Trust is a notoriously vulnerable good, easily wounded and not at all easily healed. Trust is not always a good, to be preserved. There must be some worthwhile enterprise in which the trusting and trusted parties are involved, some good bread being kneaded, for trust to be a good thing. If the enterprise is evil, a producer of poisons, then the trust that improves its workings will also be evil, and decent people will want to destroy, not to protect, that form of trust. A death squad may consist of wholly trustworthy and, for a while at least, sensibly trusting coworkers. So the first thing to be checked, if our trust is to become self-conscious, is the nature of the enterprise whose workings are smoothed by merited trust.  

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Like most goods, a climate of trust is a risky thing to set one’s sights on. What we risk are not just mutually lethal betrayals and breakdowns of trust, but exploitation that may be unnoticed for long periods because it is bland and friendly. The friendly atmosphere — the feeling of trust — is of course a pleasant thing, and itself a good, as long as it is not masking an evil.  

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Trust and distrust are feelings, but like many feelings they are what Hume called “impressions of reflexion,” feeling responses to how we take our situation to be. The relevant “situation” is our position as regards what matters to us, how well or badly things are going for us. The pleasant feeling that others are with us in our endeavors, that they will help, not hinder, us, and the unpleasantly anxious feeling that others may be plotting our downfall or simply that their intentions are inscrutable, so that we do not know what to expect, are the surface phenomena of trust and distrust. This surface is part of the real good of genuine trust, the real evil of suspicion and distrust. But beneath the surface is what that surface purports to show us: namely, others’ attitudes and intentions toward us, their good (or their ill) will. The belief that their will is good is itself a good, not merely instrumentally but in itself, and the pleasure we take in that belief is no mere pleasure but part of an important good.  

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Trust is one of those mental phenomena attention to which shows us the inadequacy of attempting to classify mental phenomena into the “cognitive,” the “affective,” and the “conative.” Trust, if it is any of these, is all three. 

Trust is accepted vulnerability to another’s power to harm one, a power inseparable from the power to look after some aspect of one’s good. 

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Trustworthiness is not just mechanical dependability, and trust is not merely confidence in a range of particular actions in a range of particular circumstances.  

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To trust is to give discretionary powers to the trusted, to let the trusted decide how, on a given matter, one’s welfare is best advanced, to delay the accounting for a while, to be willing to wait to see how the trusted has advanced one’s welfare. As we sometimes but not always wisely delay gratification, so we sometimes can delay knowing or understanding just what others are doing with what matters to us.  

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There are few fates worse than sustained, self-protective, self-paralyzing, generalized distrust of one’s human environment. The worst pathology of trust is a life-poisoning reaction to any betrayal of trust. Trust makes life “commodious,” in Hobbes’s sense, and without it we really are in conditions where our lives will be solitary, poor, and nasty, even if not short or “brutish”.

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Trust is acceptance of vulnerability to harm that others could inflict but which we judge they will not in fact inflict.  

“recipe” for designing lasting schemes of cooperation not just in governing nations but in other spheres — empowerment of the more vulnerable, equal respect, balance of power, provision for amendment, a place for the hearing of grievances, all give us ideas that we could try incorporating into rules for the design of other stable schemes of trust-involving cooperation so that all trust would come closer to being mutual trust and so also to being mutual vulnerability. 

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So even if we lack any useful rules for individuals on when to give and when to withhold trust, we are not entirely without guidelines on how to design roles for individuals that will help them avoid the worst forms of untrustworthiness, or of oppressively burdensome trust, or of overly vulnerable trusting.  

philosophers in their armchairs need plenty of books on their desks that are not purely philosophical and they need colleagues in other disciplines correcting their thoughts if they are to get very far in formulating such indirect guidelines for trusting — guidelines, that is, on the design of social roles that provide the circumstances of appropriate trust.  

 

Annette Baier - Trust