Against ‘trustworthiness’

Talk with Jacopo Domenicucci – postdoc. at the Dept. of Philosophy, The Neukom Institute for Computational Science, Dartmouth College.

‘Trustworthiness’ is a central category in the recent literature on trust and is increasingly discussed in political philosophy and the philosophy of technology. It is meant to be the moral character virtue that mirrors trust: the virtuous response to trust is to be trustworthy, and to trust well we should trust the trustworthy. Here I argue that there is no such thing as this single, well-identified, moral virtue mirroring trust. Trustworthiness is a philosophers’ myth and one that stands in the way of an appropriate virtue theory. Being worthy of trust is more psychologically complex and morally nuanced than the simplistic fixation on ‘trustworthiness’ would allow. This paper makes some steps in the direction of a richer conceptual vocabulary to support policy and theory around trust-related virtues.