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Trust, Distrust and Commitment

2012; Wiley; Volume: 48; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/nous.12000

1468-0068

Katherine Hawley,

Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment

Trust is intriguing. Trust is valued—the alleged crisis of trust is a famine not a flood—yet misplaced trust can be dangerous. Trust is needed when we lack knowledge, yet we have most trust in those we know best. Trust bestowed can be both an honour and a burden; distrust is rarely welcome. Practical reasons to trust can outstrip the evidence, yet counter-evidence can make it impossible to trust. Recent philosophical work on trust has emphasised its importance to both epistemology and ethics, asking whether reasons to trust someone must be based on reasons to think her trustworthy (e.g. Hinchman 2005, Faulkner 2007, McGeer 2008, Hieronymi 2008). But this work, and the literature it builds upon, is curiously lopsided. To understand trust, we must also understand distrust, yet distrust is usually treated as a mere afterthought, or mistakenly equated with the absence of trust. In this paper I offer an account of both trust and distrust. Roughly speaking, to trust someone is to rely upon that person to fulfil a commitment, whilst distrust involves an expectation of unfulfilled commitment. Whilst I advocate this commitment theory, my main concern is to demonstrate the importance of providing a unified account of both trust and distrust, either through commitment or otherwise. We need to understand both trust and distrust if we are to understand the different ways in which trust can go wrong, the reasons why both trust and distrust are sometimes unwanted, the nature and limitations of trustworthiness, and the difference between unpredictability and untrustworthiness. I will adopt two common assumptions. First, trust is primarily a three-place relation, involving two people and a task: you may trust me to look after your children, to keep a secret, or to tell the truth (Holton 1994, Jones 1996, Hardin 2002, Hieronymi 2008). We do sometimes speak of simply trusting someone, and I will discuss this generalised trust in section 7.2.. Second, trust involves expectations about both competence and willingness: when you trust me to look after your children, you take it that I am capable of childcare, and that I will exercise that capability as required. Following Annette Baier, philosophers usually distinguish genuine trust from mere reliance (Baier 1986, 234; Hieronymi 2008, 215; Holton 1994, 2–3; Jones 1996, 14; Jones 2004, 4; McLeod 2006, 3; O'Neill 2002, 15; Potter 2002, 3–4; Pettit 1995, 205). For example, we often rely upon inanimate objects but we do not grant them the rich trust we sometimes grant one another; inanimate objects can be reliable but not genuinely trustworthy. Moreover our reactions to misplaced trust differ from our reactions to misplaced reliance. Suppose I trust you to look after a precious glass vase, yet you carelessly break it. I may feel betrayed and angry; recriminations will be in order; I may demand an apology. Suppose instead that I rely on a shelf to support the vase, yet the shelf collapses, breaking the vase. I will be disappointed, perhaps upset, but it would be inappropriate to feel betrayed by the shelf, or to demand an apology from it. Inanimate objects can be relied upon without being trusted. And there are circumstances in which people are relied upon without being trusted. Suppose you regularly bring too much lunch to work, and leave the excess for others to eat. Suppose you do this because you're bad at judging quantities, not because you're keen to feed your colleagues. I rely on you to provide my lunch: I anticipate that you will do so, and I don't make alternative arrangements. But this reliance should not amount to trust: you would owe me no apology if you ate all the food yourself, and I ought not to feel betrayed by this, even if I felt disappointed (and hungry). Likewise 'Kant's neighbors who counted on his regular habits as a clock … might be disappointed with him if he slept in one day, but not let down by him, let alone had their trust betrayed' (Baier 1986, 235). Our attitudes to people acting reliably under threat are sometimes also cited in this context. So there is a distinction between trust in a rich sense—trust which can be betrayed—and mere reliance. But distinguishing trust from mere reliance clashes with ordinary usage: we might talk of trusting a shelf to hold a vase. Anticipating these concerns, some distinguish two types of trust—normative and predictive (Hollis 1998, 10), or affective and predictive (Faulkner 2007, 880)—rather than distinguishing trust from mere reliance. I will stick with the less theory-laden 'trust' and 'mere reliance', whilst acknowledging that we can use the language of trust for mere reliance. Why focus on a distinction which is not consistently marked in ordinary language? The distinction is important because trust, not mere reliance, is a significant category for normative assessment. Trust, unlike mere reliance, is connected to betrayal. Moreover trustworthiness is clearly distinguished from mere reliability. Trustworthiness is admirable, something to be aspired to and inculcated in our children: it is a virtue in the everyday sense, and perhaps in the richer sense of virtue ethics too. Mere reliability, however, is not. A reliable person is simply predictable: someone who can be relied upon to lose keys, or succumb to shallow rhetoric, is predictable in these respects, but isn't therefore admirable. Even reliability in more welcome respects need not amount to trustworthiness: when you reliably bring too much lunch, you do not demonstrate trustworthiness, and nor would you demonstrate untrustworthiness if you stopped. Philosophical accounts of trust standardly attempt to explicate this distinction between trust and mere reliance. But it is a mistake to theorise trust without considering distrust. Distrust is not mere absence of trust: I rely upon the shelf to support the vase. For the reasons given above, I do not trust the shelf. But nor do I distrust it. Distrust is not mere absence of trust. Moreover, distrust is not even mere absence of reliance. Like trust, distrust has a normative dimension. The distinction between trust and mere reliance shows in our different reactions to misplaced trust (betrayal) and misplaced reliance (disappointment). Similarly, the distinction between distrust and mere nonreliance shows in our different reactions to misplaced distrust and misplaced nonreliance. If I discover that I have wrongly distrusted you, appropriate reactions include remorse, apology, and requests for forgiveness. In contrast, if I take my car to be unreliable, then discover that it is after all reliable, then remorse would not be appropriate. I might regret some missed opportunities, but that's all. Not relying on an inanimate object does not amount to distrusting it. Moreover, not relying upon people need not amount to distrusting them. My colleagues have never bought me champagne, so in particular I do not rely upon them to buy me champagne next Friday. But it would be wrong, even offensive, to say that I distrust my colleagues in this respect—after all, they have not offered to buy me champagne next Friday, and there is no social convention that they do so. If they did buy me champagne unexpectedly, I ought to be grateful, but I need not feel remorse about my earlier decision not to rely on them. Indeed, it would be bad manners for me to suggest in retrospect that I should have trusted my colleagues to buy me champagne, or to apologise for my earlier non-trust. Whilst I do not rely upon my colleagues to buy me champagne, it would nevertheless be wrong to distrust them in this respect. Not because they can after all be trusted to buy me champagne, but because neither trust nor distrust in this respect is appropriate. Recall the case in which I rely upon you to supply my lunch, without trusting you to do so, and could feel disappointed but not betrayed if you stopped. Likewise, I do not rely upon my colleagues to buy me champagne, but I do not distrust them in this respect; the fact that they do not buy me champagne does not indicate any degree of untrustworthiness. So distrust is richer than mere nonreliance, just as trust is richer than reliance. Just as we should distinguish trustworthiness from mere reliability, we should distinguish untrustworthiness from mere unreliability: colleagues who do not buy me champagne are unreliable in this respect, but not thereby untrustworthy. Just as there is a middle ground between trust and distrust, there is a middle ground between trustworthiness and untrustworthiness—in the clearest case, inanimate objects merit neither trust nor distrust, so they are neither trustworthy nor untrustworthy. Thus 'untrustworthy'—i.e. 'meriting distrust'—is not simply the complement of 'trustworthy'. 'Distrustworthy' would be more literal, but I will resist the neologism. Many philosophers have distinguished trust from mere reliance; I have distinguished distrust from mere nonreliance. But what is it to rely upon someone to do something? I will adopt Richard Holton's view, that to rely on someone to X is to act on the supposition that she will X: this can fall short of believing that she will X, though it is incompatible with outright belief that she will not X (Holton 1994). Relying is not always a matter of belief, its justification conditions are not purely epistemic, and, unlike believing, relying is sometimes a matter of direct choice. In this sense, relying on someone to do something needn't mean putting your fate in their hands. You can rely upon me to bring enough food for everyone at the picnic whilst nevertheless bringing plenty of food yourself, because you don't want to seem ungenerous: you're acting on the supposition that I will bring lots of food, and indeed this partly explains the large quantities you bring along. Thus reliance in this sense needn't imply risk or vulnerability. For me, this is one attraction of Holton's account; others disagree, but I cannot examine this issue here. Distrusting someone with respect to X involves not relying upon her to X, rather than relying upon her not to X: distrust does not require confident prediction of misbehaviour. Extending Holton's framework, nonreliance involves not acting on a particular positive supposition, rather than acting on the corresponding negative supposition. There are good questions to ask about degrees of reliance, degrees of reliability, and the fact that suppositions are sometimes idle wheels: when I don't need your help, it may make no practical difference whether or not I act under the supposition that you would help if asked. Again, I do not have space to explore these issues here, but I am consoled by the fact that similar questions arise for many, perhaps all, different accounts of trust. Moreover, our understanding of these grey areas between reliance and nonreliance can only be enhanced by paying proper attention to distrust alongside trust, as I recommend. Most philosophical accounts of trust are explicitly designed to explain the difference between trust and mere reliance. They should also enable us to explain the difference between distrust and mere nonreliance. There is a simple reason and a more complex reason why an account of trust should also furnish an account of distrust. Simple: the trust/reliance and distrust/nonreliance distinctions seem closely analogous, so our default expectation should be that the two distinctions are grounded in analogous ways. More complex: an account of trust should explain when trust is appropriate and when it is not. In a given situation, trust may be inappropriate either because distrust is appropriate or because neither trust nor distrust is appropriate. Understanding these possibilities will improve our understanding of how and when trust is appropriate. But standard theories focus on the difference between trust and mere reliance, treating distrust as an afterthought. Trust is standardly thought to involve reliance, plus some extra factor. Many theories identify this extra factor with a positive view of the motives of the trusted person. If I trust you to look after my vase, then I rely upon you to do so, and moreover I take it that you have the right kind of motive for looking after my vase. Different theorists disagree about what the 'right kind' of motive might be. In this section, I will show how motives-based accounts of trust cannot readily explain the nature of distrust. I cannot survey every motives-based account of trust (McLeod (2006) provides a critical overview), but will focus on those offered by Russell Hardin (2002) and Karen Jones (1996). Both theories are well-developed, sophisticated, and prominent in the literature (though Jones herself later advocates a different account (2004)). Moreover they differ significantly from one another, turning on the trustee's rational self-interest and other-directed goodwill respectively. Hardin argues that when we trust someone, we expect the trustee to encapsulate our interests within her own because she has an interest in maintaining or strengthening her relationship with us. In trusting you to look after my vase, I take it that you will do so because you have incorporated my interest in preserving the vase amongst your own interests: looking after the vase is now in your own interest. In contrast, when I rely upon the shelf to hold the vase, I do not have any expectation about the shelf's motives or interests, for I realise it has none. an attitude of optimism that the goodwill and competence of another will extend to cover the domain of our interaction with her, together with the expectation that the one trusted will be directly and favorably moved by the thought that we are counting on her. (1996, 1) For Jones, it is important that optimism be an affective attitude, not (just) a belief, so that the justification conditions for optimism, and thus trust, are not purely epistemic. Reference to the trustee's responsiveness to our counting on her permits a distinction between genuine trustworthiness and reliable benevolence. What about distrust? On the motives-based model, we might expect distrust to involve nonreliance, plus a negative attitude regarding the motives of the distrustee. This negative attitude must go beyond expecting the distrustee to lack the motives required for trustworthiness. After all, inanimate objects lack the motives required for trustworthiness: they do not incorporate our interests amongst their own, and they do not act out of goodwill towards us. Yet we do not distrust inanimate objects, even when we decide not to rely upon them. The same is often true in interpersonal situations. Consider the colleagues who do not buy me champagne. I do not rely upon them to buy me champagne; moreover I know that they have not incorporated my interest in drinking champagne amongst their own interests, and I am not optimistic about their goodwill in the champagne-buying domain. Yet it's not appropriate for me to distrust my colleagues: they are not displaying untrustworthiness, and if they do surprise me with champagne, I needn't feel remorse about not having trusted them. Neither trust nor distrust is appropriate in this context. So if distrust is a matter of nonreliance plus a negative attitude towards the distrustee, this negative attitude must go beyond merely expecting the distrustee to lack certain positive motives. Perhaps distrust involves expecting the distrustee to act out of ill will towards us, or expecting the distrustee to have an interest in frustrating our interests. This would explain why we do not distrust inanimate objects (they are not actively working against us), and why I should not distrust my colleagues (they are not maliciously striving to deny me champagne). But neither expectation of ill will nor expectation of attempts to frustrate my interests is necessary for distrust. After all, someone who lies and cheats to achieve her goals should be distrusted, even if she does not bother to bear either goodwill or ill will to others, and does not care about other people's interests. Nor are gloomy expectations sufficient for distrust, even in combination with nonreliance. Suppose that a deeply honourable person campaigns to have me imprisoned for my crimes. I cannot rely on this person to help me, moreover I know that she bears me ill-will and is actively trying to frustrate my goals. But my attitude to her needn't amount to distrust, for she is straightforward and honest in her campaigning. (This doesn't mean that I should trust her; merely that I do not have grounds to distrust her.) Recall the connections between distrust, untrustworthiness, and remorse. My opponent does not display untrustworthiness in her open campaigning against me. And if she turns out to be more helpful than I had expected, I need not feel remorse about my previous attitude of nonreliance. Now, I have not explored all the options here, nor represented the full complexity of Hardin's and Jones's positions. Nevertheless, I have shown that neither account of trust can handle distrust easily, and this for reasons which generalise to other motives-based accounts. Both Hardin and Jones take care to distinguish genuine trust from mere reliance. But each considers decisions about distrust only in situations where either genuine trust or genuine distrust is appropriate, where a person's behaviour demonstrates either trustworthiness or untrustworthiness (i.e. distrust-worthiness). This narrow focus means that trust, distrust, and indecision seem to exhaust the options, leading Hardin and Jones to think of distrust as a kind of decisive lack of trust (Hardin 2002, 90; Jones 1996, 17; see also McLeod 2002, 34). Instead, we should ask about the preconditions for trust-or-distrust: what is it about the excess-lunch-bringer, the champagne-non-buyers, and indeed inanimate objects which mean that they are not suitable recipients of either trust or distrust in the relevant respects? The primary reason that trust is not appropriate in these cases is that neither trust or distrust is appropriate. Motives-based accounts of trust do not provide the materials for explaining the difference between distrust and nonreliance. But motives-based accounts do not exhaust the field. In this section I will discuss Richard Holton's account of trust in his (1994), and Karen Jones's later (2004) account, arguing that whilst these accounts can be adapted to address distrust, they are unexplanatory in important ways. I think that the difference between trust and [mere] reliance is that trust involves something like a participant stance towards the person you are trusting … trusting someone is one way of treating them as a person. But if this is right, it shows how important it is that we do not treat the participant stance as an all or nothing affair. Even when you do trust a person, you need not trust them in every way … . You can trust a person to do some things without trusting them to do others. (1994, 4) Taking the participant stance towards someone does seem to be a necessary condition for trust—indeed, like others in this literature, I earlier identified trust via its connections with reactive attitudes such as resentment and the sense of betrayal. Holton does not explicitly mention distrust in his article, but taking the participant stance seems also to be a necessary condition for distrust: we do not distrust faulty machines. So there is clearly something right about this approach. However, like Hardin (2002) and Jones (1996), Holton is misled by his lack of explicit attention to distrust. He seems to suggest that where our trust in someone is limited, then so too is the extent to which we adopt the participant stance to that person. But where we distrust, rather than trust, someone in a particular respect, this marks no diminution in our tendency to hold reactive attitudes towards that person. Indeed, attitudes such as resentment are to the fore in situations of distrust. Moreover, interpersonal respect for others can require us neither to trust nor to distrust them in a given respect. In some situations, either of trust and distrust would be an imposition. Trust involves anticipation of action, so it's clear why someone might prefer not to be trusted to do something she would prefer not to do. But that does not mean she wants to be distrusted in that respect. Even trusting someone to do something she is happy to do can be an imposition. Suppose that my colleagues do after all plan to buy me champagne. Still, they do not invite or welcome my trust in this respect; instead, they want to give me a treat, not merely to act as trustworthiness requires, and certainly not to risk betraying me if they forget to buy the champagne. Such situations are neglected by most discussions of trust: after all, my colleagues are happy for me to know that they have adopted my interests amongst their own, and that they bear me goodwill, yet they don't want champagne-buying to become an issue of trust between us. So it goes in even the most intimate, trusting relationships. Suppose that I cook dinner for my partner each evening and he comes to rely on this. Even if I enjoy cooking, I do not want my partner to make this a matter of trust. That is, I do not want to risk betraying him in even a minor way if I don't cook one evening, and nor do I want that to count against my trustworthiness. We aspire to a completely trusting relationship—we would like to avoid even the slightest distrust—but we do not aspire to turn all our interactions into issues of trust. Holton correctly identifies the participant stance as a necessary element of trust, and adopting this stance is necessary for distrust too. But relying upon someone to whom you take a participant stance does not always mean trusting that person: some interactions lie outside the realm of trust and distrust. Likewise, deciding not to rely upon someone to whom you take a participant stance—deciding to buy your own champagne—need not mean distrusting that person. And adopting the participant stance can sometimes require us not to turn every interaction into a matter of trust and distrust. But such nontrust interactions are still within the scope of the participant stance: it's appropriate for my partner to express his gratitude for my cooking, even though he should not convert his reliance into trust. Holton says that he is not offering a reductive analysis of trust (1994, 5), so we should not demand of him a reductive account of distrust. And he has identified a necessary condition for both trust and distrust. Nevertheless it is clear that this condition needs significant supplementation if we are to understand when trust-or-distrust in a given respect is appropriate, and when mere reliance or nonreliance is the appropriate interpersonal attitude. [Three-place t]rust is accepted vulnerability to another person's power over something one cares about, where (1) the truster foregoes searching (at the time) for ways to reduce such vulnerability, and (2) the truster maintains normative expectations of the one-trusted that they not use that power to harm what is entrusted. (2004, 6) I will take it that the notions of accepted vulnerability plus foregoing the attempt to reduce such vulnerability capture roughly the notion of reliance. One might have something like this attitude to an inanimate object like a car, for example. I do not underestimate the differences between Jones's notion, characterised in terms of power, care, vulnerability and harm, and the thinner characterisation of reliance I have adopted from Holton. But I do not have space to explore these differences here, and will focus instead on normative expectations, which must do the work of distinguishing trust from mere reliance. Normative expectations, for Jones, are "multistranded dispositions, including dispositions to evaluative judgement and to reactive attitudes" (2004, 17, note 8): when you trust someone, you are liable to feel resentful if she lets you down through ill will or laziness, and whilst you might not feel resentful if she lets you down by accident, you may still think that an apology is warranted. For Jones, this multistrandedness is a key advantage of her account over Holton's, which she reads as overly-focused on liability to resentment. If this is trust, what might distrust be? Let's understand nonreliance as a refusal to accept vulnerability, and/or a continuing attempt to reduce such vulnerability. One might have this attitude to a machine one takes to be unreliable. What more is needed for distrust? Not just the absence of normative expectations, since such expectations are absent from our attitudes towards inanimate objects. Jones distinguishes normative expectations from predictive expectations: we can normatively expect something of someone without predicting that she will in fact do what we expect of her. Though Jones doesn't say so, it is then plausible that the normative expectations involved in distrust are exactly the normative expectations which would otherwise be involved in trusting that person in that respect. So distrust is nonreliance plus a tendency to resentment, a tendency to judge the distrustee negatively, or tendency to think that an apology is warranted: distrust is something like disappointed trust, though perhaps not preceded by an episode of trust. Because Jones pins normative expectations to specific tasks (or, rather, to specific cared-for things), she can accommodate the fact that respect for others, even in very intimate relationships, can require us to stick with reliance-or-nonreliance rather than trust-or-distrust in certain respects. I am happy for my partner to predict that I will cook dinner tonight, but I do not want him to develop normative expectations, to be poised to resent my not cooking. Thus Jones's account of trust in terms of normative expectations can be extended to provide an account of distrust which is plausible so far as it goes. But it does not go far enough. Flawed though they are, the motives-based accounts of trust do provide an account of what it is that the truster attributes to the trustee (e.g. goodwill). This permits investigation of the correctness conditions for trust: what is it about someone which makes it appropriate to trust her? The Holton and later Jones accounts, in contrast, tell us more about the truster's attitudes than they do about the features of the trustee to which those attitudes are directed. Such accounts enable us to characterise the attitude of trust, and, by extension, of distrust. But we need more. In particular, we need a story about when trust, distrust or neither is objectively appropriate—what is the worldly situation to which (dis)trust is an appropriate response? When is it appropriate to have (dis)trust-related normative expectations of someone? This is not just a question of practical self-interest or mental hygiene: we owe it to others to get this right, since wrongful distrust and even wrongful trust can harm others (Fricker 2007, Jones 2002, Marsh 2011). We also need to understand the virtue of trustworthiness and the vice of untrustworthiness, as they are distinguished from reliability and unreliability. To do all this, we need a basis for our judgements about reliability: how, if at all, can we predict what others will do? (A closely related question is key to the epistemology of testimony.) But we also need a basis for our judgements about when it is appropriate to trust-or-distrust, not merely to rely-or-not-rely. Many of the relevant norms apply only when we enter the realm of appropriate trust-or-distrust. I propose that it is appropriate to trust or distrust someone to do something only if that person has an explicit or implicit commitment to doing it. In the next section, I explicate this proposal, then in following sections I illustrate its explanatory power. However my overarching concern is to establish that the following is an essential question: what are the features of other people to which either trust or distrust is an appropriate response? I answer this question with reference to commitment, but other answers are available. Recall the situation in which you reliably bring too much lunch to work, because you are a bad judge of quantities, and I get to eat the excess. My attitude to you in this situation is one of reliance, but not trust, and your reliability in this respect shows nothing about whether you are trustworthy. This is not a matter of trust—or distrust—because you have made no commitment to provide me with lunch. But if we adapt the case so as to suggest commitment, it starts to look more like a matter of trust. Suppose we enjoy eating together regularly, you describe your plans for the next day, I say how much I'm looking forward to it, and so on. To the extent that this involves a commitment on your part, it seems reasonable for me to feel betrayed and expect apologies if one day you fail to bring lunch and I go hungry. Recognised lack of commitment also explains our judgement about the colleagues who do not buy me champagne. They are unreliable in this respect, but it would be unreasonable of me therefore to distrust them, or to consider them untrustworthy in any respect. They have not offered to buy me champagne, and there's no social convention that they do so. They have incurred no commitment to buy me champagne and their failure to do so is not a failure of trustworthiness. To trust someone to do something is to believe that she has a commitment to doing it, and to rely upon her to meet that commitment. To distrust someone to do something is to believe that she has a commitment to doing it, and yet not rely upon her to meet that commitment. In later sections I will put this account of trust and distrust to work, illustrating its power and exploring its consequences. But the central notion of commitment needs immediate clar