Trust

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TRUST

Trust of science and technology and of the people who conduct research and invent, design, develop, manufacture, operate, maintain, and repair technology is essential to the development of science and technology. When the trust proves unwarranted, however, the result can be disaster in forms varying from harm to health and safety, to persistent distortions of knowledge, to theft of credit or property that cripples cooperation necessary to support the growth of knowledge and development of technology. A deeper question is what it means for science and technology, and the people responsible for them, to be trustworthy.

The Concepts of Trust and Trustworthiness

Although Sissela Bok (1978) discussed trust as a moral resource beginning in the 1970s, the question of the morality of trust relationships—the conditions under which, from a moral point view, one ought to trust—was not explicitly discussed until a decade later by Annette Baier (1986). Two earlier essays were important in laying the foundation for this major turn in the discussion. Ian Hacking (1984) provided a devastating assessment of game theoretic approaches to solving problems of trust, such as the Prisoner's Dilemma. Baier (1985) herself previously had argued for broadening the focus in ethics from obligations and moral rules to the subject of whom one ought, as a moral matter, to trust and when. As Kathryn Addelson (1994) points out, Baier's change of focus establishes a general perspective on ethical legitimacy that is shared by all, rather than privileging the perspective of those who make, instill, and enforce moral rules.

As Baier (1986) argues, trust involves both confidence and reliance. If people lack other options, they may continue to rely on something, such as the water supply, even when they no longer trust it. Similarly, people may have confidence in something, or confidence in their expectations concerning it, without relying on it. To rely only where one can trust is a fortunate circumstance.

Baier's general account of the morality of trust illuminates the strong relation between the trustworthy and the true. A trust relationship, according to Baier, is decent insofar as it stands the test of disclosure of the premises of each party's trust. For example, if one party trusts the other to perform reliably only because the truster believes the trusted is too timid or unimaginative to do otherwise, disclosure of these premises will give the trusted party an incentive to prove the truster wrong. Similarly if the trusted party fulfills the truster's expectations not through trustworthiness but only through fear of detection and punishment, disclosure of these premises will lead the truster to expect that the trusted would defect, if able to do so undetected.

Although explicit discussion of moral trustworthiness is relatively recent, both professional ethics and the philosophy of technology have given considerable attention to the concept of (prospective) responsibility. Because being trustworthy is key to acting responsibly in a professional capacity, or to being responsible in the virtue, as contrasted with causal, sense, the literature on responsibility provides at least an implicit discussion of many aspects of trustworthiness.

Niklas Luhmann (1979) has shown how trust simplifies human life by endowing some expectations with assurance. It is prohibitively difficult and time-consuming to consider all possible disappointments, defections, and betrayals by those persons or circumstances on which one relies; all possible consequences of those disappointments; and all actions that might prevent those disappointments or change their effect. Trust reduces that burden. In a later work, Luhmann urged a different distinction between confidence and trust: that trust be used only when the truster has considered the alternatives to trusting. Luhmann's discussion of the distinction between trust and confidence highlights the element of risk in trusting. Risk or vulnerability does characterize situations in which trust is necessary, in contrast to those in which one's control of the situation makes trust unnecessary. However the notion of reliance in Baier's definition of trust as confident reliance does capture the sense of vulnerability. One's vulnerability in reliance does not require consideration of the alternatives to such reliance.

The risk taken in trusting does leave the truster liable to disappointment (or worse), whether that trust is of persons, objects, or circumstances (such as, that the temperature will go below freezing overnight). However only if one's trust is in agents capable of recognizing intention, can one be let down. Furthermore, although one may disappoint without intending to, one must at least be aware of behaving in the way that turns out to disappoint in order to be said to have let someone down. So if Alice does not know she is waking Bob each morning by closing the garage door, she cannot be said to have let him down by not waking him today. Because science and technology do not arise except through human intervention, the focus of this entry is on trust in people, individually or acting as a group.

Trustworthy Professionals

For the professionals behind science and technology to behave in a responsible or trustworthy manner requires both technical competence and moral concern—specifically a concern to achieve a good outcome in the matter covered, which is sometimes called their fiduciary responsibility, the responsibility of a person in a position of trust. The moral and technical components of professional responsibility led sociologist Bernard Barber (1983) to speak of these as two senses of trust. However if the public is to trust the members of the science and engineering professions, it is not in two senses. Rather the public trusts the professional to achieve some outcome for which both competence and concern are required. For researchers, the outcome typically centers on the accurate report of the methods and results of research, a report that fairly acknowledges any contributions of others. For engineers, it typically centers on the provision of a technology that performs its function and does not pose unnecessary threats to safety.

For engineers the competence and concern are engineering competence and concern for such social goods as public safety, confidentiality of information, fairness in competition, the public understanding of science and technology, protection of the environment, and the quality and performance of the technology in question. Engineering codes of ethics enjoin engineers not to take on work beyond their competence, so at least for engineers technically incompetent performance is also recognized to be a moral failing. In contrast, researcher investigators generally do not regard undertaking research beyond one's competence as a moral failing, although certain incompetencies, such as those that result in harm to experimental subjects or to public health, might be.

Because the exercise of professional responsibility characteristically draws on a body of specialized knowledge that is brought to bear on the promotion or preservation of another's welfare, to trust a person to fulfill a professional responsibility is to trust that professional to perform in a way that someone outside of the profession cannot entirely specify, predict, or often even recognize. The point is not captured in the frequent suggestion that trust is necessary because the trusting party cannot control or monitor the trusted party's performance. It would do the layperson little good to have full knowledge of the plans for a medical device or an experiment, or even the ability to guide the actions of the science and engineering professionals. Although laypeople might be able to recognize some acts of gross negligence, they would not know the implications of most of what they saw or how to improve the professional's performance. For this reason, from the point of view of the public, there are no good alternatives to having trustworthy professionals. In her 2001 Gifford Lectures, Onora O'Neill (2002) makes the same point that nothing can guarantee trustworthiness and emphasizes the burden that what she calls the culture of suspicion places on officials and professionals, such as medical researchers.

The question of whether scientists and engineers are responsible for the ultimate uses of the knowledge and technology they create is sometimes called the end use question. Caroline Whitbeck (1998) has argued that for scientists and engineers to be entrusted to prevent evil end uses of their products and discoveries those uses must be intended as well as foreseeable, because, for example, it would be impossible to forego the creation of all the many useful tools from hammers to pokers, to kitchen knives to hatchets that one can foresee can also be used as weapons.

It is arguably unreasonable to say that scientists and engineers are untrustworthy (more specifically, negligent), if they fail to consider unforeseeable uses and consequences. Indeed National Academy of Engineering President William Wulf (2004) draws attention to technological systems, such as computer systems, that are so complex that failures in them are inherently unpredictable, so it would not be possible for engineers to predict them. Criteria for trustworthy behavior or policies regarding such systems have yet to be settled.

The application of standards of professional responsibility in science and engineering is complicated by the fact that not all scientific and engineering professions have the same developed understanding of themselves as professions. Although U.S. engineering societies formulated ethical codes and guidelines from the early decades of the 1900s, attention to the professional responsibilities of research investigators has only received broad attention since the mid-1980s. However trust and trustworthiness became a central theme in those discussions in the 1990s (Whitbeck 2004). An international perspective provides even greater variation although the so-called Washington Accord, an agreement that recognizes equivalency of accredited engineering education programs in participating countries, is leading to more uniformity.

Trustworthy Policies

Some questions about the ethical implications of science and technology are policy questions, sometimes called macro issues. Although people can and do praise and blame particular individuals for formulating, adopting, implementing, or carrying out policies regarding science and technology, in a democracy these are societal decisions. Policy decisions run the gamut from decisions about what research and development should be given public support or even legally permitted, to what can be used as research material (for example, embryonic stem cells), to how and when to prevent or clean up toxic and nuclear contamination, to whether and how to control the social consequences of new technologies, such as privacy invasions on the Internet.

Typically such policy questions must be decided under conditions of significant uncertainty. Often the nature of the possible outcomes as well as the likelihood of various outcomes are unknown. Such uncertainties lead to misgivings about the pace of innovation and discovery. Technology is said to create new options, but technological advance also forecloses options. For example, after the introduction of the automobile, one could no longer choose to keep a horse and buggy in the city. Furthermore its consequences may contradict expectations. For example, historian Ruth Cowan (1983) found that household appliances did not reduce housework but raised the standards for that work. The relationship between science and technology and the societies in which they develop is extremely complex. Therefore the extent to which the frequent criticism of modern life in technologically developed societies is most properly directed at science and technology (or at least the pace of their development); at social factors, such as market forces affecting their development; or at human tendencies to use and abuse power in general is likely to continue to be disputed.

CAROLINE WHITBECK

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Addelson, Kathryn. (1994). Moral Passages: Notes toward a Collectivist Ethics. New York: Routledge. Addelson presents a collectivist account of responsibility and ethics.

Baier, Annette. (1986). "Trust and Antitrust." Ethics 96: 232–260. Reprinted in Baier's Moral Prejudices. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Baier discusses the subject of trust and the curious neglect of this subject in most of moral philosophy. She gives an account of what it is to trust and a partial account of when it is immoral to expect or fulfill trust.

Barber, Bernard. (1983). The Logic and Limits of Trust. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. This work examines trust in various contexts including professional practice and business. As a sociologist, Barber delineates professions from non-professions in terms of their social status, rather than in terms of their claim to provide ethical guidelines for their practice.

Bok, Sissela. (1978). Lying. New York: Vintage Books. Bok addresses the subject of trust, one of the few philosophers to do so before Baier and provides a model of what was to become known as practical (as contrasted with "applied") ethics.

Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. (1983). More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. New York: Basic Books. Cowan's history of household technology demonstrates supposed labor-saving household technology raised the standards for housework, rather than reducing the time spent performing it.

Hacking, Ian. (1984). "Winner Take Less: A Review of The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod." New York Review of Books, June 28, pp. 17–21. Hacking praises The Evolution of Cooperation and criticizes twentieth-century modes of philosophizing that seeks to force-fit human life to logical models that fail to do justice to notions such as cooperation.

Ladd, John. (1979). "Legalism and Medical Ethics." In Contemporary Issues in Biomedical Ethics, ed. John W. Davis, Barry Hoffmaster, and Sarah Shorten. Clifton, NJ: Humana Press. Ladd here develops his philosophical position on the primacy of the notion of responsibility in practical ethics and the secondary status of rights and obligations/duties.

Luhmann, Niklas. (1979). Trust and Power. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Luhman's principle work on trust examines the relationship between trust and confidence and discusses the function of trust in human life.

O'Neill, Onora. (2002). A Question of Trust: 2002 BBC Reith Lectures. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. O'Neill examines what she regards as the current climate of suspicion and argues for a better appreciation of the evidence of trustworthiness.

Whitbeck, Caroline. (1998). Ethics in Engineering Practice and Research. NewYork: Cambridge University Press. Examines the notions of responsibility, trust, and trustworthiness in engineering and science.

Whitbeck, Caroline. (2004). "Trust and the Future of Research." Physics Today 57(11): 48–53.

Wulf, William A. (2004). "Keynote Address." In Emerging Technologies and Ethical Issues in Engineering: Papers from a Workshop, October 14–15, 2003. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Wulf, President of the National Academy of Engineering, reviews the accomplishments of engineers in the twentieth century and their challenges in twenty-first century, including the moral and ethical responsibilities associated with the impact of engineering on society.