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Morally Relevant Trust and Institutional Groups

Letters TRUST woven on a mat

Photo by Joshua Hoehne (external link)  on Unsplash (external link) 

Who and what can we trust? We might trust another person (a friend), or a group of people (our colleagues), but what about trusting associations, organizations, or market systems such as capitalism? Can we appropriately talk about trusting such groups distinctly from the individuals that compose them? Let’s consider these questions in light of two prominent examples.

Over a decade ago, in one of the worst environmental disasters in world history, the BP oil rig Deepwater Horizon released over 130 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Millions of birds, marine mammals, fish, and sea turtles lost their lives as a result, and many species continue to struggle to this day. What and who did we trust when we allowed BP to operate in one of earth's most biodiverse marine habitats? Did we trust BP, as a whole, or only the individuals that worked at BP? Answering these questions are critical to our assignment of responsibility for this disaster.

Consider another example: the 2007-2008 global financial crisis, brought on by the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States, during which millions of people lost their jobs. During and shortly after the crisis, there was a good deal of anger at the banks and the banking sector. This is apparent in the kind of language used in prominent news outlets that reported about public anger and reports of banks (e.g. Lehmann Brothers) being blamed for the financial crisis. Who and what did people trust when they felt let down during the financial crisis? Did people feel a betrayal of trust by specific bankers, or by Lehmann Brothers as a whole, or both?

It seems tempting to say that if we genuinely trusted BP with their oil operations, and if we properly trusted Lehmann Brothers with their subprime mortgage practices, then we can talk about blaming BP and Lehmann Brothers, as institutional groups, distinctly from the individuals that make up these organizations. In other words, we should be able to talk about trusting individuals at BP and Lehmann Brothers, as well as those organizations as a whole.

This interpretation is rejected, however, by a dominant philosophical account of trust. According to that approach, trust in groups is to be interpreted as trust in the individuals that make up those groups. In contrast, a second philosophical account of trust permits a generalised conception of trust in groups in addition to and distinctly from individualized trust. According to this account, it is possible and appropriate to have moral expectations of groups as a whole as a result of trusting them.

In their article titled “Empirical and philosophical reflections on trust”, Pouryousefi and Tallant draw on empirical research on the nature and kinds of trust to adjudicate on these different positions in the philosophical literature on trust. The key question addressed by this research is: do we trust groups (e.g. collections of people or institutional groups) or just the individuals who compose them? Pouryousefi and Tallant argue that people's attitudes towards groups (specifically, their feeling of anger and their assignment of moral responsibility) imply that they in fact do trust institutional groups, distinctly from the individuals that compose them. By institutional groups, the authors have in mind social structures that involve roles, norms, and values, as well as stable patterns of interactions (e.g. governments, hospitals, and corporations).

The key philosophical implication of this research is that trust in groups, and specifically trust in institutional groups, deserves philosophical attention distinctly from trust in individual members, which tends to be the dominant focus of attention in morally relevant discussions of trust. This research has implications for the moral relevance of trust in a range of institutional groups including for-profit firms, professional associations, state and non-governmental organizations, as well as broader socio-economic systems. To learn more, see the full article:

Pouryousefi, Sareh & Tallant, Jonathan (2023). Empirical and Philosophical Reflections on Trust. Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 9(3):450-470. DOI:  10.1017/apa.2022.14 (external link)