Katherine Hawley’s How to be Trustworthy is a concise and illuminating contribution to the philosophical analysis of trust and trustworthiness. At the heart of Hawley’s account lies the notion of commitment, which underpins and shapes the normative landscape in which, Hawley argues, trust and trustworthiness are embedded. What is distinctive about Hawley’s approach to this topic is the decision to use the notion of commitment to shed light on related concepts that have received comparatively less attention in the literature: distrust, betrayal and non-reliance. As Hawley observes, we need to understand both trust and distrust if we are to understand the various ways in which trust can go wrong. What results, as this work exemplifies, is a richer and more substantive study of trust and trustworthiness.

Ever since Annette Baier’s paper ‘Trust and Antitrust’, philosophical accounts of trust have been motivated by distinguishing between trust and reliance. It is generally agreed that trust involves reliance: to trust someone to do something involves relying on them to actually do the thing expected of them. Yet trust and reliance also come apart. I rely on the alarm on my phone to wake me up in the morning, but it seems a stretch to say that I would trust it to do so. Similarly, we can rely on people without necessarily trusting them. What then is the difference between trust and mere reliance? Part of the answer to this lies in the recognition that how we react to misplaced trust seems to be quite different to how we react to misplaced reliance. Misplaced trust can lead to disappointment, feelings of betrayal and demands for accountability; misplaced reliance, in contrast, although potentially prompting annoyance, does not warrant the same response. What this suggests, Hawley notes, is that while trust is central to ‘a network of normative concepts and assessments’, mere reliance does not have such ‘rich connections’. Extending this thought, trustworthiness can be seen as a more admirable quality than mere reliability: a virtue, ‘something to be aspired to and inculcated in our children’ (3)

The standard move in the literature is to go from these considerations to articulate with greater precision the nature of the difference between trust and reliance. Hawley takes us instead on the scenic – and more interesting – route by considering the parallel distinction between distrust and non-reliance. Distrust, according to Hawley, is not simply the absence of trust. In turn, simply not relying on someone does not mean I distrust them; in most cases, an attitude of distrust would be wholly inappropriate. In this respect, distrust is an attitude in its own right with its own concomitant set of appropriate reactions to the actions and words of those whom we distrust. For example, in the case of misplaced distrust: ‘If I discover that I have wrongly distrusted you, appropriate reactions from me include remorse, apology, and requests for forgiveness’ (4). Like trust and reliance, distrust seems to involve more than non-reliance. This in turn maps on to how we think about untrustworthiness: someone who is unreliable is not automatically untrustworthy. Instead, to be untrustworthy – ‘meriting distrust’ – has the more substantive character of a specific type of character vice, one which reaches beyond the sometimes purely circumstantial nature of unreliability. 

Such considerations give Hawley’s own account of trust a richer and more complex shape and texture. Central to this account is the notion of commitment (8-13):

• To trust someone to do something is to believe that she has a commitment to doing it, and to rely upon her to meet that commitment.

• To distrust someone to do something is to believe that she has a commitment to doing it, and yet not rely upon her to meet that commitment

Hawley does not offer a reductive analysis of commitment, but instead illustrates her use of it through examples. Importantly for her account, commitment should not be understood in a psychological sense as some kind of determined intention to do something. Even if I no longer wish to attend a friend’s party because I can’t be bothered to leave the house, that does not absolve me of the commitment I made in accepting the invitation. If I simply don’t show up, my friend would be rightly entitled to be disappointed and annoyed with me; such reactions could in turn merit my friend’s distrust if I repeatedly fail to attend. What this points to is the socially normative dimension inherent in the sense of commitment that Hawley employs. Moreover, commitments need not be, and often are not, explicit; they of course can be – and Hawley’s discussion of the act of promising later in the book illustrates how – but many of the commitments that we hold both of ourselves and other people are implicit, arising from social conventions, norms, and mutual expectations. 

Accordingly, Hawley argues that trustworthiness and untrustworthiness are best understood in terms of commitment: ‘to be trustworthy is to live up to one’s commitments, whilst to be untrustworthy is to fail to live up to one’s commitments’. As such, her account builds in the link between trust and trustworthiness that is sometimes missing from other accounts (see, for example, her discussion of Holton’s appeal to Strawson’s ‘participant stance’ and analysis of reactive attitudes to explain the nature of trust). This is because Hawley proposes that the attitude of trust involves ‘expectations of commitment-fulfilment’; that is, not only does trust involve holding those whom we trust to their commitments, but more substantively, it involves a judgement of their character along with an assessment of the likelihood that they would be able to fulfil their commitments. As such, being able to trust requires is being clear about the conditions under which judgements of trustworthiness are appropriate. This is not a purely theoretical point: that we are not always the best judges of both our own abilities to assess one another’s commitments, or of each other’s’ characters, is indicative of the more interesting difficulties and tensions that deciding who to trust and who is trustworthy can present.

The combination of the commitment account and its application to a broader range of phenomena such as distrust enable Hawley to challenge one of the dominant accounts in the literature on trust. This view holds that what distinguishes trust from mere reliance is the existence of positive motives held by the trusted person, such as having the interests of the trustor in mind or being of goodwill and competence. Although such motive-based accounts seem plausible when we consider the difference between trusting and relying upon inanimate objects, they struggle when it comes to questions of distrust rather than trust. The basic claim of Hawley’s argument against motive-based accounts is that the imputation of negative motives that such accounts would seem to require to warrant distrust are neither necessary nor sufficient for distrust: ‘Someone who lies and cheats to achieve her goals should be distrusted, even if she does not bother to bear…ill will to others, and does not care about other people’s interests’ (18). Similarly, the imputation of ill will to someone is not sufficient for distrust:

Suppose that a deeply honourable person campaigns to have me imprisoned for my real and heinous crimes. I cannot rely on this person to help me; moreover I know she bears me ill-will and is actively trying to frustrate my goals. But my attitude to her needn’t amount to distrust, for she is straightforward and honest in her campaigning (19)

The issue then concerns the preconditions for trust-or-distrust: motive-based accounts articulate conditions for trust, but such conditions do not map easily onto the converse case of distrust. For Hawley, both questions of trust and distrust depend upon there being a commitment involved in some form; only when commitments are involved can attitudes of trust or distrust become intelligible and appropriate.

From this foundation, the study proceeds by asking how we acquire and take on new commitments with a perceptive analysis of the act of promising. In making promises to one another, we explicitly indicate our acquisition of new commitments. But what makes someone a good promisor? For Hawley, good promisors not only keep their promises (thus fulfilling their commitments), but more significantly, they make the right kind of promises in the first place. To be trustworthy does not simply amount to being the person who fulfils their commitments, but is rather someone with the competence and situational judgement to assess their ability and capacity to fulfil acquired commitments, who can determine which of their commitments they are able and likely to fulfil and which ones they are not. Thus, to be untrustworthy, Hawley argues, we need to avoid unfulfilled commitments. In the real world, such an exercise of judgement, competence and ability is not easily attainable since, as Hawley goes on to document, on the one hand, learning to be a trustworthy person requires a level of self-reflection and awareness that takes time to acquire, and on the other, practical and social circumstances often present us with situational difficulties that make being trustworthy much harder. 

How to be Trustworthy is a highly readable and thought-provoking study of trust and trustworthiness that is philosophically and conceptually sophisticated. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the philosophy of trust and social epistemology more generally, one that encompasses a much broader range of social and cognitive phenomena that are relevant to this topic than is usually recognised. 

Ⓒ 2020 Harry Lewendon-Evans

Harry Lewendon-Evans, Independent Researcher