Annette Baier / Annette Baier
.docCORE11-120 Week 12 Lecture Notes
Annette Baier: Trusting in Trust
Annette Baier is a contemporary philosopher writing about moral philosophy. We will examine her views about the moral character of relationships of trust. She sets out these views in a paper “Trust and Antitrust” Ethics, 96, 1986. An abridged version of this paper is reproduced in the textbook, chapter 26.
We are going to use Baier’s paper to explore three questions. What is trust? Why is it important? What is required for a trust relationship to be morally satisfactory?
What is it to trust somebody? The first point Baier makes is that trust is distinct from reliance. We rely on somebody when we think we can depend upon them doing something we want them to do. We depend upon them because we are in a position to predict that they will do what we want. A terrorist, for example, might rely on the news media giving them publicity when they attack of hotel or a plane. If we are speaking carefully, we won’t say that the terrorists trust the news media to give them publicity. Rather, they can predict what the news media will do in response to their terrorist outrage and they depend upon this reaction. Trust is a more nuanced relationship than reliance. What is the difference?
Baier claims that the difference is good will. When we trust a person, we trust their good will towards us, or towards the things we care about. By “good will” we mean their concern for our interests or the interests of those people or those things we care about. [Note: this is very different from Kant’s “Good Will”.] Trust, then, is reliance on another’s good will.
When we rely on another’s good will towards us, we are vulnerable to them. Trust makes us vulnerable to others. If they fail to act with good will towards us, our trust has been betrayed. This leads Baier to propose this initial characterisation of trust:
Trust, then, on this first approximation, is accepted vulnerability to another’s possible but not expected ill will (or lack of good will) toward one. (Textbook, p.329)
When we trust others, we allow things that are valuable to us to be vulnerable to others. Why would we do this? Baier’s answer is that we need others to help us guard, nurture or help the things we care about. We are utterly dependent on other people’s help. She writes:
Since the things we typically do value include such things as we cannot singlehandedly either create or sustain (our own life, health, reputation, our offspring and their well-being, as well as intrinsically shared goods such as conversation, its written equivalent, theatre and other forms of play, chamber music, market exchange, political life and so on) we must allow many other people to get into positions where they can, if they choose, injure what we care about, since those are the same positions that they must be in in order to help us take care of what we care about. (Textbook, p.329)
We do not trust people with everything we care about. Relationships of trust are relativised to particular things. Thus, A does not trust B, period. A trusts B with valued thing C. Students trust teachers to be fair when they mark their work; they trust them to convey information accurately, and to present relevant and important and up-to-date theories and facts. A parent trusts a babysitter with care of their child (and their home and possessions). Partners in a business trust each other to care for the business and do the right thing by it. Married couples trust each other (when they do) to care for their relationship by treating each other well, caring about each other, not cheating on each other, and so on.
Trust is not a blank cheque. We trust others with particular things, and we don’t necessarily allow them to do anything they like to express their good will towards us. We trust, with strings attached. Here are two clear examples from Baier:
One way in which trusted persons can fail to act as they were trusted to is by taking on the care of more than they were entrusted with – the babysitter who decides that the nursery would be improved if painted purple and sets to work to transform it, will have acted, as a babysitter, in an untrustworthy way, however great his good will. When we are trusted, we are relied upon to realize what it is for whose care we have some discretionary responsibility, and normal people can pick up the cues that indicate the limits of what is entrusted. For example, if I confide my troubles to a friend, I trust her to listen, more or less sympathetically, and to preserve confidentiality, but usually not, or not without consulting me, to take steps to remove the source of my worry. That could be interfering impertinence, not trustworthiness as confidante. (Textbook, p.329)
Trusting another also means trusting in their competence, not merely their good will. If you trust a babysitter, you trust them to act within their remit, with good will toward your child, and competently.
Trust can facilitate very good things, but also terrible or immoral things. Murderers that can trust each other are more dangerous than murderers who cannot. So not all relationships of trust are a morally good thing. Trust, by itself, is a morally neutral concept. It doesn’t specify something morally good (in the way that, for example, attribution of compassion seems to specify something morally good a person’s attitudes) but it doesn’t specify something morally bad either (in the way, for example, that arrogant contempt seems to specify something bad about a person’s attitudes). “Trust” is a morally neutral term.
Making a promise is a particular way of securing trust. It is, according to Baier (and to the great 18th century philosopher David Hume), an artificial arrangement based on a convention to hold people account. When I promise a person something, I give that person extra good reason to trust me. They can trust me to fulfil my promise, because the penalty for my not fulfilling it is that I face particular sanctions. The most obvious sanction is that my word no longer is accepted, and I forfeit all the advantages of being someone who can be trusted to keep his word. Promises are very explicit conventional ways of shoring up relationships of mutual trust, particular between strangers. But they only function against a background of much less explicit trust-relationships. Here, again, is Baier:
Promises are a most ingenious social invention, and trust in those who have given us promises is a complex and sophisticated moral achievement. Once the social conditions are right for it, once the requisite climate of trust in promisors is there, it is easy to take it for a simpler matter than it is and to ignore its background conditions. They include not merely the variable social conventions and punitive customs Hume emphasizes, but the prior existence of less artificial and less voluntary forms of trust, such as trust in friends and family, and enough trust in fellows to engage with them in agreed exchanges of a more or less simultaneous nature, exchanges such as barter and handshakes, which do not require one to rely on strangers over a period of time, as exchange of promises typically does. (Textbook, p.332)
Baier argues that the tradition of Western Moral Philosophy has been so dominated by men, and in particular men that have had very little interaction with women, that they have overlooked the pervasiveness and moral significance of relationships of trust. The tradition of Western Moral Philosophy has concentrated on relationships between equals: equals in power and equals in social standing. Much of the political philosophy we have discussed in this course imagines a social contract between equals. This is a kind of promise made by equals to establish the rule of law, civil society, the basic institutions of a just state, and so on. But in real life we are implicated in numerous relationships of trust in which one party is much more powerful, or has much more at stake, than the other. The relationship between a parent and their child is the most obvious example. A child must trust their parents; trust that their parents have their interests at heart. As the relationship develops, the parents come to have to trust in their children, that the children have their own interests at heart, and the interests of the family at heart.
When is it morally appropriate (and not merely prudent) to trust in another? One obvious answer is that the overall purpose of the trust relationship be a morally good or morally neutral one. (Recall, that trust is something that aids and abets immoral actions as well as moral actions. Trust is, by itself, a morally neutral concept.) Baier does not dwell on this obvious condition. Rather she examines a less obvious one. We might worry that, because relationships of trust make us particularly vulnerable to others, and because they can also occur without our explicitly agreeing to their terms and in conditions of unequal power, trust is a morally suspect virtue. It is often a trap. When isn’t it a trap? When can we trust in trust?
Baier’s answer is that a relationship of trust is morally appropriate only if it could be made fully explicit. If both parties recognised the basis upon which trust is given (i.e. what is we are trusting the other with, under what conditions and with what discretion), is trust diminished or harmed? If it is, then our trust is not morally appropriate. It is a kind of moral mistake to trust under these circumstances. Baier’s clearest example is an oddly old-fashioned one. She considers a family of mother, father and child in which the father trusts the mother with day to day decisions in raising the child. This is a morally appropriate trust only if it would survive full knowledge of the basis of the trust relationship. We can make the example more vivid this way. Imagine that the father is an atheist who strongly objects to raising his child religiously. He trusts his partner with the day to day tasks of child-rearing. The mother, however, is a committed Christian and has been raising the child on stories from the Bible. This is a morally inappropriate trust: the father is making a moral mistake in delegating the matter of the raising of his children to the mother. If he had full knowledge of the religious basis of the mother’s child-rearing practice, he would no longer entrust her with this role. We don’t make the basis of our trust relationships fully explicit very often – we trust others enough not to have to do this. However, Baier’s test is a hypothetical one: would full disclosure enhance or diminish our trust? If the latter, something is going terribly wrong. Here is how Baier sums up her position:
..trust is morally decent only if, in addition to whatever else is entrusted, knowledge of each party’s reasons for confident reliance on the other to continue the relationship could in principle also be entrusted – since such mutual knowledge would be itself a good, not a threat to others’ goods. To the extent that mutual reliance can be accompanied by mutual knowledge of the conditions for that reliance, trust is above suspicion, and trustworthiness a nonsuspect virtue. (Textbook, p.335).