Judging Expert Trustworthiness: The Difference Between Believing and Following the Science

ABSTRACT

Expert-informed public policy often depends on a degree of public trust in the relevant expert authorities. But if lay citizens are not themselves authorities on the relevant area of expertise, how can they make good judgements about the trustworthiness of those who claim such authority? I argue that the answer to this question depends on the kind of trust under consideration. Specifically, I maintain that a distinction between epistemic trust and recommendation trust has consequences for novices judging the trustworthiness of experts. I argue for this by identifying the unique difficulties that emerge when a novice is asked not just to believe expert testimony, but to follow expert recommendations. I outline criteria for novice judgements of expert trustworthiness that have been proposed by Elizabeth Anderson and show that novel problems emerge for her criteria when we shift focus from epistemic trust to recommendation trust. More is needed when we are asked not just to believe the experts but to act as they recommend, because novices looking for trustworthy expert recommendations need to establish whether the recommended course of action supports what is important to them and accords with their values.

KEYWORDS:

• Trust
• trustworthiness
• expertise

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I follow O’Neill in treating trustworthiness as whatever it is that makes trust well-placed where it is. It is important not to confuse this with another natural way of speaking about trustworthiness, that is, the virtue held by trustworthy people. When discussing judgements of expert trustworthiness I am not referring to judgements of whether experts are trustworthy people; I am instead discussing judgements of whether trust in the expert would be well-placed.

2. I owe the outsourcing metaphor to Nguyen (2020).

3. See e.g. Douglas (2009), chapter 6, Goldman (2001), John (2018), Rolin (2020), Schroeder (2021).

4. I use the term ‘recommendation’ as a shorthand for a category of speech-acts including recommendation, guidance, advice, direction, and instruction. I will bracket differences within this category, as well as the important difference between expert recommendation and legal mandates enforced by the state. A separate analysis would be needed to understand the role of trustworthiness in the latter.

5. I discuss the difference between the rationality of epistemic and recommendation trust in greater detail in Bennett (2020).

6. Why not say that reasonable recommendation trust in experts requires only that the novice believes that the expert’s recommendations align with the novice’s values? Because were this the case, we could trust an expert without outsourcing deliberation at all. For I could believe an expert’s recommendations align with my values, not because of anything about the expert, but because I already know what course of action aligns with my values, and it so happens that the expert has recommended the same course of action. This is not trust, but recognition of a coincidence.

7. e.g. COVID Collaborative (2020).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust under a Research Leadership Award for the Competition and Competitiveness Project at the University of Essex.

Notes on contributors

Matthew Bennett

Matthew Bennett is a moral and political philosopher working on trust in people, experts, politics, and institutions. He currently works at the University of Essex as a Senior Research Officer on the Leverhulme funded project ‘Competition and Competitiveness’, which investigates conceptual, historical, and normative questions about competition and competitive social relations.