Abstract
It is uncontroversial that betrayal of trust which one has encouraged is a grave moral wrong. One case of this is promise breaking, whose self-evident moral wrongness contractarians must invoke to reduce the whole or the most important part of morality to the keeping of a hypothetical mutual agreement for minimal reciprocal services. Mutual advantage, and the sacredness of commitments or encouraged trust, both lie at the heart of what most moral philosophers take to be the point and content of morality.
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Notes
John St. Mill: Utilitarianism, ed. by Oskar Piest, 2nd edition, New York: Liberal Arts Press 1957, Ch. V.
David Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature [1739/40], Oxford: Oxford University Press 1978, Bk. II, Part II, Section VII.
Hannah Arendt: The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1974, p. 237.
Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature, op.cit.,p.597.
David Hume gave an acute analysis of eighteenth century European marriage in his Treatise discussion of chastity, and his essays “Of Moral Prejudices”, “Of Love and Marriage”, and “Of Polygamy and Divorces”. For a fascinating account of what was and was not expected of eighteenth century Parisian husbands and wives, in particular of Hume’s acquaintance Louise d’Epinay and her husband, see Francis Steegmuller: A Woman, A Man, And Two Kingdoms,New York: Knopf 1991. The “man” in Steegmuller’s title is the Neopolitan Abbé Galiani, whose correspondence with Louise d’Epinay is the book’s main concern. But along the way it tells the sad d’Epinay marital history.
Some adaptation of my account of trusting as willingness not to control and monitor the trusted will be needed when the trust is in oneself. To trust oneself, it might be said, is to be willing to do without control and monitoring from others,to rely on self-control and self-monitoring. But it is significant that when we urge others to trust their own powers we are often urging them to stop playing the role of self-monitor, to let themselves go - to trust their memory and fingers to play a piece without relying on reading the score, to let second nature take over. Self-conscious self-control may be a sign of some degree of self-distrust, some need for an interiorized authoritative other to command one’s moves.
See “Trust and Antitrust”, in: Ethics 96, 1986, pp.231–260; “Tanner Lectures on Trust”, in: Tanner Lectures on Human Values,Vol. XIII, Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah Press 1992, and “Trusting People”, in: James E. Tomberlin (ed.): Philosophical Perspectives 6 Ethics,Atascadero, Cal.: Ridgeview 1992, pp.137–153.
Andrea Dworkin: Mercy,New York: Four Walls Eight Windows 1991, quoted by Martha Nussbaum at the start of “Equity and Mercy”, in: Philosophy and Public Affairs 22, 2, 1993, pp.83–125.
See Martha Nussbaum: “Equity and Mercy”, for elaboration of the charge that equity demands that we not treat all of a class of people in the way that the worst of them may deserve, and a criticism of the Andrea Dworkin policy of holding all men equally guilty for the rapes that some of them have inflicted.
See my “The Need for More than Justice”, in: Marsha Hanen and Kai Nielsen (eds.): Science, Morality and Feminist Theory. CanadianJoumal of Philosophy, Supp. Vol. 13, 1987, Calgary: University of Calgary Press 1987, pp.41–56.
Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature, op.cit.,p.474.
Richard Rorty reports this claim of Rabossi’s in “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality”, Amnesty International Lecture, Oxford 1993, unpublished manuscript.
Judith J.Thomson: The Realm of Rights,Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1991, ch. 4.
Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature, op.cit.,Bk. III, Part II, Section II.
John St. Mill: A System of Logic, New York: Harper and Brothers 1846.
D.G. Brown, Fred Berger, and John Gray have discussed this difficulty for Mill’s theory. See D.G. Brown: “What is Mill’s Principle of Utility?”, in: Canadian Journal of Philosophy 3, 1973, pp.1–12; Fred Berger: Happiness, Justice and Freedom: The Moral and Political
Philosophy of John Stuart Mill,Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press 1984, and John Gray: Mill on liberty: A Defence,London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1983.
John St. Mill: On Liberty, ed. by Stefan Collini, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989.
Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan [1651], ed. and with an introduction by C.B. Macpherson, Middlesex: Penguin Books 1980.
Ibid.,chapter 22.
David Hume: An Enquiry Concerning The Principles of Morals [1751], in: Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1975.
I do not think that the substance of what I am endorsing differs very much from what John Rawls has endorsed, but I find his heuristic device of a hypothetical veil of ignorance to have the wrong rhetorical force, if its use is supposed to end the subjection of, among others, women. It is a nice intellectual question whether excision of this part of Rawls’ theory, and its reconstruction in other terms, could be done without radical changes in other parts of the theoretical structure.
Friedrich Nietzsche: Zur Genealogie der Moral, in: Werke in drei Bänden, ed. by Karl Schlechta, München: Carl Hanser 1956, p. 835.
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Baier, A.C. (1994). The Possibility of Sustaining Trust. In: Pauer-Studer, H. (eds) Norms, Values, and Society. Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2454-8_19
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