The Case for Trust
An excerpt from my honors thesis on Trustless Systems. You can read the whole thing here.
The idea that other people could be trustworthy and can be entrusted with things that as an individual, we care for, seems to be naive. When advocating for trust, the questions immediately rise to the surface: trusting who? For what end? What happens if we are wrong?
These questions are entirely valid. When there is widespread outcry about the decline in trust levels (in and of itself a hard claim to justify), and a call to action to “rebuild trust,” the darker side of trust is often ignored. If trust is a heuristic used in the evaluation of others, it is a decidedly imperfect one. The harms that can arise from misplaced trust are enormous, and the reason that people try to use systems of verification, accountability and control over blind trust is because past experience has continually reinforced this lesson.
Why trust?
As discussed in the rest of the thesis, trust is a hard concept to define, but broadly it can be thought of as accepting vulnerability because another is seen as having the goodwill and competence to not harm us even while having the agency to betray. Nancy Nyquist Potter writes, we cannot attend to everything the matters to us by ourselves, and so we are forced to entrust these things to others. Trusting others then gives them a chance to hurt us — sometimes immensely — because they are acting with agency, and could act to harm us. Trusting others is believing that though they have this ability, they will not act to harm you.
But trust is not simply predictive: in taking a participant stance towards the trusted, we are also making a normative judgement. When we trust we are not just signalling how we think another will act but also how they should act, and this is important. Because when we talk about rebuilding trust and having more trust, what we really want is trust that is well deserved. In that sense, as the philosopher Onora O’Neill explains, what we are seeking is not more trust but more trustworthiness.
One answer to the question of how to increase trustworthiness relies on a theory of “therapeutic trust.” — where the act of being trusted can make a person more trustworthy. A commonplace and illustrative example is parents trusting their children to carry out certain chores — in entrusting the responsibility to them they are trying to teach them how to become trustworthy as well (Walker, 2006). Another way to look at this phenomenon is captured by Phillip Pettit, in his paper “The Cunning of Trust.” Pettit writes that when we trust, we signal that we hold the person in esteem, and they will act to honor that trust because they are “esteem-seeking” (1995). Other scholars have made similar arguments to Pettit, emphasising the enforcing role the social contract can have in making people who are trusted behave in a more trustworthy manner because they are “compelled by the force of norms” or by the force of social constraints (Hardin 2002, 53; see also O’Neill 2002, Dasgupta 1988).
Pettit writes:
“The act of trust will communicate in the most credible currency available to human beings — in the gold currency of action, not the paper money of words — that the trustor believes the trustee to be truly trustworthy, or is prepared to act on the presumption that he is: believes or presumes him to be truly the sort of person who will not take advantage of someone who puts herself at his mercy.”
The salient idea here is that people need to be trusted to become trustworthy. To have more trust, you need more trustworthiness — but to have more trustworthiness, you need more opportunities where you are truster. As we create systems that increasingly remove this opportunity for trust, we might be creating a greater need for more of the same kind of systems everywhere else because we are reducing trustworthiness, and therefore possibilities for trust.
This view of the institutional effects of removing situations of trust reducing trustworthiness is also supported by the Pettit’s point that in a context where trusting behaviour and trustworthiness are low, even when someone tries to express trust, it may not be understood as trust. Pettit writes, “In a society where there are fewer examples of trustworthiness fewer examples of relationships and institutions built around attributions of loyalty or virtue or prudence there will be weaker inclinations on the part of trustees to think that they are regarded as trustworthy or on the part of trustors to expect that trustees will think this.”
That is an important caveat. In a system where there are certain constraints on a person to coerce them to act in a particular way, it is very difficult for a belief of their trustworthiness to be communicated through reliance on them. This brings into sharp focus the importance of the larger infrastructure and context of a situation of trust. Pettit warns, “If heavy regulation is capable of eradicating overtures of trust, and of driving out opportunities for trusting relationships, then it is capable of doing great harm.”
This infrastructural view of trust needs to defend itself against the idea that perhaps if we ever do reach the prescribed ideal of a “trustless” system, there is no need for trust, and no need for trustworthiness. Yet, there is more to trust than its function as a means to the end of acting together.
To trust is to believe a promise made by a person about their future actions. That, according to Friedrich Nietzsche, is divine: the “binding character” of promising is the way in which a person may “vouch for (themselves) in the future”. This exertion of memory of the will is what makes man close to divinity, because he may believe in himself to be true to his word.
Without the opportunity to be trusted, we lose a great part of that opportunity for divinity, for cooperation and for future opportunities of trust. The need to entrust others with things we care about that we cannot accomplish and tend to ourselves is a reminder to us of our interdependence. When we fail to recognise our own human limitations, we build systems with a hubris of eliminating trust with reliance.
L.M Sacasas writes, “When we rationalize and instrumentalize human activity we usually do so with a view to gaining more control over it or making it serve our ends, with a view toward mastery.” Technology that replaces trusting people with reliance on technology does so by instrumentalizing the function entrusting humans used to fulfill, and by installing a machine in their stead, creates an opportunity for mastery and control over even that which must be outsourced out of our care. It instead brings that activity as well under our own care, in that it reduces the outsourced task to the mere verification that the right reliable tool is being used to carry out the task.
But the burden of that verification and of ensuring the machines we rely on are reliable is not negligible, especially as low trust systems proliferate. Like the consent model of privacy, it situates the responsibility for privacy, safety, welfare on an individual. It makes privacy and trust from a social good to a private utility, and greatly diminishes them in that translation.
This privatisation means we are left with systems where the burden of checking is on us, and left with terms and conditions that were left unchecked and nobody to blame for it. When we fail to recognise that trust is a way in which we honor the freedom and goodwill of other people — and in that way recognise their shared humanity, we lose the chance to ever make that connection that trust allows.
When trust is seen only as vulnerability without the associated benefit of being the conduit that creates intimacy and/or connection because the vulnerability is not exploited, the importance of trust is diminished. To view vulnerability as certainty of harm is not an objective conclusion, it is a subjective decision. It is a judgment about the people you are interacting with that they may, must, maybe mean you harm.
In the book “Building Trust: In Business, Politics, Relationships, and Life” authors Robert C. Solomon and Fernando Flores make the case that: “Believing in the viability of human commitments is the necessary first step in making ourselves trustworthy, and it is the presupposition of trusting as well. To dismiss such commitments in the absence of sufficient constraints is not just pessimistic or cynical, much less “realistic,” but revealing.”
By viewing trust as a chance to recognise the dignity and goodwill of another by accepting the vulnerability that comes as parcel of giving someone agency over something we care about, it becomes apparent that trust is not only needed but something we should want to sustain.
When we lose the ability to entrust what matters to us into the care of others, and lose the ability to have them show us that they are worthy of that honor, we lose the ability to see that they do care, they are good and they are trustworthy as well. The fear of the unknowability of another’s mind may make us wary of trusting them, but it is in failing to trust others that we truly do become alien and unknowable to each other. Without situations of trust, there is no fulfilment of a promise — without the risk of trust, there is no chance of the reward, which is a trusting relationship.
