Consequences

This final chapter explores the ways in which we may try to respond to the obstacles to trustworthiness outlined in chapter 5. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which our responses are shaped by our expectations about how other people will understand or misunderstand our behaviour as reflecting our (lack of) trustworthiness. The conceptual connections between trustworthiness, competence, and commitment permit inferences between these: for example, a judgement that someone is trustworthy but not competent to perform some task suggests that she therefore is not committed to perform that task. In responding to uncertainty about our own situations, and about others’ evaluations of us, we often face uncomfortable choices: the more so when we are in difficult personal circumstances. Finally, the chapter briefly reviews how the book as a whole has been influenced by important work on injustice and testimony by Miranda Fricker, Kristie Dotson, and Rebecca Kukla.

Obstacles to Being Trustworthy

This chapter explores the many ways in which practical circumstances can make it more difficult for us to be trustworthy. In the book as a whole, trustworthiness is understood as a matter of avoiding unfulfilled commitments. Thus we have two levers to operate in the pursuit of trustworthiness: we can try to adjust our commitments, and we can try to adjust our actions. Operating these levers can in turn be thought of as involving four elements. We need control over whether we incur new commitments, and insight into what competences we have. Then we need insight into what commitments we have incurred, and control over our actions, in order to bring them in line with our commitments. The chapter explores obstacles which can arise in addressing each of these four challenges; in each case, there are many ways in which our circumstances can make it harder for us to be trustworthy.

Telling

This chapter sets out an account of assertion—or telling—which is suitable for a unified account of trustworthiness in both speech and action, and which centrally involves commitment. On this picture, assertion involves simultaneously promising to speak truthfully on a given matter, and either keeping or breaking that promise. The promise is to utter the truth, not merely to be sincere or do one’s best to utter the truth. This account shows how assertion and promising are importantly similar, without implausibly identifying asserting that p with promising that p. The account is distinguished from the so-called ‘commitment account’ of assertion and also from the ‘assurance’ account of the epistemic significance of testimony, though it is compatible with such accounts. Finally, the chapter draws on chapter 2’s discussions of norms on promising, to explore possible norms of assertion; there is also discussion of the constitutive (or not) nature of such norms.

Trustworthiness

This chapter explains the account of trustworthiness and untrustworthiness which fits the commitment account of trust and distrust. Trustworthiness is a matter of avoiding unfulfilled commitments, which requires both caution in incurring new commitments and diligence in fulfilling existing commitments. On this view, one can be trustworthy regardless of one’s motives for fulfilling one’s commitments. This is a negative account of trustworthiness, which means that one can be trustworthy whilst avoiding commitments as far as possible. In practice, through friendship, work and other social engagements we take on meta-commitments—commitments to incur future commitments. These can make it a matter of trustworthiness to take on certain new commitments. Untrustworthiness can arise from insincerity or bad intentions, but it can also arise from enthusiasm and becoming over-committed. A trustworthy person must not allow her commitments to outstrip her competence.

Promising

This chapter argues that promise-making is governed by a norm of competence, alongside a norm of sincerity. Thus a promise can be criticizable even if it expresses a sincere commitment to act in some admirable way: even if it is neither a false promise nor a wicked promise. The chapter shows how a competence norm is distinct from the norm of keeping one’s promises. Competence norms come in various strengths, from a very weak ‘keepability’ norm of avoiding unkeepable promises to a very strong norm of not making promises unless one knows one will be able to keep the promise. These correspond to the variety of possible epistemic norms on assertion which are more familiar from philosophical debate. Finally, the chapter briefly reviews the relationship between different accounts of why we should keep our promises, and different accounts of what competence norm applies to promise-making.

Trust and Distrust

This chapter introduces the philosophical study of trust, and explains the distinction between trust and reliance. It argues for an analogous distinction between distrust and non-reliance. Keeping distrust in focus highlights problems with existing accounts of trust, most especially those accounts according to which trust involves imputing a certain kind of motive to the trusted person. A new view of both trust and distrust is introduced, according to which both of these attitudes involve attribution of a commitment to the (dis)trusted person. The relevant notion of commitment is explicated, though it is not explicitly defined, and some initial advantages of the commitment account are explored. The account permits a sensible understanding of what makes trust appropriate or inappropriate, likewise for distrust; sometimes neither attitude is appropriate. The account also helps explain what betrayal is, and conversely what trustworthiness might be. The chapter ends by discussing the scope of this project, and previewing some later discussions.