Can we trust Trust?

Od Fremantle Philosophy Café

Trust is a tricky business. On the one hand, it’s a prerequisite for many worthwhile things: child care, relationships, friendships—even just eating at a restaurant. On the other hand, putting your faith in the wrong place often carries a high price.

Many philosophers define trust as a kind of reliance on other people based on a certain attitude.

What is the attitude that underpins trust?

Philosophers have answered that question many ways. For example, some say it is a simple belief that the other person will do the right thing for the right reasons. Others say it is rooted in a felt altruism, or in the hope that displaying trust will influence the other person to do what one wants them to do.

The problem with the belief view, according to Baier, was two-fold: first, it failed to distinguish trust from mere reliance, and secondly (and perhaps more importantly), it failed to make sense of the idea that when you trust someone and your trust is violated, you feel a sense of betrayal rather than mere disappointment.

Trust is important, but it is also dangerous. It is important because it allows us to form relationships with people and to depend on them—for love, for advice, for help with our plumbing, or what have you—especially when we know that no outside force compels them to give us such things.

But trust also 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.

Thus, trust is also dangerous. What we risk while trusting is the loss of the things that we entrust to others, including our self-respect, perhaps, which can be shattered by the betrayal of our trust.

Trust is one pattern of reliance, where the trusting person, or trustor can’t control what the trusted person, or trustee, does, and may not even know what the trustee does at the time he does it, but plans on the trustee doing one thing rather than another.

This pattern of reliance is no doubt essential to social life and basic survival.

But is it rational? Does trust really amount to being stupid, or helpless, or both?

” If you need a guarantee, you’re not trusting. To trust someone to do something, is to rely on them to do that thing, without having any guarantees.

Even so, we often have no choice but to trust. We’re forced to count on others all the time.

“Trust” is just what we call this kind of helpless dependence on others. We have got no way to make sure anyone will actually do what we count on them to do.

So we say I “trust” them. But perhaps I’m missing something.

Trust isn’t expectation with no guarantee. It’s expectation with a certain sort of guarantee. The sort of guarantee one gets with a promise, for example. The trustor relies on the trustee to be trustworthy. To live up to their word.

Here are some ponderings:)

if we take the assumption that trust is a kind of reliance: to trust someone is to rely on them in a certain kind of way.

The question that philosophers ask is:

What is the type of reliance that constitutes trust?

So, let’s think about trust as follows: to trust someone to do something is to rely on them to do it and to do so out of a certain attitude towards the proposition that they will do it for the right reasons.

If you think of that as the basic nature of trust, the philosophical questions are two:

What is the right attitude?

What are the right reasons?

And you can think of philosophical disputes about the nature of trust as disputes along one of those two dimensions.

But can’t we trust someone we don’t believe is trustworthy? Have you trusted trusted others to behave responsibly; believing that they really would?

Trusting those who are not trustworthy, however, seems a risk we often have to take.

Trusting where we cannot verify also is a risk we often have to take.

What do you think of this statement?

Trust is Good; Control is Better

Vladimir Ilych Lenin

Seligman, Adam B. (1998). "On the limits of Confidence and Role Expectations". American Journal of Economics and Sociology.

Ready to Trust in the Pondering?