Thinking About Trust. Joseph Godfrey, S.J. Philosophers in Jesuit Education Nov. 1, 2013

Transcription

1 Thinking About Trust Joseph Godfrey, S.J. Philosophers in Jesuit Education Nov. 1, 2013 Abstract This discussion-starter text offers some main ideas on thought about trust. In defining trust, I begin by contrasting my approach with those employed in relation to game theory and to methods of the social sciences. I then propose four dimensions of trusting: instrumental trusting, intimacy trusting, security trusting (contrasting with Heideggerian angst) and the trusting that is open to learning. I propose that receptivity to enhancement is the core element in trusting. I offer, briefly: an application to theism; an interpretation of religious faith as trust; a construal of propositions believed as propositions trusted; and a glimpse of testimony s importance for epistemology. I can in discussion go into an argument from trusting one s cognitive faculties to the relative plausibility of theism, as advanced by Richard Taylor in the successive editions of his Metaphysics (with an adaptation of this type of design argument by Alvin Plantinga). =================================================================== Discussion-Starter Text Anselm had faith seeking understanding; I explore trust seeking understanding. Working primarily in philosophy of religion, I travel the fiducial route, What or Whom do I trust, what or whom is it reasonable to trust, rather than the epistemological route, seeking reasonable propositional beliefs-that. I am interested in connections among ethics and trust, epistemology and trust, religious faith as trust. I offer two key preliminary contrasts with my approach to trust. The first is the Social Science approach. The second is the Game Theory approach. You may understand these contrasts as on-ramps or entrances to my considerations of trust. My first preliminary contrast is with the Social Science approach, formulated as Trusting as Believing Versus Trusting as Letting Take Care. I begin with a definition of trusting current in some social sciences. I use the work of Russell Hardin as my source; he edits a series of books on trust. He considers trusting to be a matter of having beliefs about other persons, specifically about their trustworthiness, and precisely about whether I believe their interests encapsulate my own interests. Russell Hardin puts it this way: My assessment of your trustworthiness in a particular context is simply my trust of you. The declarations I believe you are trustworthy and I trust you are equivalent. The advantage of this approach is that one can ascertain whether people do trust by asking what they believe about someone else s motives. This approach enables social scientists to take opinion surveys, asking us about the beliefs we have about other people s interests. Marek Kohn adopts part of this definition: Trust is an expectation, or a 1

2 2 disposition to expect, that another party will act in one s interests. Hardin and Kohn agree in taking it to be a quite different matter to act on one s trust. In the social science approach offered by Russell Hardin and Marek Kohn, an instance of trusting is an achieved believing, a successful belief formation. In my approach, an instance of trusting is an achieved letting take care. Letting take care includes having some good within the causal range of something or someone else. As a paradigmatic example, I offer: I trust myself to this ladder: I put my weight on it, perhaps testing it, partially, but then releasing myself so that my weight is fully on the device I trust. I entrust myself to the device, I put myself within the causal range of the device (and of the device s operator, if there is one--say, for a radiation device managed by a radiological oncologist). Or: I trust the healing powers of my body, of my skin. I accept my dependence on the biological processes that knit the skin that is cut, that knit the bone that is cracked. So my first preliminary contrast is between trusting as a believing-that, complemented by sometimes acting on that belief, and trusting as conveying into or accepting that some good be within the causal range of another. What difference is there between the believing-that approach and the letting-take-care approach? The believing-that approach is indeed amenable to social scientists taking surveys. Further, the believing-that approach has particular usefulness insofar as I do not let someone take care of some matter. I withhold acting because of my negative belief: I just don t trust this person. In the beliefs-that approach, one would aim to have accurate beliefs about someone, quite compatible with believing myself self-sufficient and neither needing nor accepting help from another, and therefore not interested in letting anyone help, not interested in letting anyone take care. We might consider Aristotle s sketch of the independent self-sufficient person, in contrast with Alistair MacIntyre s Dependent Rational Animals. As MacIntyre points out, Self-governance (autonomy) is not the same as self-sufficiency (autarky). The difference between the belief-that approach and the letting-take-care approach makes a difference for political theory and for social analysis. Does political life extend only to those who are well endowed with knowledge and power and equality with others? In such cases, I may not need to bother with believing anything about other people s abilities and good will. I don t need them and they do not need me. Letting take care is entirely optional. We may establish contracts among free and equal people about matters thoroughly optional, motivated by seeing some optional benefit we might secure through a contract--which, I might add, is prima facie a form of suspicion as well as of trust. Another is management, organizational behavior study: What do I aim at? Shall I aim to get people to believe that I am trustworthy, while empowering them actually to need no help from me? Another is religious faith. Do I believe God to be trustworthy? Even the demons are capable of believing that God exists and has some characteristics (Letter of James, 2:19). In contrast, faith in God seems to be more than having an opinion that God is trustworthy, and that God is of sufficient power and knowledge and good will to justify my opinion about God. But letting God take care is another matter. There are also implications for taking part in a life with others where cooperation and sometimes trust is needed, especially at the beginning and the end of life.

3 3 So the first preliminary contrast is between trusting as believing-that and trusting as letting take care. My Second Preliminary Contrast is with the game theory. Game theory reflects some experiments in social sciences, observing what people do, and presumes motivation (self-interest) and the rest of a schedule of preferences. Game theory can also be non-experimental. In her 2012 book Trust: A Very Short Introduction, Katherine Hawley provides, by way of procedures and outcomes, a definition of what she terms the pure game. Hawley reports that game theory is one way some use to understanding trusting. I ll base my second preliminary contrast by drawing on what she terms the pure game. (There is also the well-known Prisoners Dilemma game, with its variations, used to illustrate trusting--i d say one or several forms of trusting.) The pure game involves three parties. The first party is the investigator. The investigator wants to see how people behave under certain conditions. The investigator creates the initial conditions: a sum of money is given to a second party, the recipient, with the understanding that the recipient may give some or all or none of the money to a third party, and this second party s giving is termed trusting. If the second party gives some of the money to the third party, the investigator doubles that given sum, augmenting what the third party comes to have. The third party may or may not respond by giving some of the total sum back to the recipient. The second-party recipient therefore trusts the third party with money, with the possibility that an amount may be returned to this recipient-giver. Depending on whether the third-party trusted one gives something back, the original recipient, the second party, will come out ahead and the third-party trusted one may also come out ahead. So if the investigator gives ten dollars and the recipient gives six dollars to the third party, the investigator will double that six so that the third party has twelve. The recipient retains four dollars. If the third party returns, say five dollars and retains seven, the original recipient nets four plus five equals nine, and the third party has twelve minus five, or seven net. What investigators find is that the third party more often than not does return some money to the original recipient, instead of keeping all that was given. The third party therefore is trusted with money, and instead of keeping the entire gratuitous twelve, returns some and is content with a gratuitous seven. Let me offer a few comments on this and some other forms of game theory as used to define or measure trust. (1) Game theory analysis of trusting often takes the one who may trust as a person who has the option to entrust, not a person one who find himself or herself dependent and vulnerable. (2) What is received is sometimes an exchangeable good, such as money. (3) The transaction may occur only once, as in the pure game case I just presented, or repeatedly, but in any case what occur are discrete transactions rather than a growth or decline in a social or interpersonal climate, in what social scientists call social capital. (4) If the game is experimental, the outcome of the game is ideally entirely describable in quantitative observable behavioral terms, statistical terms. (5) Whether the game is experimental or theoretical, there is often operative an assumed schedule or ranking of preferences, or an inferred chart of preferences, where self-interest is ranked first. (6) Typically, the parties are hidden from one another, know nothing or little about one another, and have limited or no communication. There may be no promises, although making and breaking a promise may be a strategy for a player in a trust game. Game theory might better be named transaction theory. What does game theory do, or what does a trust-game experiment do, for understanding trust? Game theory is one theory of discovering rules for successful cooperation, even if cooperation is not labeled trust. It considers transactional costs and benefits. Uncertainty, or certainty, is only statistical. What game theory of an experimental sort can do, whether a single transaction or repeated, whether anonymous or including some facts about the parties, is give a social scientist some information about what people will probably do if game circumstances match life circumstances. Shall this economic transaction model be taken as the paradigm for trust for all or many cases of trust? Well, what else would there be that deserves to be included in the definition or conceptual model?

4 4 One difference in this approach to trust is that in some cases it does not readily extend to assessing whether to trust when finding oneself in a situation of loss and dependent on someone one has not chosen to depend on when, for example, brought into a hospital emergency room, especially when one cannot assimilate all that one is asked to consent to. It is useful, therefore, in considering trust, to have also on the table not only contracts between informed and capable adults, but also dependency among seniors, among children, among immigrants or refugees who do not speak the language of the caregiver. There are non-elective affinities that one might consider as scenarios for trusting or withholding trust. Thus end my two preliminary contrasts, one with trusting as believing-that versus letting take care, and the other regarding using game theory to illustrate trust and reckon its wisdom. Four Dimensions of Trusting. My procedure is to offer four dimensions of trusting. The notion of dimension and the deployment of four dimensions may be the most controversial element in my approach to trusting, although Aristotle does something similar in his understanding of causing. A First Understanding of Trusting is as Instrumental or Reliance-Trusting. My first dimension is by now familiar, that of letting take care, where one party lets another party take care of some good, with a view to some benefit in regard to which the other party is instrumental. To trust is to look for help. I term such trusting reliance trusting. To let take care is to have or put some good within the causal range of another, and accept or choose to have that person provide benefit or avoid loss in regard to that good. A Second Understanding of Trusting as Intimacy or I-Thou Trusting. So, on our first understanding, trusting consists of having something valued within the causal range of someone, and letting that person take care of it. Being dependent in this way may be initiated and arranged; or it may be found and accepted. Thus, I have this item within your care, with more or less discretion afforded you regarding the outcome. I trust you with that something for this outcome, because of whatever reason I have, good or bad. This is instrumental trusting or reliance trusting. In our second way of understanding trusting, a person depends on another not for some instrumental help but for a relationship itself. Thus one would look to an other not as mere means for some outcome outside the relationship, but for a bond between the two: I trust you with me for us, because of you. This is unitive trusting I-Thou trusting, to employ the phrase of Martin Buber. We may schematize reliance trusting in this way: X trusts Y with Z, for outcome W, because of R. We may schematize I-thou trusting in this way: X trusts Y with X, for outcome X+Y, because of Y. I trust you with me, for us, because of you. If only the instrumental or reliance model or dimension is used, Z, the cared-for, may be fungible, and so may be Y, the other party, for the hoped-for outcome W.

5 5 I would observe that without the intersubjective or I-thou model of unitive trust, there is less conceptual room for trusting a friend, a partner, the Amida Buddha, Christ, or the Holy Spirit. A Third Understanding or Dimension: Basic Trust or Security Trust. Security-trusting is a third way of understanding trusting. What is trusted is more like a network than like a particular: Am I secure? Are we safe? Theologian Hans Küng, for example, considers such trust in his Does God Exist? (1980), when he considers trust of reality and trust of God; philosopher Adriaan Peperzak considers similar questions in his Trust: Who or What Might Support Us? (2013). Call this basic trust, which underlies transactions, even episodically dangerous transactions. Philosopher of education Otto Friedrich Bollnow has proposed that a sense of security is one of the fundamental moods of personal existence, in contrast with Heidegger s angst. In the first and second dimensions, what is trusted is particular, either as an individual or as an institution. In this third dimension of security trusting, what or whom is trusted is not describable in particular ways, although there may be an embodiment of what is trusted, a home or nest or support. A Fourth Understanding or Dimension: Trusting as Cognitional Openness. To trust in this fourth dimension is to be receptive to what may become disclosed or evident. Such openness to whatever reality may disclose is not antecedently focusing on this or that particular person or thing to reveal something, but oriented towards a horizon of meanings. I trust in order to understand. This openness-trust is the human spirit s extended hand of greeting and exploration. It is its window on the world. I extend myself to reality and expect that reality will get through to me; I query reality without excessive fear of getting slapped, and I have some expectation that my questions, though they may get refined or turned, will meet with some response, either by answer or by seeing that the question is not a real question. Openness-trust is a necessary (but not a sufficient) condition for recognizing the genuine trustworthiness of others. The closed person not only basically mistrusts; he mis-takes. Closedness weakens human epistemic powers. Donald Evans is among those who have explored openness trusting. A Common Element. For these four understandings of trusting, there is a common element: receptivity to enhancement. A person, in trusting, is receptive to help, or receptive to companionship, or receptive to support, being secure, being upheld, or receptive to being enlightened. The one word (which I do find awkward) is: enhancement. The other that is trusted is helping, companioning, supporting, or disclosing. Considering trusting, It is more blessed to receive than to give. Why not call these distinct ways of behaving, or distinct attitudes? I term them dimensions, because one can be high on two scales which are orthogonal. In definition by genus and species, one aims at using contrastives; no one can be both or can have both. These four ways of trusting have in common a receptivity to some good, not necessarily as rival ways, but as differing dimensions of a person or group s receptivity. We may in discussion consider how one might trust badly. Theistic Religious Faith as Trust, A comment. Were it within my competence, I would translate most of the Bible s two-hundred plus occurrences of pistis as trust. That said, I would recall that historical context is helpful for considering religious faith as trust. While the Council

6 6 of Trent (in Canon 12 regarding justification) rejected justifying faith as by trust alone (sola fiducia), in 1999 a Joint Declaration on Justification by the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church stated that to have faith is to entrust oneself totally to God. May one trust God? How different is God, how would God be, different. Is trusting prima facie inappropriate for being directed towards God? Thomas Aquinas considers that while one may never trust God excessively, one may trust God badly. Marek Kohn, Katherine Hawley, others omit mention of God in their treatment of trusting, while Adriaan Peperzak does consider trusting directed towards God. There are prima facie differences. I can only subjectively, as it were, entrust something to God, if I understand God objectively to exercise divine Providence. Is there, with God, no real risk? Is there supreme risk? Is this because God is not the enforcer of Pascal s wager? Is God hardwired to be trustworthy? To have supreme discretion, either regarding what may be affected, or regarding the outcome, or both? It seems that trusting God may be more of a security-trusting than a reliance-trusting, and in lived faith might be much or more I-thou trusting as instrumental or reliance-trusting. Trusting Propositions. Trusting may be directed towards statements and towards propositions. We may trust statements believe them or assent to them to help us understand the way things are. Yet one may alternately distrust statements, because of distrust of the party issuing the statement or because of doubts about the statements ability to effect understanding or knowledge. Because propositions are instrumental, I apply trust to words. I take true to mean trustworthy. To believe is to trust. To believe a proposition is to trust the proposition to put us in touch with something. The act of the believer has the thing, not the proposition, as its target attained (terminat in rem), as Thomas Aquinas put it. The purpose of a proposition is to help us with understanding something. tterns. With these remarks to serve as a starter, we may turn to our time for discussion Godfrey Joseph J. Trust of People, Words, and God: A Route for Philosophy of Religion. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, Godfrey, Joseph J. Trust: Philosophical and Ethical Perspectives. In New Catholic Encyclopedia, Supplement : Ethics and Philosophy, vol. 4, Detroit, MI: Gale, and Catholic University of America, 2013.