A Question of Trust

"O’Neill is an atheist, I think, and she is very Kantian, and she’s a hero because she raised the whole question of trust in a very public way in the Reith lectures in 2002, the year after 9/11. And she posed questions of such fundamental central importance that haven’t been answered seven years later, and it’s because they haven’t been answered that we have then had the credit crunch, we’ve had the decline of trust in politicians, and the year after the lectures we had the Iraq war which is the biggest single cause of loss of trust in government. She is an intellectual pioneer and a hero: by asking fundamental questions and saying that we can’t batter trust into people, we can’t make them trusting by having laws, that trust is related to inner virtue. You are not going to build trust by installing more surveillance cameras or setting more targets, you are just going to make people more subtle and devious about finding ways around those cameras or around those targets. And I think she also has another fundamental truth, which is that the asking of the questions is more important than the answers. You can’t have a checklist of things that one never does as a trusting or trustworthy individual or organisation. It has to be an experiential change within oneself. The free market is not enough for people. Adam Smith himself said that there has to be a moral dimension. Climate change is one of the biggest single examples of the failures of the market, which always operates short-term. Your child, all being well, will now live to the age of 120 or 110 and the market doesn’t provide the answers. There has to be an element of higher values coming in, with structure and respect. The village is a parable for a community where you are known rather than ‘bowling alone’ as Bob Putnam put it [Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital , 1995]. The village could be a cyber village, it could be a very high-tech inner-city community, it could be anywhere where a number of people know and help and support each other. But it is generating more heat than light. Are they talking about it because of their perception of where that extra one per cent of votes lie or do they really believe it? Well, the truth is that marriage is difficult but it is a much better way of bringing up young people – to have a formalised bond and to make vows. Vows are authoritarian. We no longer have vows when we are 13, we have lost the initiation rites into adult life when we symbolically leave the bosom of the family. We need this because we no longer make that vow to humanity as a whole, which is what once happened. Yes, but that was the church or the mosque with a very male-centric interpretation of what marriage is: the vows are about a marriage of equals and caring for each other throughout life. That is not how it has been interpreted by patriarchal religious authorities and by patriarchal faiths and patriarchal legal systems: I don’t see this as going back or forward; I see it as going more deeply into what marriage is."

"I picked this because it’s very, very readable. It’s listenable to as well, because these were her 2002 BBC Reith lectures, and the book is mainly the text of those talks. I wanted to have an example of someone who is very good at bringing her philosophical skills to practical issues of public life and communicating them. In A Question of Trust she’s talking about issues of trust in public life, which is still a big issue today. There’s a lot of lack of trust in political institutions, political leaders. People have been talking about a crisis of trust for as long as we can remember. How do we increase trust? She was writing against a background where a lot of people seemed to assume the way to increase trust was to bring in mechanisms and guarantees that would reassure people that what was being said was true, that what was being done was right. What she argues is that those formal mechanisms undermine trust. So to give an example, if you’re in a long-term relationship with someone, most people would say trust is very important. The way to increase trust is not to develop systems whereby you can closely monitor what your partner is doing on a day-to-day basis, so that you have empirical, factual backup that those statements are true. In fact, that would undermine trust. It’s the idea that trust always includes elements of risk. It’s inherent to trust and you have to accept that. It’s a very rich book. It’s very brief. If you don’t know anything about philosophy, the arguments are very clear. They’re easy to follow. If you do know a bit about philosophy, you’ll be aware of all the work that’s going on under the surface. She hasn’t shown all her working. It’s wonderful that you have people who are capable of bringing their incredible knowledge, their lifetime of study of philosophy, and applying it in ways that make sense, but also explaining it in ways that people can understand. It’s good thinking in action, which we don’t see enough of, unfortunately. Indeed, and a lot of her valuable work has also not necessarily got a lot of public attention. She’s chaired at least one major commission; she’s advised on government reports, and she has been an active member in the Uk’s House of Lords, where not every member is very active. Mary Warnock was another fantastic example. She said of herself that as a philosopher, she was second or third eleven (using a cricketing analogy). That was very modest, but in a way was right, in the sense that her original contributions to philosophy weren’t many. But she did something that was even more important, which was that she chaired two major commissions on ethical issues for society: around special needs education and embryo research. She brought her philosophical expertise, brought people together, came up with these reports, which shaped policy. I think that that’s much more important work than certain people’s original contributions to the philosophical literature, which may be original, but will be footnotes to footnotes."