Negotiating domains of trust

ABSTRACT

When trust is broken, how should we determine who is at fault? Previous discussions of broken trust typically attribute the fault to trusters who place trust foolishly or trustees who act in an untrustworthy manner. These discussions take for granted the ability of the truster and trustee to communicate and understand the boundaries of what is being entrusted, that is, the domain of trust. However, the boundaries of entrusted domains are not always clear to either party which can result in broken trust despite the best efforts of both truster and trustee. In this paper, I argue that determining who to blame when trust is broken is a messy affair in which disagreements over fault regularly arise. I introduce three features of trust domains that take center stage in negotiations regarding who is at fault when trust is broken: scope, rigidity and ordering.

KEYWORDS:

• Trust
• trustworthiness
• disagreement

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Trust is also often understood as a two-place relation wherein A trusts B. It is an open question how two-place trust relates to three-place trust, although recent work has made progress on addressing it (Domenicucci & Holton, 2017; Faulkner, 2017; Kelp & Simion, 2022). In this paper, I bracket this issue and focus on trust as a three-place relation.

2. Importantly, when I speak of what trustees commit to doing in response to trust, I am not using “commitment” in the sense that Katherine Hawley uses in her (2014) account of trust (Hawley, 2014). Instead, I am using it in the broader psychological sense of intending or planning to do something.

3. Many thanks to an anonymous reviewer for making this point.

4. Catherine Elgin describes an analogous phenomenon regarding knowledge. She argues that a belief is “shaky” if a belief’s truth conducers and its relation to them must be almost precisely as they are for the belief to be justified (Elgin, 2008). Any small perturbation undermines such beliefs. Similarly, narrow trust domains require such precise courses of action that the trust is easily undermined if a trustee deviates even slightly.

5. I am not using the term “rigidity” in the Kripkean sense of rigid designators.