Rethinking

As at the end of every bad film, however, there is perhaps one last chance to avoid disaster. And it is our natural love and sympathy, and our sense of morality which point us in the right direction. These nobler parts of human nature suggest that when we trust others, we are confidently relying on their good disposition towards us - we are relying on their love or sympathy for us or their sense of morality, for instance, rather than on their egoistic interests, habits, or irrationalities. Thus trust is a special kind of reliance, reliance on others’ good disposition towards us. In contrast, if I expect my friend not to steal my bike just because I have asked him to leave a deposit, then I may be relying on him not to steal it, but I am not trusting him. (Nor is he likely to remain my friend for long!) Similarly, if I rely on others not to attack me in a state of nature just because I believe that it is in their self-interest not to break our agreement and that they are rational enough to recognise this, again I may be relying on them, but I am not trusting them.

This implies that Glaucon, Machiavelli, and Hobbes cannot even conceive of genuine trust, since their picture of human nature does not allow for it, and that we need to move beyond their picture if we are to explain genuine trust. But we also need to recognise that trust cannot rest only on love, sympathy, or the sense of morality. The insufficiency of love and sympathy is particularly clear. For we can rely on others’ love or sympathy without necessarily trusting them as well, and we can trust people who we do not believe to love or sympathise with us at all. I rely on my doting grandma to make me shortbread every time I see her, but it would be odd to think that I trust her to do so. Rather, I just rely on her love for me and for cooking shortbread. We can therefore rely on others’ love or sympathy without necessarily having to trust them as well. (To avoid offending my grandma, I should say that, of course, I do trust her as well.) We can also trust others without believing that they love or sympathise with us at all. I might find out that my grandma really despises me, but I could still trust her to make me shortbread every time I see her. This is particularly clear when we trust in institutions, officials, and professionals. For I need not think that the doctor loves or sympathises with me in order to trust her not to use me as a guinea pig for untested medicines. Even more clearly, it would be absurd to believe that those involved in the testing of medicines are reliable just because they love me or sympathise with patients in general. But I can trust them nonetheless. Indeed, we can say exactly the same thing about their sense of morality, and even their fear of detection and punishment.

Nor do we necessarily trust others just because we know that they have been reliable in the past. I have a great deal of evidence of my grandma’s making me shortbread whenever I see her, but I do not therefore have to trust, or even rely on, her to do so; and I can trust the people who test medicines without having any hard or conclusive evidence about their reliability in doing so. Also, the capacity to forgive those we trust for unreliability, and their capacity to respond when we encourage them to be more reliable, can be crucial to the cultivation and maintenance of trust. When I trust, then, I am not simply making a judgement about the past reliability of the trusted, although of course I may take this into account.

Thoughts like these suggest that there is more to trust than even an extended picture of human nature, such as that offered by Hume, Locke, Kant, or Marx, would allow. For the ‘good disposition’ of the trusted, on which we rely when we trust them, cannot consist only of their past reliability, their fear of detection and punishment, their love or sympathy, or their sense of morality. Trusting others might therefore seem to rest, ultimately, on an irreducible feeling about their good disposition, or even on a ‘leap of faith’, much like its Christian counterpart.

But one need not go this far. Below I will briefly suggest one way in which we can account for our belief in others’ good disposition towards us, and therefore rationally trust them, without reducing trust to reliance on any of the features of human nature considered so far. I will leave you to judge whether you think this way of understanding trust is plausible.

This way emphasises that human life is ...