Trust
Trust is confidence that someone or something will act or perform as expected, especially when the outcome is beyond our control.
We trust people, institutions, tools, machines, and systems.
A carpenter trusts a familiar tool. A passenger trusts an airplane. A child trusts his parents. A patient trusts a physician. Business partners trust one another to fulfill agreements.
In every case, trust allows us to rely upon someone or something we do not completely control.
Trust can be well-founded or foolish. Reliable past performance gives us reason to expect continued reliability, but it cannot provide absolute certainty about what will happen next.
Trust allows us to rely upon what we cannot control.
Trust Is Not Necessarily Virtuous
Trust itself is not necessarily morally good. A criminal might trust an accomplice to carry out an unjust act. His trust could be well-founded if the accomplice has demonstrated that he reliably does the injustices he promises to do.
The moral quality of an act of trust therefore depends partly upon who or what is being trusted and toward what end. Reliability is not the same thing as moral virtue. A person can be reliable in behaving immorally.
This distinction matters because trust should not be confused with responsibility, justice, or virtue. Those ideas help us judge whether the actions being trusted are right or wrong.
Trust Is a Gift
We often say that people must “earn our trust.” There is truth in that expression, but it also obscures something important.
Another person can give us reasons to trust him by keeping his word, demonstrating competence and good judgment, and acting reliably over time. In this sense, he can make himself trustworthy. But he cannot make you trust him.
The person doing the trusting ultimately decides whether to rely upon another. Someone can give us excellent reasons to trust him, yet we may still refuse; conversely, we may foolishly trust someone who has given us little reason to do so.
In this sense, trust is a gift. Another person can make himself worthy of our trust, but the trust itself remains ours to extend or withhold.
Trust Creates Vulnerability
To trust another person is also to make ourselves vulnerable to what that person freely chooses to do. When we extend trust, we place something we value partly beyond our own control and partly in another person’s hands. The stakes can be small or enormous.
We might trust someone with property, confidential information, money, a business, our reputation, our children, or our deepest affections. The greater the value placed in another’s hands, the greater our vulnerability if that trust is betrayed.
Trust therefore gives another person a kind of power: the power to vindicate our confidence or betray it.
That is one reason betrayal can hurt so deeply. It is not merely that another person failed to meet an expectation. He abused a vulnerability we voluntarily placed in his hands.
Wisdom—or prudence—therefore matters in deciding whom to trust, in what matters, and how far. And when another person gives us his trust, wisdom counsels us to cherish it. Trust is a precious gift.
Civic Trust and the American Founding
The Declaration of Independence ends with one of the most solemn expressions of mutual trust in American history: “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
The word mutually matters. The signers were pledging themselves to one another as they declared the colonies free and independent states. Their undertaking placed their lives, property, reputations, and political futures at risk.
Such cooperation requires trust.
A free society likewise depends upon substantial trust among ordinary citizens. People enter contracts, loan money, form businesses, raise families, establish friendships, live next door to one another, and cooperate with strangers because they expect sufficient reliability from others.
Where such trust is widespread, people can cooperate without constantly controlling one another. Where trust collapses, demands for regulation, surveillance, verification, enforcement, and control tend to grow.
In this respect, civic trust is closely connected to liberty.
Free people must be able to trust their fellow citizens to a significant degree.
Trust and Political Power
Political trust presents a special problem because those entrusted with government possess powers ordinary citizens do not. They operate under different institutional incentives from those facing ordinary citizens.
Those in government can make and enforce laws, collect taxes, seize property through lawful processes, arrest and imprison citizens, and otherwise employ legal coercion. A free political order therefore cannot depend merely upon confidence that those exercising power will always use it wisely, or even constitutionally.
Federalist No. 51 makes the point famously. Because human beings are not angels—and rulers are human beings too—government must not only possess sufficient power to govern but must also be constrained from abusing that power. Publius therefore argues for constitutional arrangements that supplement popular control with “auxiliary precautions.”
The Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 express the same concern even more sharply: “free government is founded in jealousy and not in confidence” and therefore limited constitutions are necessary to restrain “those whom we are obliged to trust with power.” Jefferson concluded: “In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”
The paradox is important.
Political society requires us to entrust power to human beings. Constitutional government recognizes that while a free society depends upon citizens trusting one another to a large extent, those same citizens should not place unlimited confidence in those who occupy positions of government power. Keeping government within the confines of the Constitution is easier when citizens regard political power with suspicion rather than naïve trust.
Why Trust Matters
Trust makes cooperation possible where certainty and control are impossible. It allows us to rely upon tools and institutions, form relationships, exchange with strangers, divide responsibilities, and place valuable things in other people’s hands.
But interpersonal trust also makes us vulnerable. That is why extending trust should involve careful, considered judgment, and receiving another person’s trust should be treated as something precious.
A free society requires citizens who can trust one another enough to live, work, exchange, associate, and cooperate without constant control. Political liberty simultaneously requires some distrust toward those in government and constitutional limits upon coercive power.
Trust allows free human beings to rely upon one another without controlling one another. Constitutional limits recognize that no human being should be trusted with unlimited government power.
