Trust: A Very Short Introduction by Katherine Hawley

Author:Katherine Hawley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2012-04-20T04:00:00+00:00

Partiality and prejudice

In thinking about trust, it’s easy to focus on interactions amongst strangers or, at best, acquaintances. How do we judge one another?; how should we judge one another?; do we need to judge one another? But many issues about trust – or distrust – arise within the context of a relationship, amongst family members, friends, lovers, colleagues, or neighbours. How does increased intimacy change what we should do? And how do personal considerations weigh in the balance alongside cold hard fact?

In close friendships, we feel inclined, even obligated, to offer the benefit of the doubt, to assume that our friends are being honest with us, unless we have clear evidence to the contrary. Is this because friendship itself is a reason to trust? Perhaps, but it’s also true that we have amassed a great deal of positive evidence about those we know well. The reason you should trust your friend even when she is accused of shoplifting is that you have known her for years, and therefore have very good evidence that she has not done what she is accused of doing. But is this evidence all that counts? When we start to calculate the odds in deciding whether to trust our friends or family, they may rightly resent us.

Philosophers Sarah Stroud and Simon Keller argue that part of friendship is the commitment to put a positive spin on the picture you have of your friends: to defend them to others, to resist believing malicious gossip about them, and to assume that they are behaving from good motives, even when you can’t quite see what these are. There are limits, of course, but pushing up against these limits can be painful for both parties: when does the evidence force you to concede that the worst may be true? When we see the mothers or wives of criminals stand by their man, we may pity them, but it’s hard to condemn. Rationality doesn’t require us to ignore our human relationships.

Trusting can also be a way of building trustworthiness – people have little incentive to speak the truth if they know they will be assumed to be lying in any case – and perhaps we have a special obligation to help our loved ones develop their trustworthiness in these ways. Other relationships of responsibility or care can also bring obligations like this: teaching essentially involves an extension of trust, and part of the intended effects of such trust is an increase in the trustworthiness of the student, both in terms of their knowledge, and in terms of intellectual openness.

There is a darker side to these personal considerations, however. How far can I extend the benefit of the doubt which I give to my close friends? What if I trust people I grew up with, and no-one else? What if I don’t trust anybody over the age of 30, as Jack Weinberg urged student protesters at Berkeley during the 1960s? What if I don’t trust Japanese people because of my nasty

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.