Trust, Ethics and Human Reason

Olli Lagerspetz

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781441109194
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

The variety of approaches to the concept of trust in philosophy reflects the fact that our worries are diverse, from the Hobbesian concern for the possibility of rational cooperation to Wittgenstein's treatment of the place of trust in knowledge. To speak of trust is not only to describe human action but also to take a perspective on it and to engage with it. Olli Lagerspetz breathes new life into the philosophical debate by showing how questions about trust are at the centre of any in-depth analyses of the nature of human agency and human rationality and that these issues, in turn, lie at the heart of philosophical ethics. Ideal for those grappling with these issues for the first time, Trust, Ethics and Human Reason provides a thorough and impassioned assessment of the concept of trust in moral philosophy.

CHAPTER ONE

Trust and our worries with it

If one were very briefly to describe the life of the human being as a species, one characteristic would easily spring to mind: our dependence on other people. It is the very fabric of our lives. At times such dependence results from considered choices, but on the whole the life that involves mutual dependence and trust is not something we have planned or chosen. To start with the obvious, learning processes take time and require instruction by others. Consequently the human young still remain dependent on the previous generation long after they physically reach maturity. Once in the full enjoyment of our rational faculties, we make decisions about engaging in cooperative ventures or withdrawing from them. But all this takes place in society – within a massive network of mutual dependence that can hardly be surveyed, even by experts. Dependence on others is constitutive of important human practices, which is perhaps best seen in situations where for some reason help is unavailable. Many of us would be prepared to ask complete strangers for directions in a foreign city. But consider those who do not feel safe to do so: such as, perhaps, the very young and the very old, women in some situations, and members of minority groups routinely treated with suspicion. Where we cannot trust and be trusted, we are shut out of society at large – not only because our contacts with others turn difficult and unpredictable in a practical sense, but because we are divested of our very capacity as a social agent.

David Hume has remarked: ‘The mutual dependence of men is so great that scarce any human action is entirely complete in itself, or is performed without some reference to the actions of others, which are required to make it answer fully to the intentions of the agent.’1 Hume’s observation is apt, but he perhaps did not see its full implications. He was mainly thinking of cooperation for specific, limited undertakings – things that we can plan to do or not to do. Our involvement with each other clearly goes deeper than that. The very possibility of reasonable distrust depends on a huge body of knowledge, thinking patterns and accepted patterns of action that we take on trust from others.

In English-speaking academic philosophy, most of the work concerning trust has been published in the 1980s or later. The work published in the 1980s is still widely cited and used as a starting point for research. Today trust is no longer a neglected subject but more or less well-defined central questions and approaches have emerged. Hence the time seems ripe for an overview.2 Surveying the philosophical trust literature, one question comes across as central. How does the inescapability of trust square with rationality – another feature agreed to be central in the life of Homo sapiens? For isn’t there a tension between these two characteristically human conditions: (1) the overwhelming fact of our mutual dependence; and (2) the character of rational thinking as the independent exercise of reason? Ever since Descartes, if not earlier, we are constantly told that knowledge rests on evidence and reasoning, not trust; for, as John Hardwig formulates the point, ‘trust, in order to be trust, must be at least partially blind’.3 It seems that trust involves going beyond or against what is accessible or justified merely on the basis of our own reasoning from available information. If we refuse to trust someone or something (a person, a source of information) more than they have demonstrably ‘earned’, we just do not trust them. Yet it is difficult to imagine human life where no such trust is involved. A considerable part of the philosophical discussion concerning trust involves various attempts to overcome the apparent conflict between trust and reason.4

Trust and reason: Friends or foes?

In his brief book on trust and rationality, Martin Hollis argues that trust and even cooperative action in general seem in the last analysis to be incompatible with the individualist bent of what he calls ‘Enlightenment reason’.5 His analysis, to which we will return later,6 seems convincing with regard to a specific view on practical rationality, defined as the individual pursuit of utility. No formal argument seems to be available for convincing a rational agent (of the kind implied in Hollis’s discussion) to trust another agent known to be similarly motivated. An analogous case for the incompatibility of trust and rationality has been made in the epistemological realm. According to standard views on the rational justification of knowledge claims, it is problematic, at least prima facie, to accept knowledge claims by others on trust.7 These are views generally associated with the Enlightenment, implying individualism and emancipation from tradition. However, a somewhat different picture arises if we turn to that pivotal document of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant’s 1784 essay on the concept of enlightenment.8 As is well known, Kant coins the Enlightenment dictum, ‘Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!’9 But he wants to find out exactly what using one’s ‘own understanding’ amounts to. Kant stresses the importance of an informed general public. The progress of reason depends on the possibility of shared reflection and cannot be imagined to occur in social isolation.10 It would thus be more fitting to describe the target of Hollis’s criticism as a specifically individualist and rationalist idea of reason and autonomy, and it is not quite obvious on whose side ‘Enlightenment’ would finally stand in the dispute. This individualist tradition, of which Thomas Hobbes is an important pre-Enlightenment representative, assumes suspicion as the default stance; for him it is the obvious position that human beings in a Hobbesian world need rationally to overcome. Kant may be rather seen as saying that the enlightened public needs, in a certain important but limited range of cases, to overcome the natural human default stance of trustfulness. But regardless of its historical roots, a large part of our philosophical tradition both in political philosophy and epistemology has involved focus on the individual agent. This is an agent supposedly only using his or her strictly personal resources to arrive at rational conclusions.

Let me consider some features of this individualist and rationalist picture of human life which of course has been dissected in detail by others.11 Philosophically its most important feature is the privileged position it gives to scepticism. Believing nothing is the initial position which the individual agent supposedly must overcome with the help of experience and rational thinking. Elizabeth Wolgast accordingly refers to the ideal launched in the Renaissance as one of ‘do-it-yourself science and theology’.12 The consequences of this general stance are shown, in epistemology, in the difficulty of accommodating knowledge by testimony as a legitimate source of knowledge.13 In political philosophy, the sceptical legacy surfaces as problems about explaining how cooperation can be rationally justified at all.14 And it is expressed in both political and moral philosophy in an explicit or implicit view on the proper place for trust, vulnerability and dependence. On that view, mutual dependence is not the natural environment for human thought and action. At least in a perfect world populated by fully rational adults, dependence should be treated as something we may either do without or choose because of some prudentially or morally justified end. The philosophical debate on trust in the last few decades, especially in English-speaking philosophy, has largely consisted of attempts to engage with that tradition.

The focus of that debate lies in attempts to justify trust and other forms of interpersonal dependence. At the same time there is perhaps something inherently self-defeating in the idea of justifying trust, or at least fully justifying trust.15 For isn’t the problem precisely that we must trust because there is no certainty? Thus it seems that any reason for trusting that might be brought up must fall short of a complete justification. On the other hand, if we already trust the other, the need to look for a justification does not even arise. In other words, it appears that the force of argument as such could never move a person from an initial stance of distrust to that of trust or vice versa. This is not to claim that such shifts do not take place in real life, but the role of argument in them is not very clear-cut. In sum, reviewing the literature on trust from the 1980s onwards, the ubiquity and perhaps irreducible character of trust are mostly recognized, but these features are often taken to imply a prima facie difficulty. Trust is something that in a sense rationally ‘ought not’ to be there, but which nevertheless clearly is there; something which moreover seems inescapable and which calls for rational explanation and justification.

Barring the conclusion that trusting simply is irrational and should be avoided, three strategies seem available. One is to argue that trust, despite appearances, consists of justified beliefs that only seemingly conflict with received ideas of rationality.16 Another is to maintain that trust as a human tendency is neither rational nor irrational, but has beneficial (prudential, ethical, psychological) consequences that make it reasonable and justified.17 The third possibility is to argue that trust is not external to human reason in the first place but an important aspect of it. Thus, on that last view, our conceptions of rationality must be revised in order to accommodate the role of trust in it.18 On the whole I side with the last view in the present book. The growth and employment of rationality are not inimical or extraneous to sociality. Even what we recognize to be ‘informed decisions’ are influenced by our engagements with people; as I will later argue, also our ideas about ‘evidence’ speaking in favour of one conclusion or other reflect our relations with other people.

In the opening chapter of his book on testimony, C. A. J. Coady describes his trip to Holland, pointing out that at every step his reasons for believing he actually is in Holland depend on what others are telling him.19 But his dependence on testimony goes even further. His conviction that there is a country called Holland, and indeed the very idea that there are such things as ‘countries’, is something he has accepted as true from others. We are happy with this state of things because, as Ludwig Wittgenstein puts it in the notes published as On Certainty, ‘we belong to a community which is bound together by science and education’.20 One might see this as a problem because it implies that our lives, in their great outlines, are dependent on a general pattern of behaviour not rationally chosen by us; rational decisions appear only as tiny islands in a huge sea of irrationality or non-rationality. But Wittgenstein’s work here and elsewhere may just as well be taken as suggesting that ‘rationality’ just is the way (or ways) in which humans organize their lives. ‘Reason’ does not stand for a philosophical or political programme of any kind, but it describes how human beings in the course of their lives invoke ideas of the ‘reasonable’. Not all suggestions of what is reasonable are equally plausible and philosophers who look at human discourse are under no obligation to accept them all. But disagreements of this kind also belong to the general framework of a life where certain forms of interpersonal dependence are self-evident.

The present book has two main objectives. It aims to present a general outline of the philosophical trust debate of the last few decades. In the course of doing so it moreover hopes to develop a view that does justice to interpersonal dependence and trust as central aspects of reason itself. The analysis will necessarily include an idea of our life with ‘reason’ as one involving moral relations. By ‘moral relations’ I do not now mean ‘good moral relations’ but generally relationships where the moral vocabulary is available. For instance, I will argue that the applicability of notions of truthfulness and being committed to one’s words as elements of possible praise or criticism is essential to understanding what a person means by what he or she is saying.21 Epistemological and moral concepts are tightly intertwined here.

Given the nature of the present inquiry, one should not expect it to result in definitions of what trust or reason ‘really’ are. Concepts are made for use, and the advisability of adopting certain definitions of ‘trust’ or ‘reason’ depends on the issue that they are meant to illuminate. For instance, technical and stipulative definitions may be used when needed. Moreover, this kind of flexibility is itself an important part of our use of these concepts. I do insist on one thing, however. We will end up with a very limited understanding of the place of both trust and rationality in the human form of life if we think that their relation is only external.

On how to write about what trust ‘is’

A fellow philosopher,22 in considering the concept of trust, remarked to me that he is reminded of St Augustine’s observation about time: we know what it is when no one asks us, but once they do we don’t know what to answer. He would probably also agree with me about a chief reason for Augustine’s perplexity. If the question is, ‘What is time?’, not only the answer, but the question itself eludes us. Who is asking the question, for what purpose? Almost each and every human activity or concern involves what may be called a time dimension. But the ubiquity of ‘time’ in our pursuits does not make the question easier, quite the contrary. For it also means that, before the context of the inquiry is settled, there is no privileged way to approach it. To put this another way, the meaning of ‘What is time?’ is not settled simply by uttering the question.

‘What is mustard gas?’ almost always invites an answer either in terms of the chemical makeup or the devastating effects of this forbidden substance – unless some u...

Table of contents

• Bloomsbury Ethics Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Trust and our worries with it
• 2 Trust and Hobbesian reason
• 3 Vulnerability and entrusting
• 4 The time dimension
• 5 ‘Trust’ as an organizing tool
• 6 Communication, truthfulness, trust
• 7 Basic trust
• 8 Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright