SE 01 E06: Bonus episode: Trust and Anti-Trust with Corinne Lajoie
S01E06: Trust and Anti-trust with Corinne Lajoie
Kristin: OK. OK everybody. Annette Baier: take one… One and only one.
Anna: [laughs] One and only one!
Kristin: Are you starting?
[theme music plays in the background]
Kristin: Go!
Corinne 0:23
Welcome to thinking bodies, a feminist philosophy podcast.
Kristin and Anna: Hello! Hello.
Kristin: Hello Corinne!
Corinee: Hello!
Contributors:
My name is Carolyn McLeod.
My name is Amy Mullin.
My name is Hale Demir-Doğuoğlu.
This is Laura Specker Sullivan.
Kristin: Western philosophers have separated the mind and body here on thinking bodies we are pulling on the threads that have always held them together. To do this we crowdsource voice clips to discuss works in feminist philosophy that deserve more attention. Our podcast collages with these clips as a feminist DIY experiment
Anna: Maybe even a DIT-experiment, like doing it together.
Kristin: Right! Doing it together, sharing the sounds of feminist philosophy.
Anna: I’m Anna Mudde, I’m on the Lands of the nêhiyawak, the Anihšināpēk, Dakota, Lakota, and Nakoda peoples, of the Michif/Métis nation, which is also called “Pile o’ Bones.”
[music fades]
Kristin: And I’m Kristin Rodier recording today sitting right next to Anna.
Anna: Hi Kristin!
[Anna, Kristin, and Corinne laugh]
Corinne 1:32:
I am Corinne Lajoie. I'm joining today from Tiohtià:ke (djo-dja-ke)/Montréal, on the unceded lands of the Mohawk Nation, which are also a gathering place for many First Nations.
[transition music fades in]
Kristin 1:51
Who do you trust? And what do you trust them for? When is trust appropriate? If trust is broken, what does it take to repair?
Anna 2:11
And what about you? Are you trustworthy? Are you trustworthy for others, for yourself? Is self-trust different than trusting others?
Corinne 2:22
What differences are there between interpersonal relations of trust that are small and intimate, and the relations of trust and distrust that we have with institutions? Is trust better than distrust? What forms of trust promote justice, equality, flourishing, and other goods?
Kristin: You will have noticed that we have a guest.
Anna: We do have a guest.
Kristin: A lovely guest, a guest producer, who has answered our call.
Anna 2:52
We're so happy to try this out. And to try it out with Corinne Lajoie is such a treat.
[music fades out]
Corinne: I'm a postdoctoral researcher in philosophy at Western University. And the article that I picked for this episode is from 1986. It's an article by Annette Baier that is called Trust and Antitrust. I first read this paper about two years ago, and I don't know how many times I've read it since, but I know that I've read it a lot and I keep going back to it. I think it's a really beautiful piece, especially like how Baier gets us to think about trust philosophically and to carefully reflect on the workings of trust in our everyday lives.
Kristin 3:50
So cool. So, ever since we've been reading thinking about this paper, I've been thinking so much about how much I trust people [Anna and Kristin laughing]... sometimes for good sometimes not so good!
Anna 4:10
And I've been thinking about whether I do… I think of myself as as very trusting, but I'm actually not sure that I am. I've been thinking I might just take people to be reliable and I might not actually trust them.
Kristin 4:22
So interesting, so thinking about trust changed how trusting you think you are?
Anna 4:27
Yeah! Yeah. Exactly right. That’s… yeah, exactly!
Corinne 4:32
It's also possibly the kind of thing that you don't want to always be thinking of, so I think that once you read this paper, and maybe after listening to this podcast, people are going to start thinking a lot about whether they're trusting and who they trust. But I think trust, as we'll discuss, is this interesting thing that sometimes works best when you don't reflect on it too much.
Anna 4:53
And so interesting for philosophers to think about: don't think about it too much.
Corinne 4:59
Which is what we do.
Kristin 5:00
Part of what helps it is not thinking about it. Uh-oh.
Corinne 5:08
Might be a problem for the episode today.
Anna 5:10
Yes.
[background of indistinct voices in a large space]
Kristin 5:11
People will say, “well, you know me, I have trust issues.” Right? And it's kind of like, “well, I think we should all have some trust issues.” At the same time, we tell people to trust their gut.
Anna 5:30
Yes. Oh, yes. “Trust your gut.”. There's a thinking body! Yes.
Kristin 5:35
So how do I trust my gut?
Corinne 5:18
I think also trusting your gut is something that you need to learn to do at some point. I think I'm not very good at trusting my gut, and I want to get better at it. But I'm not sure there's a manual for learning how to trust your gut, or learning how to trust better, or to be better at trusting yourself, especially.
Anna 5:36
It’s so true. And I was thinking about just that question, because it does seem like one of the things that trust gets us thinking about, as we'll talk about, are relationships with other people. But it might be that part of learning to trust yourself comes from having other people trust your gut.
Corinne: Yes. Yes.
Anna: Maybe that's part of what helps us to learn how to do that. That's so fascinating.
Kristin: Like, I don't just bootstrap trusting my own gut.
Anna: Right!
Kristin: You help me trust my gut.
Anna: Right. By trusting your gut! Yeah!
Kristin: Yeah.
Anna: Maybe there's something about that. Yeah!
Corinne 6:14
And maybe also in that case, the opposite would be also true. So
Anna: Yes.
Corinne: People who are not used to being trusted or who are often distrusted might have a harder time trusting their own gut. So there's kind of a, it's kind of a two way street.
Anna 6:29
Yes. And people who are very used to trusting their gut might need to trust it a little bit less than they often do.
Kristin: Let's introduce some self doubt into the, into the system.
[sound of book pages flipping]
Kristin: Corinne, you were thinking about those “keep calm and trust me” coffee mugs.
Corinne 6:48
Oh yes. I went down a rabbit hole yesterday because I was trying to find the source of this expression. All I could think of were those coffee mugs and shirts that say something like “keep calm and trust me. I'm a doctor.” I found out that there are also mugs that say, “trust me. I'm a, I'm a lawyer.” “I'm an engineer.” I think about what, what those, what that, what the joke is around those, you know, silly little mugs.
I think that some people that, you know, people that occupy certain social roles here, you know, doctors, lawyers, engineers might be more used to being trusted on the basis of the role that they occupy, but then also on the basis of things like their gender, their race, their social class.
Anna: Oh, yeah.
So, on the other hand, you have, you know, people who are very used to being distrusted on the basis of those same things. And, you know, you might have heard two stories I'm thinking of are stories of these two black female doctors that were on planes, trying to offer assistance to a sick passenger. And they were met with skepticism or told to go back to their seat, you know, by flight attendants who simply did not trust them and did not trust that they could possibly be doctors. So there's a really clear asymmetry here between people who are easily trusted and expect to be trusted and people who may be fully trustworthy, but not be trusted by others.
Anna: Yeah.
Kristin 8:20
I wanted to read this one quote, “to entrust is intentionally and usually formally to hand over the care of something to someone. But trusting is rarely begun by making up one's mind to trust. and often it has no definite initiation of any sort, but grows up slowly and imperceptibly. What I have tried to take from the notion of entrusting is not its voluntarist and formalist character, but rather the possible specificity and restrictedness of what is entrusted, along with the discretion of the trustee has in looking after that thing.” (pg. 240)
Anna: Yeah.
Kristin: So interesting to think about it as something that grows imperceptibly and over time. And it's not just about a decision.
Anna: Yeah, right. It's “non-voluntarist,” as philosophers like to say. We don't volunteer it. It just happens. We don't decide or choose. It just grows.
Kristin: Or maybe we can have some ability to sort of cultivate and nurture, but that it's not a sort of a deciding thing. It doesn't get its foundation from a decision.
[sound of people speaking indistinctly in a large indoor space]
Corinne 9:48
You know, some forms of trust are really carefully cultivated over the course of several years. So, for instance, relation, you know, some relations of trust that we have, perhaps with friends or intimate partners. But then in the essay, she also talks about trust in strangers. So, like, trusting, you know, trusting strangers enough to fall asleep on a plane or, like, trusting strangers enough to drive the bus that takes us to work. So, those forms of trust are also really important to our lives. But they're kind of instantaneous in a way that other relations of trust that we cultivate over time are not.
Kristin: one way that I read Baier's question about trust is to think about... When you should trust. So, when is trust a good? When is trust serving a good? Because of, like, I don't want to be all trusting. I want to
Anna: No. That gets you into trouble!
Kristin: I want to trust when it's appropriate. And I think, you know, we make mistakes and have our trust, you know, let down.
Corinne 11:02
I just love this idea that trust is not always good. Because I think that we live in a time when we're told that we need to, for instance, place more trust in institutions or place more trust in political actors. And this just seems to me like it's, you know, it depends on the idea that trust is always better than distrust or that trust is something we should always lean into.
But, you know, Baier's point is that a lot of really bad things can be sustained by trust. Right? Exploitation can thrive in trusting climates. There are a lot of really terrible things that can happen when we trust people and trust is not always warranted. There's an essay by Baier (1991) in which she talks about how in order for trust to be warranted or reasonable, there needs to be some good “bread being kneaded.” And I know that you love food metaphors on the podcast.
Kristin: We do.
Corinne: And she's saying essentially, you know, we need to consider the enterprise which trust serves. So, if people are making really good bread, then perhaps we should lean in and trust them. But trust can also support, you know, the making of really rotten and stale bread. And then in those instances, we don't want to be too trusting.
[music fades in]
Anna: Yeah. Dangerous bread. Yeah, absolutely.
Corinne: Bad bread.
Anna: I love that… What kind of bread is being kneaded? That's gorgeous. Yeah.
Corinne 12:37
So she says that in the case where trust is serving something like exploitation, then trust busting is a morally proper goal. So, I take this to mean that it's not only the case that we shouldn't always be trusting or that we shouldn't be trusting at all, but that we sometimes try to kind of unravel trust or kind of expose trust for what it, you know, for the kinds of enterprises that it serves. And so perhaps sometimes we should also be encouraging others to be less trusting, if their trust is enabling things like exploitation, oppression of other people. I think that's one of the ideas that she's getting at here.
Kristin: I love that idea: “trust busting.”
Anna: Trust busting! Ya!
Kristin: Feminist trust busters! It's like we could get badges. So, so, okay, this leads us kind of into a discussion of how trust or a sort of philosophy of trust can be specifically an issue, a feminist issue.
Anna: Yeah, and that… this is sort of what Baier’s talking about in terms of how moral philosophers, as she rightly points out, ignored trust for such a very long time. So, she talks about there being some discussion of trust among moral philosophers, but that it's, she says, “regrettably sparse.” (pg. 241, citing Luhmann)
Kristin 1404
I'll take a stab at how this is a feminist issue. I think if you're in a position of social power, you're afforded a certain amount of trust. And therefore, you know, where trust develops and how it breaks down just isn't a super salient feature of your life, you know. But if, on the flip side, systems, social institutions, they're not built up around your interests, then, you know, the work that you have to do to become a trusted member of society, maybe of the powerful group, maybe that's what you're aiming for, not everybody. What you have to do to become trustworthy is going to be different. And it's going to be harder, maybe even impossible.
Those who are more powerful, you know, who find power within a sort of white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy, if you want to use bell hooks' term, you know, they don't have to notice that it's harder for others to gain trust, you know. Like, it's remarkable to me how those who are in powerful positions, when they break a promise, when they break trust, it's so easy for them to just recover trust.
Anna 15:17
Yep. Yeah, it's… this sort of really fits nicely, I think, into thinking, Marxist feminist thinking, about, sort of, who knows how certain social phenomena work. And here, right, we might say that moral philosophers haven't paid a lot of attention to trust and trusting relationships. And when they have, they haven't theorized that very competently or comprehensively, in part because they don't have to know how those things work. And we can also say here, I think, too, that feminist philosophers have often failed to notice important things that make us untrustworthy.
[page flip]
Corinne 16:00
Going back to the example of the mugs, right, the” keep calm and trust me, I'm a doctor” versus the experience of the black doctor on the flight. I think that the black female doctor on the flight that isn't trusted, even though she is competent and trustworthy in the situation where a passenger is sick, this doctor is going to notice things about how trust works that the person who just walks into a room and says, you know, just trust me, is not going to notice.
Anna: Oh my gosh, Yes.
Corinne 16:33
I often think of how early care ethicists were doing something pretty similar with care and dependency and need. Right? They were kind of encouraging all of us, but male philosophers especially, to pay attention to these features or dimensions of human life that are really central to our lives and to how our societies operate, but that philosophers hadn't really been thinking about and writing about.
Anna: Yesss. Yes, yes.
Corinne:
And I think that there's a parallel to be made here with trust, right? Trust is something that is happening all the time, that is around us, that sustains us, right? That makes social lives or cooperation possible. And I think we need to think about who kind of wins and who loses when we ignore those dimensions of human life that are very present and yet ignored in the work that we do.
Anna: uh-huh. Yep. Yeah.
Kristin: Baier talks about how, you know, male philosophers, the very work that they're doing, the concepts they're coming up with, the philosophy that they're able to do depends on this sort of background of domestic trust, right? And so what if we're philosophizing from that background of domestic trust that makes all this other work possible? So she writes, “we inhabit a climate of trust as we inhabit an atmosphere and notice it as we notice air, only when it becomes scarce or polluted.” (pg. 234)
Anna: [laughing] We're recording in the middle of some wildfire season here in Canada, listeners. So we're sensitive…
Corinne: Noticing the air.
Anna: We're very much noticing the air. Yes, we are. Yes.
Corinne 18:22
Yeah, I think this idea of, you know, how we only notice certain things when they break down, when they don't fit, when they don't flow, when they don't happen seamlessly is a feminist point that she's making. So, I think that, again, people who are on the margins of society are going to notice some things about trust because they're not necessarily going to thrive in the same climates of trust as more privileged and powerful actors.
Anna and Kristin: Mmmm. Yep.
Corinne: So, this idea that, you know, we notice trust when it breaks down, perhaps when it doesn't work out for us, when it's not extended toward us, right? And one question that I often think of, because she brings up this idea of climate and she talks about this one climate of trust, I think one question we can ask is whether there are perhaps all of these micro-climates of trust in society. There might be all of these different climates that some people do very well in and that other people find to be polluted.
Anna: That’s awesome
Kristin: It sort of explains a kind of epistemic gap in a way when people try to explain the climate they're in.
Corinne 19:48
Yes, this is Baier's often cited definition of trust: She says that trust is “accepted vulnerability to another's possible, but not expected ill will (or lack of goodwill) toward one.” (pg. 235) So I think there are a lot of interesting concepts in this definition. Um, the first is the concept of vulnerability, which obviously feminist philosophers have written a lot about. And I find it interesting that trust would involve accepting one's vulnerability toward another person that you depend on for something, right?
Kristin: Well, Yeah.
Corinne: I think that accepting your vulnerability is not something that a lot of people want to do, which is maybe why we sometimes find trust to be really scary.
Kristin: Absolutely. You know, if I'm putting something, you know, I'm handing something over in a way, a good, whether that's a material good or, you know, some, some aspect of my own flourishing, I'm sort of outsourcing in a way that makes me vulnerable. And, you know, it could go badly, it could go badly for me to extend myself in that way. And it's, it's kind of scary.
Anna 21:03
Well, and it seems as though there, there might be practices, that some people among us have instituted to try to circumvent that, that vulnerability or circumvent that risk. Yeah.
Kristin: Totally.
Corinne 21:17
I think trust is, is partly about surrendering control. And there are all of these strategies that we can adopt to kind of reclaim control, including trying to control how other people are going to act toward us, right? But if we, if we really take seriously this idea that trust involves accepting some level of vulnerability, then it means that other people can seriously harm us. It also means that they can, you know, as you said, Kristin, they can support our flourishing, they can extend our agency, right? Trust allows us to do all of these really beautiful things, build meaningful relationships with people. But there's always going to be this kind of, you know, unavoidable or, or irreducible vulnerability at the heart of trust.
[music fades in]
Anna: Yeah.
Corinne 23:45
This would be a great time to hear our first clip for the episode.
Anna: Amazing!
[music fades out]
Carolyn 21:19
Hi everyone, my name is Carolyn McLeod and I'm really pleased to chat about Annette Baier's “Trust and Anti-trust.” I think I've read this paper more often than any other piece of philosophy and I get something new out of it each time. It's so rich. It's also full of lines that I love, like the one about the woman who's deliberately rearing her daughters to be patriarch-toppling Amazons, doing so behind the back of her patriarchal husband, or the one about the terrorist plumber whom I might unwittingly invite into the bowels of my basement. Baier was rare among philosophers in being wise and entertaining and I've appreciated her work very much during my career.
In reading this paper for the umpteenth time for this podcast, I homed in on what she writes about betrayal, because that's what I'm writing about these days. The topic doesn't come up very much in the paper, even though betrayal is pretty central to how Baier thinks about trust. She uses it to distinguish trust from mere reliance, which is something that we can have on things like coffee makers or people who act out of pure habit or fear and there are examples of those people in the paper. She writes, that trusting can be betrayed or at least let down and not just disappointed. Mere reliance is different because it can only be disappointed.
Baier doesn't give us an account of betrayal, but she says things that are relevant to how we should think about it, especially feminists like me. She emphasizes how unequal many trust relationships are, and that's particularly true for people who have little social power. So for example, women with patriarchal husbands in deeply patriarchal societies need to trust their husbands to act toward them with goodwill and they have little power to retaliate if instead their husbands treat them badly. In other words, they have little recourse when they're betrayed.
In writing about betrayal and the morality of it, we need to discuss what this experience is like for people who lack power to “instigate sanctions against rule breakers” (pg. 249), as Baier puts it. So, these people are harmed not only by the fact of being betrayed, but the inability to do enough about it. They're forced to stew in their anger, give a much weaker response than the betrayal warrants, or convince themselves that it wasn't as bad as it actually was. I'm sure many listeners have been in this sort of position. Philosophers should have something to say about it when they write about betrayal, which more and more of them are doing. Yet so far, they've been silent about betrayal and inequality. I hope to remedy that in the work I do on betrayal. And I will certainly take my inspiration from Baier.
[music fades in]
Corinne: I love this clip!
Kristin: So good.
Anna: Ough!
Corinne 25:22
I had forgotten that image until hearing Carolyn talk about it. And I was thinking, "Oh, there's a body reference!" tucked away in the paper.
[music fades out]
Anna: Bowels of your basement!
Corinne: Letting people into the bowels of your basement is like yeah really them come close yes. So, one thing that Carolyn touches on which is important to the essay by bear is this distinction between trust and reliance. The distinguishing factor is the kind of deep disappointment or the betrayal that can happen when we trust people. So if, for example, my partner cheats on me or violates an agreement that we had, I'm not just going to feel kind of mildly annoyed or disappointed or surprised. I'm going to feel deeply betrayed. That's because I didn't just rely on them not to cheat on me or to keep their word, I trusted them to do so.
And so one thing that Carolyn mentions is how, for instance, we often rely on objects, right? Perhaps you rely on your phone to send you an alert before an important meeting, you rely on your car to start in the morning when you're on your way to work, right? But for Baier, trust is something much richer. It comes with this kind of lot of normative expectations that we can only really have toward people, because only people can betray us in the sense that she gives to this word.
Kristin 27:13
I think it's so interesting to think about betrayal from a feminist lens. Right? So what's betrayal? You know, because we come up with these hypotheticals all the time, you know, Joe and Sally.
Anna: Yeah.
Kristin:
There's no power between them. They're made up individuals. Joe tells Sally he's going to be here at three and then he's not. And, you know, those kinds of things. But most betrayal happens in a context of power relations.
Anna 27:40
Right. That's right. Yeah. And so not only do you have the difference between reliance and trust. So, you know, when someone breaks your trust, you're not like, you know, your language doesn't get salty the way that mine does when an object has let me down. But if you couple that with discrepancies of power and the inability for recourse or recourse without.
Corinne: Yeah.
Anna: Really significant relationship-damaging outcomes then. That's a very different situation than Joe and Susie.
Kristin: Yeah. Yeah. Sally.
Anna: Sally!
Kristin: But I liked what Carolyn said about, you know, really thinking about that that the way one of the ways that we can see power through betrayal is thinking about what people are able to do about it.
Anna 28:26 Right. Right. And there are often really big repercussions to telling someone that they have broken your trust. And suggesting that you're not able to trust them in the way that you did before. And I think that also speaks to the sort of the ways we have access to recourse.
Corinne and Kristin: uh-hmmm.
Corinne 28:55
I'm thinking, for instance, of the case of a student, for example, who kind of experiences sexual harassment in her department. Right? This male professor is being completely inappropriate and has betrayed her trust because she trusted, for instance, that this person would be, you know, a mentor, an educator, and a person who's looking out for her well-being. And in so many cases, even after you realize that someone has betrayed your trust, right?, you might still need to communicate with this person, to work with this person because it would be too costly to cut them out or to tell them that they've betrayed you.
And Carolyn talks about how it can be especially harmful to experience betrayal when you have no recourse, when there are no sanctions available for people who have betrayed your trust. And I know that Carolyn works on this idea of institutional betrayal as well, right? So in the case of the student, it's not only the case that the student has been betrayed by this male mentor. She could also be betrayed or sorely let down by the institution if she tries to, for instance, speak out about what she experiences and she's turned away or she's told, you know, that she's trying to damage someone's reputation. Like, I think there's this ripple effect of betrayal.
Anna: Riiight.
[voices of indistinct speaking in a large indoor space]
Corinne 30:23
Generally the work within philosophy that has addressed relations of trust has you know kind of described trust through the lens of social contract theory. So! Would either of you want to do a little social contract minutes or less?
Kristin: oh man…not me!
Anna: OK!
Kristin: Anna, you’re up for this
Anna 30:44
Okay, actually I would love to do this. Yeah, I'm up for this! I'm very up for this. Yeah so, social contract theory is a story. And the story that we can tell about human beings, according to social contract theory, is that human nature, at its base, is defined by self-interest.
So in what philosophers call a “state of nature,” where we are living according to human nature alone, we don't really have any relationships except the ones where we hate and fear one another.
Kristin: uh-boy.
Anna; Because we're trying to get what other people have, or what is available. And they're also trying to get what we have and what is available. As a result, we're also all trying to protect ourselves from one another.
Kristin 31:37
Wow, this is so interesting, because it's sort of just exactly a scarcity mindset.
Anna
Yes, it's a scarcity mindset.
Kristin
You have something that I want…It kind of makes me think about two siblings. Nobody's Nobody's watching, watching. It's like, I cut, you choose, except for, you know, I'm going to cut 75 and you're going to get 25 or a punch or kind of just fear and scarcity. And I'm just so confused about that kind of hypothetical state of nature.
[page flip sound]
Anna 32:16
So the story continues, that while there are inherently social animals, so philosophers recognize that there are some animals that are inherently social, like bees! and wolves! But human beings are not inherently social on this model. There can be no trust in a state of nature unless you want to count my trusting you, that you are just like me, and you will do the same thing to me as I would do to you, which is to try to take my stuff or kill me if you get the chance.
Corinne
That's a very bleak portrait of human relationships, right? But it makes sense that within this story, you know, naturally we would not trust others.
Anna: Yeah.
Kristin
Well, we're worse than wolves.
Anna
We're worse than wolves. Yes. And as Hobbes very famously, Thomas Hobbes very famously describes this, “the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” It is bleak.
How or why do we get out of this state of nature? Like how or why do we live together? Yeah.
Kristin: Yeah.
Anna
So the story tells us that we live together not because of our nature, but sort of in tension with our nature. We live together because we are also rational enough to recognize that not living together makes our lives worse.
Kristin 33:28
So I only want to live together because I'm worse off otherwise. It's just completely about me.
Anna
Yeah, exactly. So I know that you're self-interested, too. We're actually equals in this way. And if that's the case, then I have to worry about you trying to take my stuff. That is what I have to worry about in you because I know that that is what I'm thinking about doing to you!
Kristin: But Anna, just trust me.
Anna: That’s right!!
Kristin: “Leave it on the counter! No problem!”
Anna 37:35:
So… how do we get out of this? I can agree to give up my right to take your stuff and try to kill you. So long as I know that you are also giving up your right to take my stuff and try to kill me. So: there's an exchange So we contract ourselves to one another on this sort of basis of mutual fear and hatred.
Kristin
And it doesn't actually in a way operate on trust, right?
Anna
No, there's no real trust at all.
Kristin
There's an exchange out of fear. And the trust is kind of, we offer it up to a government to enforce it, right?
Anna
That's right.
Kristin:
So I trust you because I've deferred, I've given up some of my right. Because if Anna is going to take my stuff, she'll have to pay a fine or give it back or go to jail or like there's, there has to be consequence for it to work.
Anna
Right. And on, and on some accounts, the other reason I would do that is because I don't entirely trust myself to keep my promise. So, I contract myself also to the higher power because I want to have some, somebody over me who will enforce the promise on me as well.
Kristin: Right. Help you be a better person.
Anna: That's right. Help me be a better me. In every way, every day.
Kristin
I remember this as an undergrad and it made sense for me to me for like 10 minutes. And then I thought, this is just game theory. Yes. Like it's just chess, right?
Anna
I give up having to be afraid of you, uh, in, in favor of being, uh, afraid of the power that is above both of us. And voila! We have human relationships and also, uh, government relationships!
Kristin: Right.
Anna
Right. It's, it's a very, um, it's a very sort of neat and tidy story in that way.
Kristin
It kind of reminds me of these different TV shows that just revolve around strike-force. So like Damages or, um, Succession or like House of Cards where it's just people threatening each other and trying to get them to do things out of, out of power moves.
Anna: That's a good point because there are often plot points around people maybe trusting just a wee bit too much or trusting at all. And then, right.
Kristin
Yeah. That person always gets punished.
Anna
That person will be punished and sometimes actually killed.
Kristin: Yes.
Anna: Literally killed. Yes.
Corinne
Trust is very naive. Trusting others is the very naive move. And you can kind of see it coming from a mile away.
[sounds of indistinct talking in a large indoor space]
Kristin
Absolutely. Like I, some of the things she says in the article are just so cool. She says she calls the contract theory, uh, you know, “minimal moral traffic rules.”
[All three laugh]
Kristin: Like, none of this is about how to live, you know, life as art or how to flourish or meaningful life. It's just minimal moral traffic rules and talks about relying on each other's strike force, so threat advantage against each other. And she also calls the social contract theorists “exchange fetishists” (pg. 243)
Corinne: I love that.
Kristin: one of this thinks about how those agreements and the climate is shaped by power.
Corinne
This kind of approach to trust, it focuses only on agreements that are entered by two people who are taken to be, you know, roughly equal. And it completely ignores, and here I'm quoting her “dependency relations between those grossly unequal in power” (pg. 241). So the idea is that, sure, people, you know, agree to contracts or enter into contractual relationships with other people. But so many trust relationships develop between individuals who simply are not equally powerful.
Anna 38:00
And one of the examples she gives about this is thinking about marriage, at least patriarchal marriage. That is an agreement. But patriarchal marriage is an agreement that kind of flies in the face of social contract theory in many ways. It's unequal. It's potentially non-voluntary, but there's this really central institution in our lives, and at least our historical lives, that looks like a contract, but in fact doesn't behave that way!
Corinne 38:33
And it makes sense that this contract, you know, the marriage contract would not be noticed by these theorists because it functions to their advantage!
[music fades in]
Laura:
Hi, this is Laura Specker-Sullivan. In her landmark, “Trust and Antitrust” from 1986, Annette Baier writes that philosophers of the modern period, quote, “managed to relegate to the mental background, the web of trust tying most moral agents to one another, and to focus their philosophical attention single-mindedly on cool, distanced relationships between more or less free and equal adult strangers” (pg. 248).
By contrast, Baier is interested in asymmetrical and intimate trust relationships, in part because, quote, a complete moral philosophy would tell us how and why we should act and feel towards others in relationships of shifting and varying power asymmetry and shifting and varying intimacy, end quote. A further development in Baier's account of trust is her understanding that it is founded on implicit expectations. In contrast with contracts and promises in which each party's expectations and obligations are explicit, trust relationships are by their very nature imprecise.
She points out that when she trusts the plumber to clear her drains, she trusts him to do whatever is necessary and safe to do, and she takes his expertise and lack of ill will for granted. If he planted explosives in the drain due to some odd grudge, this would not be a breach of their contract of service, but a betrayal of their trust. While the imprecision of a trust relationship is riskier than a contract, it also has higher potential benefits.
Trust, according to Baier, is rarely enacted between equals and is not equivalent to a promise or a contract. Trusting, she says, is rarely willed and grows slowly and imperceptibly, whereas entrusting is intentional, explicit, and willed. She writes that, quote, "trust relationships need not be so express, and some important forms of them cannot be verbally acknowledged by the persons involved." (pg. 240)
[sound of page flipping]
Trust is more likely if there is a general climate of trust, and it is indefinite. This point about a general climate of trust is important, but it is one that Baier does not fully develop, as she herself recognizes. She writes that, "any person's attitude to another in a given trust relationship is constrained by all other trust and distrust relationships in which she is involved…I have alluded to such society-wide phenomena as climates of trust, affecting the possibilities for individual trust relationships." (pg. 258)
This climate is significant because, as she notes, "if the network of relationships is systematically unjust or systematically coercive, then it may be that one's status within that network will make it unwise of one to entrust anything to those persons whose interests, given their status, are systematically opposed to one's own." (pg. 259)
She also acknowledges her own limitation in considering trust relationships that have already got off the ground, but that are not especially lengthy or especially brief. An extension of her argument would thus need to include, in her words, "brief trusting encounters and the morality of trust between generations who do not encounter each other." (pg. 258)
In my own work, I've attempted to follow in her footsteps by developing our moral understanding of these asymmetrical, intimate, and imprecise relationships.
[music fades in]
Kristin 42:34
Like, does a person need to immediately, presently exist with you to be part of the trusting network through which you gain benefits and flourish and develop?
[music fades out]
Anna
Yeah. And is that often largely implicit, given that the ways we live now are the products of people who've come before? We assume people after us. Yeah, I mean, that's so compelling.
Corinne 43:07
I think this intergenerational trusting makes me think also of how we can inherit kind habits of trusting and habits of distrust, right, from ancestors or from past generations. So we might trust or distrust certain groups or certain institutions, not necessarily because of things we've experienced ourselves or betrayals that we've experienced ourselves, but perhaps, you know, the betrayal of people we identify with or the betrayal of people that we, you exist or stand in solidarity with, but that, you know, have preceded us.
Kristin 43:48
Something I was thinking about that we could almost kind of bring out from her theory now, we've sort of talked about social contract being very limited. And Laura was talking there about um the sort of intimacies and the connections that we have that we can really only have with certain kinds of trust, right? Like what what would a marriage be like in that social contract uh culture of trust right? It is sort of just it is that House of Cards marriage right where
Anna: It’s that House of Cards marriage!
Corinne: It is!
[sound of indistinct voices in a large indoor space]
Kristin: She shifts to this other kind of she called it a “seed” of her theory and the seed is to think about infant trust. Right? Because if part of what we're doing is trying to think of all of the different kinds of trusts, right, when we're putting together a philosophy of trust, we have to think about other kinds of trust that is part of what makes us us, right, and what what part of makes us us is that we arrive as infants.
Anna: That’s right.
Kristin: Thus far! And thinking about that, that infant vulnerability: they require so much active care right it's not just a it's just a it's a letting-be it's an active care right. And the infant arrives trusting so uncritically by nature and that undermines this notion of the separate individual because there is a connection through pregnancy and gestation and you really do have a live moving around thing going on you're two you're doubled in the in a certain way.
Infant trust shows us that it’s an innate capability that we have that we can extend and nurture, give to each other.
Anna 45:53
And that it's asymmetrical and inarticulate or inarticulable… and perhaps even um pre-reasoning.
Corinne 46:02
Mm hmm. Absolutely. There's this whole period of our lives where we just kind of trust our parents every day for so many things, and we don't reflect on it. And it's such a huge responsibility to be a parent for that reason, right? Because you want to be a good kind of steward of the child's trust, right? Or a parent or any kind of caregiver that's very present in the life of a young, you know, completely dependent infant or child.
[music fades in]
Amy 46:40
My name is Amy Mullen. I'm a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto. When trust and antitrust was published nearly 40 years ago, I was in my first year of grad school. It was deeply impressive to me to see a piece feminist in its sympathies and subject matter appear in a premier journal like Ethics. I didn't know then that years later, I'd be fascinated by trust, particularly once I became a parent. When I did, I recognized that what my children trusted me to be and do was shaped not only by what I did, but also by a sexist society that encourages mothers to sacrifice more than fathers. Baier’s work would be important as I thought through the dilemma this presents for feminist parenting.
One of the abiding themes of my work has been relationships between people that involve intimacy and mutuality, but also a significant power differential. I was inspired once again by Annette Baier's work. Trust and antitrust is striking in its focus on relationships of asymmetric mutuality, particularly between parents and children, but also between mothers and fathers in a patriarchal society.
Baier sharply observes that her focus on asymmetric yet intimate relationships is in vivid contrast to many male moral philosophers’ attention to relatively distant relationships between people of roughly equal power. Baier's insight that equality is not a desirable ideal in all relationships, such as those with children, is an important one. Although, in this article the only other relationships she analyzes that involve inequality are morally abhorrent ones between masters and slaves or in which fathers and husbands have vastly more power than mothers and wives. Nonetheless, her observation that relationships can be mutual, intimate, morally decent and involve vulnerability on both sides, even in the face of asymmetries of power, is relevant to thinking about what makes for morally decent trust in other asymmetric relationships, such as those between paid caregivers and those in their care.
Baier conveys many insights about familial trust, especially the trust of young children, including how challenging it is for parents to balance encouraging their children to trust them and find the world safe to explore, while increasingly letting them know about dangers. One of the most interesting things she says about infant trust is how overlooked it has been and yet how socially necessary it is for many, if not all other forms of trust to develop. Her discussion of the vulnerability of even the more powerful person in a trusting dyad is likewise insightful.
Her analysis of trust between parents and children is complex, and includes the claim that children, once capable of conscious trust, must not only believe that their parents care for their well-being and development, but also have a somewhat shared understanding of what both involve. The extent to which trustor and trustee must share understanding of trustee has shaped my own approach to trust, which is inspired by hers, while deviating from her claim that goodwill or absence of ill will is necessarily what we expect to motivate those we trust.
[music fades in]
Anna: This thinking about the infant relationship that Amy's doing is so important and is so much a part of Baier’s piece here.
Kristin 49:55
The remark about maternal sacrifice… you're trusting that – if you're the, if you're playing the part of the patriarchal husband, right? – you're trusting that there's a certain level of sacrifice that the, the, the wife, the mother is willing to undertake for the good of everyone else.
Anna: Yep.
Kristin: And so you're trusting that, but that sacrifice itself is kind of a, uh, it's kind of cultivated through self-distrust in the part of the, the oppressed person.
Corinne:
This is making me think of the earlier, very early, when we talked about trusting your gut, right? And I was saying, how do you learn to trust your gut? So, you know, you learn to trust yourself and to trust your gut through the experience of being trusted by others. But if we think of the mother in this kind of patriarchal society,
Kristin: Yeah
Corinne:
Who is, you know, parenting a child and is urged, encouraged to kind of always, you know, put her children first, to sacrifice her needs, to sacrifice her well-being for their sake, to never doubt that she loves them, to never doubt that she wants to be around them.
Kristin:
For sure.
Corinne:
All of those things, right? All of those expectations about what the ideally trustworthy mother is. I feel like this pressure would really make a person, a mother in this case, right? Start to doubt her own experience, right? And start to doubt, um, or start to distrust herself, potentially, because not being attentive to your own needs, right? Not being attentive to your own experience of the world, to your desires, to your ambivalent feelings, to your frustration, to your anger. Like, maybe sometimes you need to trust your gut, and your gut is telling you that, like, you need somebody to look after your kids, because you just need to leave the house and get a break.
Kristin
Part of what Amy was saying about the child and trusting the parent, because they are developing decision capacities over time about, I'm going to trust my parent on this or not. And there's developmentally sort of appropriate stages where they just don't believe anything you say anymore. And they're trying things out all the time. We go, well, you might come to find out mommy was right. But, you know, I want you to trust yourself. And, you know, like, so there's lots of games, trust games and and contexts, you know, in between the infant and the adult.
Corinne 52:34
And as I was hearing this, I was just thinking about, again, how, you know, factors like a child's gender or sexual expression or race is going to affect whether or not they can trust the world around them and feel safe in this world. And I'm just thinking of this devastating experience of, you know, wanting your child to trust themselves and wanting them to trust their environment enough to, like, put themselves out there and discover who they are as a person and to trust other people. And then also wanting to protect them from these oppressive systems that, you know, render the world unsafe for them.
[music fades in]
Anna 53:13
Baier writes, quote, “The best reason for confidence in another's good care of what one cares about is that it's a common good. And the best reason for thinking that one's own good is also a common good is being loved.” (pg. 243)
Corinne: But if that's the best reason, it's not the only reason.
[music plays]
Kristin
We have an innate sense of trust. So it can be voluntary or not voluntary, explicit or implicit, acknowledged or not, contract-based or not contract-based. You know, it can be a fragile kind of trust. Maybe, maybe it's being repaired after something. Or it can be a stronger form of trust. You know, we talk, I like how we talk about people as “my rock.”
Anna: Yes.
Kristin: You know, when someone is a rock, you know, it really trumps a lot of other, you can let a lot of other things go if someone is a rock, you know, for you. So there's also different power, power structures that our trust flourishes in the context of or breaks down in the context of. There's different costs to break down when the trust breaks down. It harms people differently. When we trust, we might put out in that trust very different degrees of vulnerability.
[sound of book pages flipping]
Kristin: Being the parent in the parking lot on the first day of daycare drop-off, and how hard hard that is and how I just remember, it's a it's a total flashbulb memory of dropping my son off at the daycare on the first day and um and the daycare worker sort of saying to me that it's always harder on the parent and and thinking to myself you know “how could that be true” [Anna and Corinne laugh]...”obviously it's harder on him,” and just going to my car and being like “oh, god, how could I do this,” you know and of course he had a great time and all that.
Anna:
Well, and all those varieties that you were just listing and the ways that those can combine in various ways means that having one model for trust, the the promise of the contract um that doesn't recognize like basic things about how much of human life um is sort of grounded on these multifarious kinds of trusting, is going to fail as a helpful account of trust. But it doesn't even get – I mean, if you have a model of trust that can't even account for your feelings when dropping your kid off at daycare the first day, then we have a problem with the account of trust it's…
Kristin: it’s weighty!
Anna: it's weighty, yes!
Corinne 56:08
Maybe we just need an account of trust that recognizes all these variables, right, this is something that I take from Baier's piece: she's trying to get us to think about all of these, you know, variables – all the different ways that trust plays out in our lives.
Anna:
That makes sense and it would odd I think for very, sort of ground rock, fundamental features of human life to be univocal and so maybe the philosophical work is thinking about the ways in which we have, I don't know something like, Wittgensteinian family resemblances, or maybe not at all, maybe just this um great amount of variability. Yeah.
Corinne
Absolutely. You know, more recently philosophers have started thinking about institutional trust philosophically for instance and so one thing that's really interesting is thinking about you know what's the kind of Venn diagram like what's the overlap between interpersonal trust and institutional trust.
[music fades in]
Hale 57:13
Hi my name is Hale Demir-Doğuoğlu, and I'm a PhD student who specializes in the philosophy of trust and distrust. As a feminist philosopher, the thing that I find most interesting about Annette Baier’s work on trust are her thoughts on the relationship between trust, vulnerability, and power, along with a relative lack of attention this aspect of her work has received since 1986.
Most who are interested in the subject of trust are at least somewhat familiar with Baier's famous argument that trust engenders a quote-on-quote "special vulnerability" in the one trusting. So, trust is risky, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone, philosopher or not, to argue that it isn't. But in “Trust and Anti-trust”, Baier also consistently draws conceptual connections between the vulnerability of trust and existing power asymmetries in society. For instance, Beyer talks at length about how the gendered oppression of women has historically rendered them inequitably vulnerable, inside and outside of their trusting relationships with men. She also alludes to other power differentials, like class and race and disability.
In short, on Baier's account, trust emerges as a phenomenon that's more risky for the oppressed, particularly in cases where the one being trusted is in a position of relative power, privilege, or authority.
In this sense, Baier’s work is quite timely, I think, despite being over 30 years old. Over the last few years, particularly since the pandemic, there's growing interest in the distrust felt by members of oppressed groups in North America towards institutions like health care and policing. Some approach this issue in obvious bad faith, and blame marginalized people for their justified distrust. But what's increasingly necessary, I think, in addition to basic empathy, of course, and a willingness to confront systemic biases, is a concept of trust, which is sensitive to how power shapes the arithmetic of trust. I think Baier's account more or less succeeds in this. To the extent that power has something to do with how our vulnerability manifests, institutionally or interpersonally, then power has something to do with trust.
I think Baier's decision to center vulnerability and power in trust also dialogues very well with feminist works in general. For example, there is a lot of feminist literature in the field of vulnerability studies unpacking how vulnerability is both fundamentally inherent to the human condition and variably experienced. We're all vulnerable, for instance, to physical harm. But some of us, given our social locations, our access to resources, our environments, etc., are more vulnerable to certain kinds of physical harm, like police brutality, intimate partner violence, state violence, and so on.
This inequitable distribution of vulnerability across society can thus shape trust relations between the relatively powerful and the relatively powerless. Beyer's work on trust offers a solid point of departure for feminist interventions like this.
[music fades in]
Kristin 1:00:29
So interesting. I like the discussion of the differential distribution of vulnerability.
Anna: Yeah.
Kristin:
According to power and different institutions. And if these institutions make us differentially vulnerable, then, of course, trust is going to… kind of follow that. Trust, not maybe antitrust, is going to follow that.
Anna
Yes. Yeah. And if we think about why Baier might focus on vulnerability and power so strongly in this piece is probably because trust does seem to be connected to our dependency on one another and our interdependency. So, a really interesting feature of trust – I mean, maybe what we can say about trust sort of more univocally – is that trust challenges these myths that are really common in Western canonical thinking about our radical independence and self-sufficiency.
Kristin
Trust, the more I was thinking about it and working through this article together and listening to you, Corinne, is just, I started thinking about this kind of glue that we all have, whether you see it or not, that we're all tied. And how much work feminist philosophers have tried to do to understand the social self. Well, that's a revision against the self as radically individualized, which is a concept, right? It's not, it's not, you know, [laughs] it's a concept!
Anna: Or a story?
Kristin: It's a story, as…
Anna: … as I diplomatically called it earlier?
Corinne 1:02:09
I think that's nice, this image of, because we do hear that, right? This idea of trust is kind of the social glue that holds our societies together. I mean, we want to make sure that the forms of trust that we encourage and that we promote don't leave people behind, right? So maybe if we want to think of trust as a social glue, we need to make sure that it's, like, some good social glue, right? That actually, like, promotes solidarity between people and not, you know, doesn't promote a kind of account of social life that leaves people behind and leaves them especially vulnerable to betrayal.
Anna: Yeah, everyone's kneaded into the bread, right?
Kristin: Yeah, I was just thinking of the bread, too! How do we go from glue to bread without it being weird? Yeah, exactly.
Corinne:
This is a point that I keep returning to when I think about why it's important for Baier to distinguish her account from, you know, the social contract theory account of trust, is that not everything that's important to trust can be put in a contract, And I think there's something kind of messy and unspeakable about trust that can't really be written into a contract. And maybe that's a little bit scary, because we want to be able to say things out loud, right, and to name them. But there's something really valuable also in building trusting relationships that can't be put into contracts.
[theme music fades in]
Corinne: Thank you to our fantastic contributors Hale Doğuoğlu, Laura Specker Sullivan, Carolyn McLeod, and Amy Mullin.
Anna:
And on that note, if you'd like to contribute to our DIT experiment, give feedback or propose ideas for our next episodes, or participate as a guest producer, please go to our website, thinkingbodiespod.com. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Kristin: Thank you, Anna. And I will also just say thank you to Corinne Lajoie for being a most excellent guest producer, as well as our premier guest producer.
Anna: Very trustworthy.
Kristin: And an excellent episode.
Anna: Fantastic.
Anna: All the references for what we discussed on the podcast today are on our website. Our theme music is by Seth Make Sounds and Joseph Pres. Thanks so much to the Amplified Podcast Network for all of your mentorship and getting this podcast created.
[theme music plays]
Anna: 1:04:59
Yay! How did that go?
Corinne: So much fun! I loved it.
Kristin: That's fun? Oh, good.
Anna: The hardest part, actually, is that you spend all the time thinking about what you want to say and then there's not enough time.
Corinne: But, like, now I really understand the script better now that we've done it. Yeah, no, this is super cool. And I feel like it's making me listen to podcasts differently. Like, now I'm, like, super curious about going back to those podcasts that I do like and being, like, oh, like, seeing how things flow and how people talk, especially those philosophy podcasts, right? Like, some of them I really like and others I don't.
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