From Trust to Trustworthiness

Maria Baghramian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367183103
• eBook ISBN: 9780429593949
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Humanism in Philosophy

Trust is an essential component of social life and yet political polarization and social tensions can easily lead to its erosion. The articles collected in this volume throw a new light on the fundamentals of trust and trustworthiness and thus help us understand better the conditions and the limits of trust.

The book brings together some of the best recent thinking on trust from across a broad spectrum of approaches and concerns. The essays range from the more abstract discussions of the conditions and nature of trust, to its application to our social and political lives in general, alongside more subject specific approaches such as trust in the media. Trust is a thick concept with both epistemic and normative content and significance, and several chapters engage with the ethical features of trust in distinct ways and also show the central role of trust in our decision-making. There is also an engagement with the phenomenological approach of Husserl in conjunction with Margaret Gilbert's theory of political obligation. The final chapter, by Onora O'Neill, one of the pioneers of the discussions of trust and trustworthiness in recent philosophy, links the topic of trust to the central issue of the conditions of trustworthiness.

Given the paramount significance of the exercise of trust in our daily lives, this book will be of interest to philosophers and non-philosophers alike. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies.

Giving the Benefit of the Doubt

Paul Faulkner iD

ABSTRACT
Faced with evidence that what a person said is false, we can nevertheless trust them and so believe what they say – choosing to give them the benefit of the doubt. This is particularly notable when the person is a friend, or someone we are close to. Towards such persons, we demonstrate a remarkable epistemic partiality. We can trust, and so believe, our friends even when the balance of the evidence suggests that what they tell us is false. And insofar as belief is possible, it is also possible to acquire testimonial knowledge on those occasions when the friends know what they tell us. This paper seeks to explain these psychological and epistemological possibilities.

1

Walking home alone at night you come across someone badly injured. Going to their aid you find, to your horror, it is your estranged partner and they have been stabbed with what appears to be your kitchen knife. You call the ambulance and police, but your partner dies before they arrive. When they do arrive, the police arrest you. The evidence against you is significant. Your prints are all over the knife and you had a motive. In this nightmare scenario, you know that you are innocent. You know that all the evidence indicating otherwise is misleading and has some other explanation. What you need to do is convince someone of these facts so that this alternative explanation is sought! The problem is that all the evidence suggests that what you say is false. And if one had such seemingly good but in fact misleading evidence that an instrument is broken, there would be no epistemic options: this evidence would mean that one could not but reject its readings. However, in protesting your innocence to your friend, you do not take your friend to be similarly epistemically bound by the evidence. It seems possible for your friend to give you the benefit of the doubt. It seems possible for your friend to trust you, and so to learn what really happened.

The aim of this paper is to give an account of what makes this possible. In the next section, I develop the epistemological issues that situate the problem.

2

Evidence can be misleading. So it is possible for an audience to have evidence that a speaker is lying when in fact the speaker is being truthful and telling the truth. Since the possibility under investigation is a matter of what is possible for an audience, imagine now that you are in the position of the audience who is the friend.

The murder case. The evidence suggests that your friend is guilty of murdering their estranged partner. Your friend comes to you and protests their innocence. In fact, your friend is innocent and has been very cleverly framed.

Three things, I think, are true of this case.

First, it is psychologically possible for you to believe your friend. One way of making sense of this possibility is to imagine that, in considering whether your friend is innocent, you bring to bear everything you know about your friend – their history, circumstance, character, values, the fact that they value your friendship and care about truthfulness – and so come to judge that this evidence, in conjunction with their testimony, outweighs the evidence pointing to their guilt. However, this possibility should be excluded: the murder case should be read as a case where the balance of evidence, when impartially considered, points to your friend’s guilt. The first claim is that even in this situation, you could believe your friend.¹ The claim, here, is not that belief is probable but possible. The way that things would probably play out would be that you would listen to your friend’s account, weigh the evidence, and at a certain point either trust your friend, giving them the benefit of the doubt – or not.² Moreover, that you should trust your friend – that you should put your faith in them, and so believe them – is a claim that has been much discussed.³ A presupposition of this discussion is that belief is a psychological possibility.

Second, it is epistemologically possible for you to get to know that your friend is innocent on the basis of believing her when she tells you this. That this should be taken as an epistemological datum is shown by imagining the murder case, as section 1 does, from the speaker’s perspective. In seeking a friend, so that you can tell them what happened to you, you hope to be believed not merely because this is good in-itself, but because you want your friend to learn what really happened. In telling your friend that you are innocent you take it that you have put them in a position to know this, if they can only believe you. Moreover, suppose you were wrong in this and that your telling does not put your friend in this epistemic position; to assert so much would be to deny that trusting someone who knows offers a unique route to knowledge. The second starting point of this paper is the contrary claim that trusting someone who knows does identify a unique route to knowledge.⁴ This (epistemic) intuition that your friend could learn what happened, if only they could believe you, is as robust as the (psychological) intuition that your friend could believe you.

Nevertheless, third, this epistemological datum is problematized by the fact that the balance of evidence supports your believing that your friend is guilty. So while it might be allowed that trusting someone who knows identifies a unique way of getting to know, it can still be denied that it is a way of getting to know in this case. That is, in this case the possibility of acquiring knowledge seems to be blocked. This idea might be put in terms of defeat: any possibility of getting to know that your friend is innocent seems to be normatively defeated.⁵ The relevant defeater here is normative because given that the evidence of your friend’s guilt is in fact misleading, there are no undefeated objective defeaters. And if you do manage to believe your friend, trusting her for the truth, it follows that there are no undefeated subjective defeaters. Of course, the worry is that epistemically you should not trust your friend for the truth given the evidence you have, which, again, is to say that the relevant defeaters are normative: the issue is the epistemic reasonableness of believing your friend is innocent when the balance of evidence, impartially considered, points to your friend’s guilt.⁶ It follows that a requirement on any explanation of how you get to know that your friend is innocent is that it must show how believing your friend can be epistemically reasonable.

The philosophical challenge is then to account for these three data-points: (1) to explain how belief in the face of the evidence is a psychological possibility; (2) to explain how the acquisition of testimonial knowledge in the face of the evidence is an epistemological possibility; and (3) to explain how believing your friend can be epistemically reasonable when the balance of evidence, impartially considered, suggests that it is not epistemically reasonable, and thereby implies that the possibility of acquiring knowledge is normatively defeated. In the next three sections, I sketch three possible explanations of these data-points, before arguing for a fourth explanation in the final two sections.

3

One explanation of how belief is possible in the murder case starts from the fact that in this case it is a friend that tells you she is innocent. ‘Friendship’, Sarah Stroud (2006, 499) observes, ‘places demands not just on our feelings or our motivations, but on our beliefs and our methods of forming beliefs’. This is to say that friendship ‘positively demands epistemic bias, understood as an epistemically unjustified departure from epistemic objectivity’ (Stroud 2006, 518). Similarly, Simon Keller (2004, 329) concludes that ‘epistemic norms sometimes conflict with the requirements of friendship’. In listening to these requirements of friendship, we are then led to demonstrate epistemic bias; the balance of evidence might suggest that our friend is guilty, but we do not consider this evidence impartially. First, we question any evidence that puts our friend in a bad light and attempt to undermine its evidential value. If one bit of evidence against your friend is that their estranged partner was stabbed with their kitchen knife, you would try and imagine alternative explanations of this fact under which your friend is innocent; the knife was stolen, for instance. That is, we ‘try to discredit the evidence’ (Stroud 2006, 509). Second, we try to put a different interpretation on what evidence cannot be discredited in order to charitably conceive a friend’s action and motives. If you could not deny that your friend did the killing, you might, for example, then conceive it as an act of self-defence. In this way, we seek interpretations of our friends’ conduct that is as favourable as the evidence will allow. In doing so, Stroud (2006, 508) jokes, ‘we become spin doctors’.

The idea that we treat testimony from friends differently – that we are epistemically partial and so more likely to believe it – explains the psychological datum, namely that belief is a possibility in the murder case. Moreover, late in her paper Stroud (2006, 522) suggests that this fact should force us to ‘rethink the assumption that epistemic rationality requires the kind of epistemic objectivity or impartiality from which friendship seems necessarily to depart’. Here Stroud questions the assumption that epistemic partiality entails epistemic irrationality; rather, she suggests that the demands of friendship can make it epistemically reasonable to believe your friend. Assuming that this is true of the murder case, Stroud both endorses the third epistemological data point – that believing your friend can be epistemically reasonable – and offers a suggestion as to why this is so: the demands of friendship make it so. However, what is left mysterious is how the demands of friendship do this. In the next section, I consider one way of developing this explanation and removing this mystery. But first I want to raise a general worry about this explanatory strategy.

The general worry is that believing-your-friend-out-of-friendship seems to fall short of simply believing your friend; and if it does, then it would leave your friend frustrated. Pamela Hieronymi (2008, 219) makes this point when discussing her own murder case and in criticism of non-cognitive notions of trust: what the friend demands is trust in the sense of belief; ‘your friend wants you to trust that she is innocent; she wants you to believe her’. Hieronymi’s worry is that unless trust entails belief, the friend’s demand to be trusted is unsatisfied. For example, merely accepting what your friend says, and thereby treating your friend as if she were innocent, offering her shelter and so on, would not be enough. It would not be enough because you could do this all the while believing, based on the evidence, that your friend is guilty. Similarly, unless believing-out-of-friendship entails believing – and so entails crediting your friend with knowing that she is innocent – your friend’s demand to be believed is unsatisfied. The following explanation of how friendship supports belief then goes some way to appeasing this worry.

4

What is needed is a defence of ‘the rationality of partiality’, and such an argument is provided by Berislav Marušić (2015, 174). Consider first what reason one has for believing that someone, S, will φ. In considering this question, one must distinguish between the perspectives of the agent and an observer. An observer, if disinterested, will look to the evidence and here S’s track record will be crucial. But from the agent’s p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: From Trust to Trustworthiness
• 1 Giving the Benefit of the Doubt
• 2 Trust in the Guise of Belief
• 3 Trusting Relationships and the Ethics of Interpersonal Action
• 4 Trust in the Normative Domain
• 5 Trusting the Media? TV News as a Source of Knowledge
• 6 Trust, Reliance, and Democracy
• 7 Trust within Limits
• 8 Trust and Betrayal from a Husserlian Standpoint
• 9 Transformative Choice, Practical Reasons and Trust
• 10 Linking Trust to Trustworthiness
• Index