How To Be Trustworthy

by Katherine Hawley

We often trust people to do things which we know they have not explicitly promised to do. I trust my friends not to steal my books when they come to my house, and, at least in some circumstances, I trust strangers to let me walk unhindered. Indeed, an important element of trust involves trusting people not to be overly legalistic about what they are committed to doing.

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.

If someone relies upon a rope bridge to hold their weight, but the bridge is unreliable, the practical consequences might be very serious, even unto death. If someone relies upon Kant’s regular morning walk as a reminder to take their medication, but Kant is unreliable in this respect, this might also lead to the ultimate bad consequence. Relying on the unreliable can be dangerous. But trusting the untrustworthy can generate harms go beyond those caused by relying on the unreliable. One sort of harm is emotional damage caused by discovering that you have trusted someone who turned out not to deserve your trust. This sort of damage can have long-ranging and complex consequences. Important though such harms are, I will set them aside here in order to discuss the kind of distinctive harm done when trust is violated, even if the violation is never discovered and so does not cause emotional damage. It does seem that there is something intrinsically problematic about betrayals or violations of trust, something in addition to both the practical consequences of unreliability and the emotional consequences of discovering such violations: the wrong of lying, cheating, and promise-breaking goes beyond its contingent practical harm. But being trusted is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the possibility of such betrayal.

See Hardin (ed.) (2004), Krishnamurthy (2015), and other papers in the October 2015 issue of The Monist on Trust and Democracy. Some forms of epistemic injustice can be understood in terms of unfair distrust and its consequences; I return to these issues in chapter 6.

we aspire to be good promisors; bad promisors are untrustworthy people. So what do good promisors do? They keep their promises. But not only this: they make the right promises in the first place. Promises are offered and accepted in the spirit of hope, whilst a broken promise is a sad business. And not just sad, but bad: breaking a promise is not the worst crime imaginable, yet it is paradigmatically wrong, unless there are extenuating circumstances.

My suggestion is that promises are subject to a competence norm: do not make promises unless you are competent to keep them.

Is competence a statistical notion: do not promise unless there is a high probability you will succeed? Consideration of lottery situations suggests otherwise. Sid should not promise to draw a red ball, even though there is a high probability he will keep such a promise. On the other hand, a skilled baker’s promise to make a delicious cake seems perfectly acceptable, even though there’s some real chance that the oven will break down, or the power will fail. Ernest Sosa has made sophisticated, fruitful use of the notion of competence in his epistemology. For Sosa, ‘Competences are dispositions of an agent to perform well’ (2010: 465), and,

will sketch how different accounts of promissory obligations might explain certain competence-related norms on promise-making. The literature on promising is strikingly concerned with the temptation to make insincere promises, whilst issues of incompetence or recklessness rarely reach the surface.

Is there any onus upon an audience to accept an offer only where the resulting promise satisfies the norms I have already discussed? Should you decline someone’s offer to promise if you know that she is insincere, or incapable of keeping such a promise? In practice, all sorts of considerations will be in play, depending upon your relationship to the promise-offerer, whether she is a child or adult, the costs and benefits of causing her embarrassment either now or later, the interests of any third parties, and so on.

I am not the first to suggest that telling and promising are somehow connected. But, in my view, this connection has not previously been articulated in the most plausible fashion, and so has been vulnerable to easy objections. Exploring the connection also has a broader purpose in the context of this book. It helps us understand the way in which ‘epistemic’ or ‘intellectual’ trust, distrust, and trustworthiness are related to their practical counterparts: trusting someone to speak truthfully is a special case of trusting him or her to do something. This will allow me to move between epistemic and practical concerns in later chapters more easily, and to explore what obstacles there are to trustworthiness in each domain.

both promising and telling are important elements of the ways in which we live together, and they are governed by norms of competence and sincerity. If you lack relevant competence, or you are not recognized as competent by yourself or others, you are distanced from being able to engage properly in these activities. Often we have a moral obligation to be in a certain epistemic state,

Suppose then that we encounter circumstances in which we find it difficult or costly to avoid incurring a new commitment, whether we like it or not, and whether or not we feel competent to fulfil that commitment. How to respond? We could choose to bite the bullet, and pay the high price of prioritizing trustworthiness by avoiding new commitment. For the most part, the cases I discussed in chapter 5 do not involve a complete lack of control over commitment, and indeed there is reason to think that coerced commitments do not genuinely bind us. Instead, I focused on situations in which our circumstances mean that avoiding commitment is a very unattractive option. For example, someone who has only one friend, a person who makes unreasonable demands upon her, may be forced to choose between accepting unsafe commitments (thus risking untrustworthiness) and losing her only social contact. Someone who needs to see a doctor, and will struggle to make it to the appointment on time because she relies upon poor public transport, must choose between a risky commitment to show up on time and a certainty of not seeing the doctor at all. People living in challenging circumstances, with few material or social resources, will more often pay a very high price if they prioritize trustworthiness—the avoidance of unfulfilled commitment—

How might all of this manoeuvring look to observers who are not fully aware of the challenges posed by circumstances? From this outside perspective, imagine someone who opts to pay the high social cost of avoiding a particular commitment. Suppose we do not realize how difficult it will be for that person to fulfil that commitment, or at least how difficult it is for her to know what she can do; perhaps it’s the kind of thing that would be easy for us to manage. Then the refusal to become committed looks perversely unmotivated: we may simply assume that she is antisocial, lacking confidence, or not a ‘team player’. Or imagine someone who makes what seem to be absurdly cautious attempts to specify exactly what she can and can’t commit to doing, offering up conditions and potential excuses. Again, imagine that we do not appreciate how difficult it is for this person to know whether she will be able to act as required, perhaps because she knows how unstable or hostile her circumstances are likely to be. To us, the person will appear to be simply a fusspot, or self-centred, or unreliable: we won’t see these superficially irritating behaviours as evidence of her admirable underlying motive.

So far in this section, I have pictured cases in which a relatively powerless person tries to protect herself both from becoming untrustworthy and from paying other costs, and cannot achieve these simultaneously. But there are parallel issues which affect relatively powerful people, and not always to their advantage. Sometimes an individual has special responsibility to foresee and either forestall or accommodate possible misapprehensions of the intended force of her words.

This kind of caution is not cost-free. In itself it uses up time, energy, and other resources; by assumption this challenge often affects people who don’t have a lot of time, energy, or resources to spare. But in addition such caution can either improve or damage our image in the eyes of people around us. Careful examination and weighing of potential commitments may be seen—often rightly—as a sign of trustworthiness, of being the kind of person who takes commitments seriously and is anxious not to incur debts that cannot be repaid. On the other hand, if this is read as ostentatious or excessive caution it can prompt impatience in those around us, who wish we’d just make up our minds.

Kristie Dotson’s rich work on types of silencing has also expanded the range of phenomena which now seem amenable to ‘respectable’ philosophical exploration. Moreover she demonstrates the importance of black feminists’ varied discussions of testimony and of obstacles to testimonial exchange; thus she widens intellectual horizons for most of her philosophical readers.

Testimonial smothering can occur when a potential speaker decides to withhold her testimony, in anticipation of a poor audience response.

Bird, Alexander (2002), ‘Illocutionary Silencing’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 83: 1–15.