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Creating Trust1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

Fernando Flores  and
Robert C. Solomon
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Abstract:

In this essay, we argue that trust is a dynamic emotional relationship which entails responsibility. Trust is not a social substance, a medium, or a mysterious entity but rather a set of social practices, defined by our choices, to trust or not to trust. We discuss the differences and the relationship between trust and trustworthiness, and we distinguish several different kinds or “levels” of trust, simple trust, basic trust, “blind” trust, and authentic trust. We then argue that trust as an emotional practice, can be “willful,” voluntary and a matter of personal responsibility.

Type
Articles
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , April 1998 , pp. 205 - 232
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 1998

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References

Notes

2 Daryl Koehn, “Should We Trust Trust?”, American Business Law Journal 34(2) (1996): 184-203.

3 Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (New York: Free Press, 1996).

4 In a recent movie about Louisiana governor Earl Long and his longtime mistress, Blaze Starr, Starr’s mother warns her, “never trust a man who says, ‘Trust me.’” The line occurs in the movie, starring Paul Newman and Lolita Davidovich, Blaze (1989).

5 E.g., Dick Morris on Bill Clinton’s campaign strategy, Behind the Oval Office (New York: Knopf, 1997).

6 For example, Francis Sejersted, “Managers and Consultants as Manipulators,” Business Ethics Quarterly 6(1) (1996): esp. pp. 77-78; Nancy B. Kurland, “Trust, Accountability, and Sales Agents’ Dueling Loyalties,” Business Ethics Quarterly 6(3) (1996): esp. pp. 293-295.

7 John Whitney’s The Economics of Trust (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980).

8 Nicholas Luhmann, “Trust: A Mechanism for the Reduction of Social Complexity,” in his Trust and Power (New York: Wiley, 1980), pp. 4-103.

9 The most notable exception is Annette Baier, who wrote a series of provocative articles in the mid-Eighties, and credited her own interest to David Hume. Baier’s recent work on Hume and on trust can be found in her A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s Treatise (1990), and in Moral Prejudices (Harvard University Press, 1994), esp. “Trust and Antitrust,” pp. 95-129. Hume’s views on ethics are too often restricted to his (in)famous discussion of reason versus the passions (perhaps the weakest of his views) and the problems he raises about moral motivation. Hume’s work on sentiments has only recently come back into view, for example, at the conclusion of Stephen Darwall’s The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’ 1640-1740 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), but Hume’s theory of the sentiments is also brought up only to take something of a pounding, for instance, in Alasdair MacIntyre’s Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1988).

10 Christine Swanton, Freedom (Hackett, 1986).

11 Karen Jones, Russell Hardin, Lawrence C. Becker, “A Symposium on Trust,” Ethics 107 (1) (1996): 4-61.

12 For example, Russell Hardin, “The Street-Level Epistemology of Trust,” in Analyse und Kritik (1992), 152-176.

13 Robert Solomon has defended this approach in general in my Ethics and Excellence (Oxford, 1991) and in my “Corporate Roles, Personal Virtues: An Aristotelean Approach to Business Ethics,” BEQ 3(4) (1993).

14 Hardin, op cit., p. 28.

15 Russell Hardin goes on the warpath against any attempt to “moralize” trust in his “Trustworthiness,” pp. 28, 42. If ‘moralizing trust” means that one always ought to trust, then of course, this is nonsense. But if “moralizing trust’ means only some version of holding that “trust is a (morally) good thing,” then it is hard to imagine someone not doing so. Honesty or generosity are not virtues per se, in any context whatever. As Socrates argues early in the Republic, to return weapons to a maniac is not virtuous but irresponsible.

16 For example, see Sisela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (New York: Random House, 1978).

17 Thus Hobbes explicitly invokes trust, along with justice, as features of society that result from the social compact rather than precede it (Leviathan VII, 6). See, also, A. P. Martinch, A Hobbes Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 114.

18 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. W. Kaufmann (Random House, 1967), p. 57.

19 Karen Jones, “A Trust,” Ethics 107(1) (1996): 4.

20 Fukuyama, esp. pp. 69-95.

21 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), trans. Joan Stambaugh (S.U.N.Y., 1996), esp. pp. 134-139.

22 Becker, “Trust as Non-Cognitive Security about Motives,” in the Ethics Symposium, p. 44f. Annette Baier also suggests taking simple trust, in particular the trusting of babies, as a paradigm, in her “Trust and Antitrust.” But she makes this suggestion to counter the overemphasis in philosophy on relationships between mature, consenting, more or less equal adults, not in order to deny the existence of more articulate and authentic trust relationships.

23 Hardin talks extensively about “devices for commitment,” for example, which, in our mind, amount to substitutes for commitment, or simply a denial of what is meant by “commitment” altogether (“Trustworthiness,” p. 41 and passim).

24 We are reminded here of the extensive but peculiar philosophical literature on self-deception, a phenomenon so common that no one could sensibly deny its existence. And yet the philosophers, with their crude epistemic categories of “knowing” and “not knowing,” have spent decades wondering if (and sometimes how) the phenomena of “knowing and not knowing” can be.

25 The phrase “animal faith” came into popular usage with George Santayana’s powerful argument that trusting relationships—including trust in God—should be understood as something more primitive than social thinkers and theologians were willing to allow. In our terms what he was espousing was simple, inarticulate faith, again, probably a welcome antidote to the extreme intellectualism he was attacking.

26 Robert C. Solomon has argued this “kangaroo courtroom” scenario analysis in The Passions, Chapter 6.

27 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Emotions (Citadel, 1948).

28 Karen Jones, for instance, discusses Othello’s trust of Iago at some length. Of equal importance and in many ways more instructive, however, is Othello’s growing distrust of Desdemona. The one is as blind as the other, but the latter might be viewed as a dynamic and unfolding version of distrust, whereas the former is a rather static and unthinking version of trust.

29 Our thesis is akin to the thesis that Dostoyevski (and many others) have suggested concerning religious faith, that faith is not really faith unless it is punctuated, perhaps even pervaded by doubt. Faith is a form of self-overcoming, not simply a matter of naivete, or “ blind” faith.

30 There was a book by a relatively popular management guru, entitled Love and Profits, a few years ago. In the context of the current corporate paranoia over downsizing and the like, the very appearance of such a book begs for sociological critical analysis. But we would want to distinguish, quite thoroughly, between the importance of managers trusting their employees and the rather kinky but inappropriate suggestion that they love them.

31 See Robert C. Solomon, “The Politics of Emotion” in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, ed. Peter French, Volume XXII, 1998.

32 Jones, p. 5.

33 The theory of speech acts was more or less invented by J. L. Austin of Oxford, although its origins can be traced back considerably before that, for example, in the positivist conception of “pragmatics” and some of the views discernible in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s writings on language. We take it in its most mature conception from John Searle, Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).

34 For instance, Becker, in the Ethics Symposium.

35 Figures from Rep. Martin Olav Sabo, D-Minn, 5/17/97.

36 Hardin’s comment that “remarkably, economic institutions…are often trustworthy,” together with his throwaway parenthetical line that “they might readily pollute or discriminate”—presented not as a possibility but rather as a probability—reflects an offensive and unfair view of corporations, which are for the most part moral institutions in which trust and trustworthiness are central concerns (op cit., p. 33).

37 Hardin, “Trustworthiness,” p. 30.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid., p. 16.

41 Robert C. Solomon notes that anger often resembles a kangaroo court, in this respect, and quotes Lewis Carroll’s insightful refrain in making such points: “I’ll be judge, I’ll be Jury/Said cunning old fury” (Alice in Wonderland, “The Mouse’s Tail” [The Passions]).

42 Ibid.

43 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (Philosophical Library, 1956).

44 Ibid.

45 Robert S. Gordon, The Structure of Emotions, Chapter “The Passivity of the Passions” (Cambridge, 1988).

46 Robert C. Solomon, “Emotions and Choice,” in Explaining Emotions, ed. Amelie Rorty (University of California Press, 1980). Also, The Passions (Hackett, 1993).

47 This raises the difficult question of akrasia or incontinence, knowingly doing wrong. Such behavior plays havoc with the notion of trust, for the incontinent person cannot trust him- or herself.

48 Hardin, “Trustworthiness,” p. 26

49 Ibid.

50 Robert Frank, “Why Economists Make Bad Citizens,” published as Robert Frank, T. Gilovich and D. Regan, “Does Studying Economics Inhibit Cooperation?”, Journal of Economic Perspectives 7(2) (1993): 159-171.