The Role of Trust in Judgment
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University of South Florida Scholar Commons Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 4-30-2009 The Role of Trust in Judgment Christophe Sage Hudspeth University of South Florida Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd Part of the American Studies Commons Scholar Commons Citation Hudspeth, Christophe Sage, "The Role of Trust in Judgment" (2009). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/2020 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Role of Trust in Judgment by Christopher Sage Hudspeth A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Co-Major Professor: Stephen Turner, Ph.D. Co-Major Professor: Brook Sadler, Ph.D. Hugh LaFollette, Ph.D. Sandra Schneider, Ph.D. Michael Gibbons, Ph.D. Date of Approval April 30, 2009 Keywords: Ethics, Decision-making, Risk, Cooperation, Confidence © Copyright 2009, Christopher Hudspeth To my mother, whose support made this possible. Table of Contents Abstract iv Chapter One: The Meaning of Trust 1 Introduction 1 Description 3 Separation 5 Risky 7 Goodwill 8 Two-part 10 Interpretive 12 Terminology 13 Outline 14 Chapter Two 15 Chapter Three 16 Chapter Four 17 Chapter Five 18 Chapter Six 19 Chapter Two: Trusting and Trustworthiness 22 Bentley Glass 25 The Importance of Trust to Science 28 Trustworthiness Is Imperative 38 Trust as an Inherited Trait 39 The Need Does Not Obligate 42 Connection 46 Against a Necessary Causal Connection 46 A Breach Does Not Entail a Betrayal 48 Misplacing Trust Without Betrayal 50 Worthiness Does Not Entail Trusting 51 Generalizing the Case 52 Prisoner’s Dilemma 54 Prisoner’s Dilemma in Context 55 Cooperative Matrix 58 Not a Good Tool for Conceptualizing Trust 63 Connecting 70 Chapter Three: Trust is Risky 72 Risk 77 i Common Understanding 81 Restating the Scenario 84 Choice in the Dilemma 84 Held and Trustability 86 Cooperating Can Be Harmful 91 Actions 93 Trusting is Not an Action 94 Trust Without Entrusting 95 Entrusting Requires Right 96 Distrusting the Entrusted 98 Mistakes to Avoid 99 Complexity 104 A Reduction of Complexity 106 A Basic Fact of Social Life 108 Necessary for Interaction 109 Familiarity and Trust 111 A Positive Expectation 112 Confidence Is Not the Same as Trust 113 More to Trust? 114 Overwhelming Complexity Produces Trust 115 The Benefit of Trust 115 Risky 116 Synthesis 118 Chapter Four: Trust as Good Will 123 Vulnerability 127 Motivation 132 Promising’s Disanalogy 133 Verbal Commitments 136 The Question of Alberich 138 The Brothers Karamazov 139 Promise Requires Trust 141 Prior Acts 144 Good Will 146 The Importance of Friendship 148 The Importance of Incentives 150 Judgment 156 Belief 158 Bad Trust Is Not Trust After All 159 Dependence on Goodwill 162 Accounting for Trust 166 Misusing Discretionary Powers 167 Trust Without Purpose 170 Discretion 171 ii Chapter Five: Trust as a Two-Part Relationship 173 Hardin 181 A Matter of Belief 183 Explaining an Epistemological Account 186 A Dispositional Account 191 No Good Reason to Trust 196 Three-Part 197 Serving Trust 199 Three-part Expectation 209 Unexpected Behavior 211 Two-Part 213 Simple Trust 215 Blind Trust 217 Authentic Trust 219 Contentious Conclusions 221 Chapter Six: Trust as an Interpretive Framework 225 Introduction 227 Interpretation 232 No Connection Means That Trust It Not About Actions 236 Trust Is Not About Objective Certainty, It Is Risky 245 Trust Is Not Expectation 250 Trust Is Not About the Object of Trust 254 Reciprocal 258 Conclusion 264 References 266 Bibliography 271 About the author End Page iii The Role of Trust in Judgment Christopher Hudspeth ABSTRACT In this dissertation I defend five claims about trust: 1) trusting and trustworthiness are conceptually but not causally connected; 2) trust is risky; 3) trust requires good will; 4) trust is a two-part relation; and 5) trust is an interpretative framework. A concern for trust often appears in discussions about testimony and the expectation of truthfulness; Bentley Glass, John Hardwig, and Jonathan Adler each address the role of trust in science while assuming a necessary connection between trusting and trustworthiness. I argue that this conception is untenable because a justification for one fails to suffice as a justification of the other. I show, instead, that it is our assessment that links trustworthiness to trusting. My second claim, that trust involves risk, is contentious. I argue that the common understanding of risk as harm, which is held by Russell Hardin, contains the more technical understanding of risk as uncertainty, which is suggested by Niklas Luhman. Trust is risky precisely because it is inherently uncertain. Annette Baier argues that failing to recognize a distinction between trusting and action associated with that trust leads us to accept accounts of trust that are too broad. I argue that trust is to believe that another is concerned with your well-being, has good iv will, because she is concerned about you and not that it will necessarily benefit her in some way. Seeing trust as good will allows me to advance my fourth claim, that trust is a two-part relation, because trust is the assessment of another’s good will towards me. Trusting another is believing that the other’s good judgment will include concern and consideration for my interests because they are my interests. My fifth point follows naturally once trust is understood to be a risky, two-part relation requiring good will: it is an interpretive framework. Our trust in another sets the tone for understanding her behavior such that we take her actions as either supporting or blocking our interests. This account takes the capacity to trust to be the foundation for, rather than merely an outgrowth of, our judgments. v Chapter One: The Meaning of Trust Introduction What does it mean to trust? This is the question of my dissertation. It sits at the core of my investigation and informs the approach. My concern, thus understood, is descriptive rather than prescriptive even though there can and will be prescriptive claims made based on the description that I present. I want to be clear about this goal in the hopes of avoiding misunderstanding. Because I am attempting to describe rather than define trust it will be possible to present cases that seem to contradict my position. That is, counterexamples can be offered that challenge a prescriptive account but which, rightly understood, are no threat to a descriptive account. For example, were I to define trusting simply as allowing another to act in your interests then one could challenge that definition by pointing out cases of trusting where it would be impossible to allow another to act in your interests. On the contrary, by describing trust as allowing another to act in your interests then the cases in which you cannot allow another to act in your interests would, quite simply, not be trust at all but rather something else. This might seem to be a kind of intellectual sleight-of-hand, especially since prescribing is generally understood as the act of delineating the scope of the conversation, but I do not intend it that way. Instead, by making this claim I mean only to reinforce that I am chasing after what it means to trust rather than attempting to show when one should or should not be trusting. 1 A prescriptive account would run afoul of the intricacies of life and would confound my position. Certain cases, for all that they appear to be trust, are simply not; a criminal mastermind who gives you the keys to Fort Knox after he has irradiated the gold inside might appear to be trusting you not to steal the gold but he is not, in fact, trusting you. Likewise, the Nigerian who needs only your bank account number in order to secretly move $60,000,000 out of the country seems to be trusting you with a fortune but is, in fact, not trusting you at all. The parents that leave you to babysit their child appear to be trusting you to watch their child but the video cameras hidden throughout the house tell a different story. The goal, then, of my dissertation is to consider those cases when one is actually trusting (or being trustworthy) and not simply the cases in which one appears to be trusting (or being trustworthy). I assume that a person is trusting and then investigate what makes that case special. On might object that by targeting the investigation in this way that the answer to the question is assumed but, I believe, the arguments that follow sufficiently make my case and avoid a vicious circularity. I begin with what I take to be a simple and, in some sense, uncontroversial claim about the relationship between trusting and trustworthiness: they do no entail each other. While this claim may be widely accepted as obvious the conclusions that are drawn from it are not. The lack of entailment (or a necessary connection) means that acts are not sufficient to explain trust. Trust can be betrayed, failed, and misplaced. We can trust the unworthy and distrust the worthy. Any particular action is not, therefore, a case of being either trustworthy or untrustworthy. And yet, though I argue that the two do not entail each other, that they do not cause each other, there is an inseparability about them.