Should we trust in trust?

Trust may very well prove to be the buzzword of the 1990s. Pundits lament the lack of it in citizen-government relations. The political theorist Francis Fukuyama has written a bestseller discussing the importance of trust for a healthy economy.(1) Philosophers such as Annette Baier and Trudy

Govier(2) have argued for a whole new approach to ethics centered less on legalistic contractual relations and more on trusting relations such as those existing between parents and their children or among friends.(3) It has begun to sound as if trust were the Rosetta stone of all human relations.

While trust clearly is an important human, and maybe even animal,(4) phenomenon, I think that our discussions of trust need to be much more nuanced than they have been to date. Before we place too much of our trust in trust, we should ask a number of questions concerning 1) the definition of trust; 2) the value of trust; 3) the way in which we identify trustors and objects of trust; and 4) the appropriate means of engendering trust. The aim of this article is not to resolve all of these complicated issues but rather to open up some areas for further research by persons in a variety of disciplines (e.g., sociology, economics, business, and legal ethics). One problem in particular -- the problem of divergent expectations and beliefs on the part of trustor and trustee -- surfaces as an issue in connection with all four of the above topics and should be a special area of concern for persons theorizing about trust.

PART ONE: THE DEFINITION OF TRUST

There are two popular definitions of trust, definitions that have gone largely unchallenged. Annette Baier, in her widely-cited article "Trust and Anti-Trust," defines trust as the trustor's expectation of being the recipient of the trusted party's good will.(5) Francis Fukuyama characterizes trust as "the expectation that arises within a community of regular, honest, and cooperative behavior, based on commonly shared norms, on the part of other members of that community."(6) Three features of these definitions are especially noteworthy. First, both definitions treat trust as an exclusively interpersonal phenomenon. Such a definition is unduly restrictive. Persons appear, for example, to trust themselves as well as others. Indeed, it might be argued that self-trust is the basis for interpersonal trust. Individuals who are totally lacking in self-confidence may be too afraid or insecure to form any relations with others, much less stable and "regular" relations.(7) Conversely, individuals may trust too much in their own character and opinions (including their opinion of the correct definition of trust). Unwarranted self-trust may lead these persons to make self-righteous or even racist condemnations of others who have different beliefs or expectations, a point to which I will return in Part Three.