Trust: The Forgotten Virtue
Am I trustworthy?
It’s a question that few people ask themselves, says Nancy Potter, a U of L philosophy professor and author of the recent book How Can I Be Trusted? A Virtue Theory of Trustworthiness.
As a graduate philosophy student at the University of Minnesota in the late 1980s, Potter also worked as a crisis counselor for an outreach program at a seven-county agency in Minneapolis.
![[Image]](/advancement/pub/impact/spring2004/images/trust1.jpg)
U of L philosophy professor Nancy Potter found that the idea of trust is often conspicuously missing in discussions of morality.
“I was studying a lot of moral theory,” recalls Potter, who has been at U of L for eight years, “and I noticed that the issue of trust was virtually never discussed. It just wasn’t a concept that was being analyzed when I was in graduate school.”
At the same time, Potter was learning firsthand how crucial trust is as a crisis counselor. “I noticed how important it was to think about the trust that a client places in a counselor and the sort of characteristics I needed to have to be trustworthy to the client.”
She also noticed, and experienced, the conflicts.
“One of the central problems in trust and being trustworthy is that we are often in conditions where we are torn in two different directions,” she says. “We have to be trustworthy to those above us—those who are expecting us to perform our position well. But we also have to be trustworthy to the people we serve.”
Sometimes that’s impossible, Potter says.
“We have to make decisions about whose trust we are going to continue to sustain and whose we’re going to betray. I was really interested in the question of what it means to be trusted within that situation—where you really have to make the choice.”
As Potter began to grapple with the conflicts, she realized that, especially in moral theory, little had been written and discussed about what it means to be trustworthy.
“That’s the counterpart to trust: being trustworthy,” she says.
So she took on the notion of trustworthiness, especially within institutionalized differences such as race and gender relations, sexual orientation, worker relations and health-care relations, etc.
“With race relations, you can turn the question around from the more complaining, ‘Why don’t people of color trust us white folks?’ to ‘What do I need to do in order to be trustworthy to people of color given our history—given the context in which we are trying to live together in a pluralistic society?’ ”
As she pored over case studies and literature and discussed her thoughts with colleagues, Potter’s research led from abstract moral theory to something concrete.
“My interest is in developing the kinds of moral framework that people actually can work in and find a need for,” she says.
A big part of that framework is eliminating the notion of risk when thinking about trust.
“Can I trust you? What are the risks involved with me trusting you? How much should I gamble? These are the questions people ask,” Potter says. “It’s a calculating attitude. It makes trust a contract.”
But most of our relationships are not contractual, she insists.
“Lots of them are much more nuanced and subtle and unclear and unconscious. It’s not a matter of just calculating what risks to take.”
Potter thinks it would be better to reorient these questions about trust and trustworthiness.
“Instead we should ask what sort of responsibilities do we bear to one another,” she says.
Potter’s book How Can I Be Trusted? is the first to connect trust to virtue theory. Unlike many philosophers who believe that morality consists of following precisely defined rules of conduct, such as “don’t kill” or “don’t steal,” virtue theorists stress developing good habits of character such as benevolence.
“One of the reasons I’m interested in virtue theory is because it talks about character—the importance of having the kind of character that would cultivate relations of trust,” she says. “It seems to me that the building of character is not something we naturally have. We have to work to build that character.”
