he couldn’t help it– it was an accident’ or participant
thinking: ‘you betrayed me– you did it on purpose’. Trust is not a matter of adopting
participant thinking already, before anything happens, and standing ready to experience
betrayal should our trustee fail (Holton 1994: 66); trust can just as much require us to
remain steadfast in objective thinking, even when the trustee fails, even when it seems
without question that we have been betrayed.
We can see this in The Invention of Lying. In Gervais’ big-screen thought-
experiment, we are confronted with characters who do have freedom of action, as well
as the capacities for reflection, deliberation, decision-making, and self-determination on
a level not too dissimilar from our own. They can “decide to trust”, in Holton’s sense
that they can decide to fall backwards, counting on someone to catch them, and they can
“decide to be trustworthy” in the sense that they can decide to catch the person who is
counting on them. It is true that they differ from us in possessing superior knowledge of
their trustee’s intentions (at least at the time of asking), but they still lack certain
knowledge of the outcome. Intentions can change in an instant, and, in the trust game,
all sorts of extraneous things can intervene in the moments as we are letting ourselves
fall, meaning that they cannot predict the future any better than we can. As such, the
Trust Game works (involves risk) in their world too, requiring them, like us, to take a
leap of uncertainty.
Yet despite all these similarities in agency and epistemic status, what we see in The
Invention of Lying are characters who do not take the participant stance towards one
another. With no veil, there is defeated resignation instead of moral outrage; hurt
acceptance in place of resentment. They treat one another as elements of the natural
world, causally manipulated and manipulable in various ways. Of course, unlike us they
lack the freedom to speak lies, but lacking this freedom alone cannot fully explain why
they only take the objective stance towards one another. Imagine that our friend (or
II.4 Trustworthiness 226
someone we thought to be our friend) is drugged somehow to speak only truth. In this
single way they would be very much like the characters in The Invention of Lying. Yet if
our friend were to say something hurtful to us that they could not help saying while
drugged, then we may still be upset at them; not for saying it – they couldn’t help that –
but even just for thinking it. In our world, it is not only important how others treat us,
but how they privately regard us, how they experience us. We hold people responsible
not only for their actions, but for their opinions, beliefs, and attitudes (A. M. Smith
2005). This makes sense, given the freedom we have in this regard.
Take for example, that reactive attitude so often linked in the literature to trust (see
I.1)– betrayal. When it comes to betrayal, infidelity must be considered the prime
example. In The Invention of Lying, an unfaithful lover is just an unreliable
monogamous partner. Without the accompanying lying or sneaking around, the harm
ends with the act. This is comically captured in a marriage ceremony scene late in the
film, where the couple’s ‘vows’ consist of the rather feeble ‘promise’ to stay with one
another for “as long as they want to”. In our world though, the accompanying deception
is by far the most damaging aspect of infidelity. As infidelity researcher Lisa Firestone
explains, the real villain behind infidelity is not the affair [the sexual act] itself, but the
many secrets and deceptions built around it:
Deception and lies shatter the reality of others, eroding their belief in the veracity of their
perceptions and subjective experience. The betrayal of trust brought about by a partner's
secret involvement with another person leads to a shocking and painful realization on the
part of the deceived party that the person he or she has been involved with has a secret life
and that there is an aspect of his or her partner that he or she had no knowledge of.
(Firestone et al., 2006)
We can shatter one another’s reality because our reality with regard to one another,
unlike theirs, is made of glass-guesses. When explaining our reactive attitudes – why we
feel betrayed – we tend to speak in terms of what he did… what she said… how they
behaved. ‘I’m resentful because she lied’, we say. But the act is just the catalyst. More
precisely, when we take the participant stance towards someone, what we are really
reacting to is our own ideas about them, our own interpretation of them, of who they are
II.4 Trustworthiness 227
in the greater scheme of their reasons, motives, and emotions and it is most important,
most vital, that it is a guess, that we might be wrong.
In Gervais’ world, people fail to take anything other than the objective stance
towards one another not because they have no freedom with regard to action, but
because they cannot choose to either: imagine that things are other than as they appear,
give the benefit of the doubt, use their reason to let that which they do not understand
pass unjudged, try to move into a more optimistic frame of mind about one another,
reflect on their own motivations towards one another, try to overcome their own
emotional responses towards one another, or look again and see one another in a better
light. They cannot be held accountable for their failures of trust and trustworthiness, not
because they cannot be held accountable for their actions – for the most part they can –
but because they have no freedom with regard to their own experience of one another.
Without hidden private subjectivity, they manage only the ‘purely objective’ view of
one another as posing problems simply of ‘intellectual understanding, management,
treatment, and control’ (Strawson 1962: 13).
Just like the people in The Invention of Lying, we too can respond to evidence about
a trustee’s trustworthiness. This is to have our mind changed for us about them. But
unlike them, who only have this passive avenue of change open to them, we have the
freedom (within personal limits) to change our own mind about a person, without any
outside help at all. This is not the same as blind faith, for it is not about closing our eyes
to truth. Rather, it is a matter of holding appearances firmly in one eye’s gaze, while
using the other eye to see something – even just some remote possibility – that was
obscured in bare-blinding reality. This “looking again” is discussed by Iris Murdoch in
her development of an ethics of vision, as opposed to an ethics of choice (1957). This
ethics of vision for Murdoch involves the human capacity to “picture ourselves” and
then come to resemble the picture (Murdoch 2001: 234) and so in this way, is very like
Løgstrup’s ethics.
Strawson’s argument in “Freedom and Resentment” can shed some light on trust
and trustworthiness, as it helps us to see that navigating our trusting relationships
requires us to treat one another in various ways depending on the context, sometimes
holding one another to account for our failures of reliability, sometimes not. But trust is
II.4 Trustworthiness 228
no more ‘reliance from the participant stance’ than it is ‘reliance from the objective
stance’. Moreover, there is one worrying part of Strawson’s discussion that does not sit
well with the predominant message of Part II of this dissertation. The participant stance
is something we take towards some groups of people and not others:
We can have direct dealings with human beings without any degree of personal
involvement, treating them simply as creatures to be handled in our own interest, or our
side’s, or society’s—or even theirs. In the extreme case of the mentally deranged, it is easy
to see the connection between the possibility of a wholly objective attitude and the
impossibility [my emphasis] of what we understand by ordinary interpersonal relationships.
Given this latter impossibility, no other civilized attitude is available than that of viewing
the deranged person simply as something to be understood and controlled in the most
desirable fashion. To view him as outside the reach of personal relationships is already, for
the civilized, to view him in this way. For reasons of policy or self-protection we may have
occasion, perhaps temporary, to adopt a fundamentally similar attitude to a ‘normal’ human
being; to concentrate, that is, on understanding ‘how he works’, with a view to determining
our policy accordingly, or to finding in that very understanding a relief from the strains of
involvement. (1962: 11)
Strawson says that the participant stance is impossible to take towards some groups
of individuals, i.e. the “mentally deranged”. This makes the alternative objective stance,
in Long’s words, to treat a person as a problem to be solved, rather than as a person to
be met (Long 2017). Any account that makes trust into ‘reliance from the participant
stance’ will end up being exclusionary, just as Jones’ account is (II.3). It may well be
“civilized”, but it is not human to treat anybody as entirely outside the reach of personal
relationships. Taking relief from the strains of personal involvement is something we do
with everyone on occasion (particularly our in-laws). However, if taking the objective
stance becomes something that we do consistently with any individual or any particular
group of individuals, then we are refusing those individuals participation in human
relationships, and so are dehumanising them. Moreover, there is a treacherous (but
ultimately just) twist to dehumanisation: the dehumaniser is thereby dehumanised.
Coming full circle back to that rich source of philosophical exchanges Star Trek: Next
Generation (Berman 1990), I end with some reflections between the non-human
II.4 Trustworthiness 229
android Lt. Commander Data (capable only of the objective stance), and his very much
human commander, Commander William T. Riker:
Riker: In all trust, there is the possibility of betrayal. I'm not sure you were... prepared
for that.
Data [an android]: Were you prepared, sir?
Riker: I don't think anybody ever is.
Data: Hmm... Then it is better not to trust?
Riker: Without trust, there's no friendship, no closeness. None of the emotional bonds
that make us who we are.
Data: And yet you put yourself at risk.
Riker: [smiles] Every single time.
Data: Perhaps I am fortunate, sir, to be spared the emotional consequences.
Riker: Perhaps.
To summarise, if Strawson’s discussion in “Freedom and Resentment” illuminates
our trusting relationships, then it is not as a dichotomous divide – the trustworthy on the
participant-side and the untrustworthy on the objective-side – but as a reminder of how
our trusting relationships involve the continual, alert-but-blind navigation of this divide.
Taking the objective stance spares us the emotional consequences, but it dehumanises
others, and in doing so ourselves. This is most unfortunate.
II Summary of Part II, On Trustworthiness 230
Summary of Part II, On Trustworthiness
Section I.1 reviewed the philosophical literature on Trustworthiness. Section II.2
demonstrated the limitations of the current dominant understandings of trustworthiness
in the philosophical literature. Section II.3 highlighted the potential ethical problems
with current dominant understandings of trustworthiness via one influential
philosopher’s view. Section II.4 made use of the film The Invention of Lying to further
characterise the role that trustworthiness plays in our lives. Two-place trustworthiness,
as it was presented in this dissertation, is one way we might experience and so relate to
a special individual in our lives; one who trusts us. Trusters and trustees are all of us
who live a veiled existence between the zombies and the gods. Trust acknowledges: ‘I
can’t see you; you could be anything you like, but here I am choosing to make myself
vulnerable to you’. Trustworthiness answers: ‘You can’t see me, I could be anything I
like, but here I am choosing to make myself worthy of you’.
231
Conclusion To trust … is to lay oneself open (Løgstrup 1997)
This dissertation has two symmetrical parts. Part I, Trust, argued against the dominant
epistemic view of trust in philosophy – three-place trust – and suggested a paradigm
shift. So-called ‘three-placed trust’ is better understood not as a kind of trust, but as a
kind of reliance. Trust is instead presented as a two-place relation, and this dissertation
further characterised this bare schematic. Part II, Trustworthiness, has also argued
against the dominant view of trustworthiness in philosophy, paying particular attention
to the potential ethical implications of the dominant view, rather than the
epistemological implications focused on in Part I. Trustworthiness in Part II has been
presented as the other half of a trusting two-place relation, and again this dissertation
further characterised this bare schematic. This conclusion proceeds with a more detailed
synopsis of this dissertation in the section that follows, Summary; then provides
recommendations for further work in this area in Future Research; and finishes with
some final Closing Remarks.
Summary: On Trust and Trustworthiness
Both Part I and Part II began with an extensive review of the relevant philosophical
literature on trust and trustworthiness respectively. In I.1 Trust: in the Philosophical
Literature, this dissertation has demonstrated that the dominant view in philosophy is
that trust is a three-place relation. Examination of the literature has revealed that the
dominance of three-place trust led to ‘The Problem of Trust’ being understood as an
epistemic problem, involving a conflict between what trust requires of us with regard to
risk and evidence, and what rationality requires of us with regard to risk and evidence,
leading trust to become confused with both reliance (implicating our practical
reasoning) and belief (implicating our theoretical reasoning). In II.1 Trustworthiness: in
the Philosophical Literature, this dissertation has demonstrated a symmetrical three-
place dominance, though in the case of trustworthiness one-place views that understand
Conclusion Summary: On Trust and Trustworthiness 232
trustworthiness as a moral notion – a virtue – have been shown to have been given more
prominence. Sections I.1 and II.1 thus have effectively set the stage for the arguments
that follow, renouncing the dominant views.
Following on from their respective literature reviews, both Part I and Part II have
presented problems with, and limitations of, the dominant views as laid out. Dominant
Views on Trust: Problems (I.2) considered the notion of three-place trust in detail,
examining the reasons for three-place dominance and the various manifestations of its
forms. The more simplistic forms were shown to be indistinguishable from reliance and
cooperation and were rejected on these grounds. This dissertation has demonstrated that
the more intricate ‘three-place trust plus’ accounts found in the literature aim to fix the
limitations of simplistic three-place trust and acknowledged that such accounts have
much to add to our understanding of trust. Ultimately, though, this dissertation has
demonstrated that by retaining the three-place schematic, ‘three-place trust plus’
accounts do not manage to avoid the problems faced by their more simplistic
counterparts. This dissertation was able to incorporate what was found to be of merit in
these ‘three-place plus trust plus’ accounts into its own two-place account presented in
Trust (I.4). In Dominant Views on Trustworthiness: Problems (II.2) this dissertation has
highlighted and addressed the limitations of one-place trustworthiness and three-place
trustworthiness. With regard to one-place trustworthiness, this dissertation has revealed
that unlike virtues or character traits, which are (or aim to be) one-place, trustworthiness
takes an object, and so cannot be a virtue or character trait. With regard to three-place
trustworthiness, this dissertation has made use of an original thought experiment
involving two individuals (a truster and a trustee) to demonstrate that although various
versions of three-place trustworthiness do manage to pick-out trustworthiness in some
circumstances, they cannot do so consistently, or without error. Three-place
trustworthiness was rejected on those grounds.
In I.3 The Object of Trust and II.3 Rich Trustworthiness or Poor Trustworthiness?
the symmetry between Parts I and Part II diverged, with I.3 having undertaken an
exposition of the underlying logic of three-place trust, and II.3 having undertaken an
examination of the ethical implications of three-place trustworthiness. This reflected the
parallel divergence in how the concepts of trust and trustworthiness have been treated
Conclusion Summary: On Trust and Trustworthiness 233
by philosophy: trust is more often understood as an epistemic notion with epistemic
consequences, and trustworthiness as an ethical notion with ethical consequences. To
that end, section I.3 demonstrated an underlying ambiguity in the logic of three-place
trust regarding the object of trust. This dissertation has offered a remedy to this situation
by providing an alternative way of understanding so-called three-place trust and
trustworthiness as kinds of reliance/reliability that may have involved trust/worthiness,
rather than as kinds of trust/worthiness that have definitionally involved reliance and
reliability. In section II.3 this dissertation has used an influential example from the
philosophical literature on trustworthiness to draw attention to the potential ethical
consequences of adopting a three-place view of trustworthiness that is rooted in
behaviour. Specifically, by framing trustworthiness as a matter of a trustee’s success or
failure at adhering to certain social norms of behaviour, many groups of people have
been precluded from being considered as candidates for trustworthiness based on
criteria that are 1) orthogonal to their worthiness of trust, and 2) potentially harmful.
This dissertation established that these grounds are sufficient for rejecting behavioural-
based three-place accounts of our worthiness of trust.
The symmetry in this dissertation re-emerged in sections I.4 Trust and II.4
Trustworthiness, with both these sections having further characterised the bare two-
place schematic argued for in the previous sections. To do this, I.4 made use of an
excerpt from George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch, and II.4 made use of the Ricky
Gervais film The Invention of Lying. Both these humanistic art forms, in their very
different ways, were shown to be expositions of trust and trustworthiness as they
actually exist in human relationships, and they both shed light on the severe limitations
of trust and trustworthiness understood as moralised or cognitively informed actions. In
addition to making use of these humanistic resources to further characterise two-place
trust and trustworthiness, I.4 and II.4 both finished by addressing some potential
criticisms and implications of the shift to a two-place view.
The shift from three/one-place trust/worthiness to two-place trust/worthiness, as
presented in this dissertation, has allowed us to divorce epistemological and ethical
situations, implications, and questions that arise in our interactions with one another
from the interpersonal relationship itself, while acknowledging that such situations,
Conclusion Further Research: On Trust and Trustworthiness 234
implications, questions, and dilemmas do arise in and because of our interpersonal
relationships, and do affect them. Truth, morality, reason, duty, love, and trust are
intermingling and yet separate forces pushing and pulling us about in complex ways,
and so this shift should be of use to ethicists and epistemologists who tackle these
complex and interrelated issues.
Further Research: On Trust and Trustworthiness
The conceptual shift from three-place trust/worthiness to two-place trust/worthiness
presented in this dissertation has left much room for further characterisation. Future
work could investigate, for example, the various ways in which being parties to trusting
relationships affects our moral and rational decision-making.
When trust/worthiness is non-moralised and non-cognitive, the interplay between
the trusting, the moral, and the rational elements becomes more intricate and interesting,
as discussed briefly in subsection II.2.1.
Two-place trust and trustworthiness as they have been presented in this dissertation
could also play an important role in psychology, not only in accounting for the success
and break-down of relationships as they do now, but potentially also in helping to frame
some forms of mental illness and treatment, especially in relation to the notion of
complex self-trust, as touched upon in subsection I.4.5.
As some aspects of trust and trustworthiness are voluntary according to a two-place
account and some are not, as discussed in subsection I.1.4, philosophers may be
interested in which aspects are which, and how these voluntary and non-voluntary
components interact to bolster or undermine our trusting relationships.
This dissertation has highlighted the similarities between trust and love, but it did
not examine the relationship between them. This would be another important area of
investigation; for example, philosophers may ask: which is primary (trust or love), can
either one survive the loss of the other, and is love a two-place relation as well? Indeed,
more work needs to be done than was possible in this dissertation to characterise the
symmetrical nature of trust and trustworthiness as two-halves of a two-place relation,
Conclusion Closing Remarks: On Trust and Trustworthiness 235
and whether love has two similar halves (love and love-worthiness) is an interesting
proposal.
This dissertation has provided numerous reasons for rejecting the increasingly held
view that trust should be given a wide-scope interpretation so as to be able to explain all
instances of cooperative behaviour. This may provide the beginnings of a framework for
researchers to separate out broad categories of causes underlying cooperative
endeavours, with trust being only one possible cause among many: selfishness, mutual-
benefit, boredom, coercion, mercy, love, sympathy, etc. This work should be of use to
historians as well as to political and social scientists, or any researcher faced with the
difficult task of elucidating human behaviour both on an individual as well as a
collective scale.
Lastly, given the ethical implications addressed in section II.3 in relation to one
influential account, it would be pertinent for philosophers to investigate whether any
other theories of either trust or trustworthiness that have come out of philosophy have
similar ethical implications. As suggested in II.3, it is my hunch that they will. On this
point, it would be in line with the message of inclusivity brought forth in this
dissertation for philosophers to reflect on how mind-blindness, rather than mind-
reading, gives rise to important aspects of our humanity, since unlike so-called “mind-
reading”, mind-blindness – the veil – is a feature of humanity that is not exclusionary,
but is one we all share.
Closing Remarks: On Trust and Trustworthiness
This dissertation opened with some thoughts from Pastor Graham Long of the Wayside
Chapel in Sydney’s Kings Cross. As he is, in a way, this dissertation’s ambassador for
two-place trust and trustworthiness, returning to Long is a fitting way to close. The
“philosophy of Wayside” – which is a way of life for Long – does not come from any
“tricky seven-step answer that we worked out of some, you know, helping book or The
Bible or anywhere else; it just isn’t there” (Long 2017). This way of life is not religious
or moral, but is instead a humanistic way of treating those who comes to them for
assistance as a person to be met rather than as a problem to be solved:
Conclusion Closing Remarks: On Trust and Trustworthiness 236
If they come and they’re driven by: what can you give me? you know, we haven’t got a lot
to give. If you arrive thinking this is an intensive care unit so that we can make you feel
better in your lostness it’ll be very disappointing because we’re not here to meet all your
needs. We’re here to meet you. Call you out into a healthier place which is a place of
community where you take responsibility for yourself. In other words, you are responsive to
others. That’s a much more difficult journey than… just give me this… just give me that…
everything I know about me has come from others and... and… it’s always two-way.
This dissertation, at heart, has been a plea to shift how we understand trust and
trustworthiness in philosophy from solutions to the problems other people create in our
lives – problems of an ethical, agential, epistemological, or risk/reward nature – to a
way of meeting people, creating one another in our experience of one another. The bare
schematics of this shift went from one/three-place trust/worthiness to two-place
trust/worthiness. Fleshed out, this means that rather than being attributes that we have
(one-place) or behaviours that we do (three-place), trust and trustworthiness are two-
place relations that emerge when we lay ourselves open and let others emerge. Trust and
trustworthiness meet a person where they are at, with open eyes, heart, and mind,
blinded not by faith, nor by the facts as they are, nor by the judgments we might have
carried. Meeting a person in this manner requires us to acknowledge the veil between
us: the veil that means there is always a chance we have got one another wrong; always
a chance that if we look harder, we might see something different, something new,
something that we missed before.
The rewards of this way of experiencing another human being can never serve as the
reason why we do it, but they are manifest, and so can be explicated. Describing the
rewards of the experience of being trusted, Long recounts to Richard Fidler his
attendance at the death of a newborn baby whose parents had found out days before he
was born that he would not survive due to a rare genetic condition:
The mum sang him sweet songs and eventually his life ebbed away. And, the incredible
honour it was to be in that room. I felt like I received something even though we lost this
little boy. The trust these people put in me to just be there and be a… a tower of weakness
for them… that’s what I do. I don’t have magic tricks. I don’t know anything. I’m just there.
And I was there with these people in this awful moment and in some ways, I think they
Conclusion Closing Remarks: On Trust and Trustworthiness 237
invited me in because they knew I wasn’t going to tell them this all happened for a good
reason. I was just with them. And the trust they put in me was, man… one of the treasures
of my life. I have no right to be there. That they would ask me to be there is just… an
honour beyond words.
Two-place trust and trustworthiness, as presented in this dissertation, do not require us
to know anything or have any magic tricks. The relationship of trust is special, but we
do not need to display any special skill at social norm-following, communication, moral
development, intelligence, or rationality to be let in. These things can enhance, and they
can undermine our trust and trustworthiness, which require our presence not our
reasons, our openness not our action, our vulnerability as much as our fortitude. The
complicated way in which two individuals’ lives can entangle means we can experience
almost anything in our trusting relationships, our loving relationships. These relations
will break any conditions we place on them in our attempts to define them. Their ability
to do this, to expand our experience in wholly unexpected and contradictory ways, is
precisely why we value them so much.
* * *
238
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