Review Essays: Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics; Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics.;

International Phenomenological Society

Review Essays: Moral Prejudices: Essays on EthicsMoral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics by Annette C. BaierReview by: Virginia HeldPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 57, No. 3 (Sep., 1997), pp. 703-707Published by: International Phenomenological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2953762 .

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Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. LVII, No. 3, September 1997

Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics*

VIRGINIA HELD

City University of New York, Graduate School and Hunter College

The heart of this book and the most important section of it for moral theory is composed of the four essays on trust, and the first essay of the book which introduces the issues about trust. Annette Baier has done a great deal to call attention to the centrality of trust for ethics, and to the neglect of it by most philosophers, past and present.

Here we see what an ambitious project she undertakes in behalf of trust. Agreeing with feminist moral theorists who see the need to attend to the val- ues of care and connection, and recognizing with them "the need for more than justice" (as the title of one of her most cited essays, included in this book, puts it), she asks for a concept that can bring together both love and obligation. She suggests for this task "the concept of appropriate trust," (p. 10) noting that it has the related advantage that it "mediates nicely between reason and feeling, those tired old candidates for moral authority, since to trust is.. .to have a belief-informed and action-influencing attitude" (p. 10). Baier thinks trust can include justice and also care. She writes that "it is because I have tried the concept and explored its dimensions a bit...that I am hopeful about its power as a theoretical ...tool... I am reasonably sure that trust does generalize some central moral features of the recognition of binding obligations and moral virtues..." (p. 11).

She expects wide agreement with the claim that a morality that could spell out when we should trust and when we should mistrust could deal with the moral issues of love and loyalty, which demand maximal trust. She thinks the claim more controversial, but also sustainable, that such an ethics of trust could also cover the ethics of obligation, for "to recognize a set of obligations is to trust some group of persons to instill them, to demand that they be met, possibly to levy sanctions if they are not, and this is to trust persons with very significant coercive power over others" (p. 12). The main support for morality, she holds, most come "from those we entrust with the job of rearing and training persons so that they can be trusted" (p. 14).

Annette C. Baier, Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1994).

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Her widely known essay "Trust and Antitrust," included here, remains the most important discussion she provides of what trust is, and how mistaken it is to ignore it. Trust, she argues, is "accepted vulnerability to another's pos- sible but not expected ill will.. .toward one" (p. 99). It is a 3 place predicate: A trusts B with valued thing C (p. 101). "Thing" here should be taken loosely, since when we trust others to leave us alone, we entrust them, in Baier's view, with the care of our autonomy. Perhaps a better way of charac- terizing this claim, then, would be to say that we normally trust persons in some respect or other, such as to wake us up at the time we requested or to keep something we say confidential, unless in some cases we say that we trust them with respect to everything, which could still fit in with an understanding that A trusts B with respect to C. Still, we often trust people to act in certain ways, which may not best be thought of as, in another way Baier characterizes trust, entrusting them to care for something we care about.

Whether or not Baier's analysis of trust is entirely satisfactory, it is surely the case that trust is involved in much of human life. Since we need others to sustain life, health, conversation, and market exchanges, we must allow others to be in positions such that they could, if they chose, damage what we care about. Much of the time, we trust that they will not. But mistrust rather than trust is often appropriate, and of course ethics should provide guidance on appropriate trust and mistrust.

Trust can often be between unequals, as in the trust infants place in their caretakers. In Baier's view, infant trust is "primitive and basic," (p. 110) the seed of later trust. The infant doesn't will to trust, his trust is there until de- stroyed. As the child grows, trust can approximate mutual trust between equals, and the power differential may then be reversed in the parent's old age. Such trust is never a contractual exchange. Trust between adults is not an act of will either, Baier holds, but in a climate of trust we can, at will, make promises and agree to contracts, which, when kept, can increase trust.

Baier's attention is directed, especially, at the conditions that will promote trust between the trustworthy, and enlargement of such a domain. Thus she is critical of liberal morality's assumption that voluntary agreement is the paradigm source of moral obligation. What preoccupies liberal morality re- quires a background trust that must be examined. "Once servants, ex-slaves, and women are taken seriously as moral subjects and agents," (p. 114) she argues, such background trust cannot continue to be ignored. The liberal fixa- tion on contract, and the obsession with such problems as prisoner's dilemma, should in her view give way to consideration of how best to cultivate trust.

In the meantime, she admits, much watchful distrust is called for, lest trust become foolish self-exposure to harm. Baier suggests a test for the moral decency of a relation of trust: it does not depend on concealment or threats and could survive openness and an absence of enforcement. But she

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worries that such a test is too individualistic, and does not take adequate account of the network of relations in which trust between any two persons is involved. If the whole network is unjust, perhaps one should trust no one whose interests are systematically opposed to one's own.

At this point a reader unwilling to abandon a strong sense of justice may be brought back to the kind of morality Baier would displace, and back to the kinds of difficult choices for which we may look to morality for guidance, even if we would not need to do so in a social world more conducive to appropriate trust. In her chapter on the vulnerabilities of trust, she deals with how trust is "easily wounded and not at all easily healed" (p. 130). So her answer to the liberal theorist might be that we need in any case to build the conditions of trust before contracts and rights can take hold.

Baier sees in trust a prime example of "the inadequacy of attempting to classify mental phenomena into the 'cognitive,' the 'affective,' and the 'conative,"' (p. 132) since if trust is any of these, it is all three. It involves belief in the trusted's goodwill and competence, it is a feeling most easily recognized when shaken by mistrust, and it is a willingness to be vulnerable to the harm the trusted might cause. It is not the same as mere reliance, because it involves risk.

While this may be a useful description of what trust is like when we have it, if we are interested in moral recommendations addressed to adults on when to take a chance on trust, and when not to, a choice unfortunately often facing us in the world as it is, one might need to emphasize that to decide whether to take such a chance is different from simply feeling trust or mistrust, and it is different from a cognitive calculation of the probable outcomes either way. A useful way of interpreting a major difference between Hobbes and Locke is to say that in a prisoner's dilemma-like situation, without effective enforcement of legal restraints and where the probabilities of betrayal by the other are judged to be equal, Hobbes would recommend mistrust, and Locke would recommend trust. Hobbes is then faced with the problem that the mechanisms of enforcement can never become established without the trust they presuppose. But Locke is faced with the problem that his recommendation is no more than a moral one, and will be ignored by some, leaving others in the lurch. While Hobbes and Locke were dealing with questions of establishing a social contract, similar questions affect us still, from the ghetto to the workplace to the bedroom, where a climate of trust may well be absent and far from imminent. A recommendation like Baier's to cultivate trust simply sidesteps such issues.

Baier is surely right, however, that in a normal, functioning social con- text, we should aim to rely on trust-with its granting of discretion and sus- pension of constant demands for an accounting-rather than contract. "If one stands over one's builder, watching and querying every move she makes, she may well refuse to finish the job, since what self-respecting builder would

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put up with such apparent lack of any trust in her professional skill and stan- dards of care?" (p. 130). Contract is a device for cases where trust has shrunk to near zero, and a society relying increasingly on contracts, as is the U.S., could convincingly be judged by Baier as increasingly unhealthy.

"Trust comes in webs, not single strands," Baier writes, "and disrupting one strand often rips apart whole webs" (p. 149). Though too great willingness to forgive untrustworthiness can surely damage the network, as can con- stantly and belligerently demanding one's rights (p. 150), she concludes that reliable guidelines are had to find. She goes so far as to conclude that "there are, as far as I have yet discovered, no useful rules to tell us when to trust..." (p. 151). She does think some rules of thumb can be useful for constructing social roles to avoid the worst forms of untrustworthiness in governmental and other institutions, but she still maintains that there are no useful rules for individuals. Trust in sustained trust, and trustworthiness to sustain trust do seem to her to be virtues, but they presuppose that trust is there to be sustained. In its absence, we are again without guidelines. Baier is also suspi- cious of many distinctions, for instance the distinction between egoistic and nonegoistic motives (p. 155), and she sees the motives for parental concern, for sustaining friendship, even for keeping promises, as difficult to classify (p. 156).

Such positions fit with her background suspicions of moral theorizing itself, more clearly stated in Postures of the Mind (1985), and with her ten- dency sometimes to see moral reflection as closer to literature than to philosophy. For those whose background considerations have led them to be more appreciative of the clarifications and guidance moral theory can provide, especially when such theory is built up from actual situations in all their com- plexity, and for those who well appreciate the reasons to look to philosophy more than to literature for moral understanding, Baier's explorations of trust can be highly valuable even if her conclusions, so pessimistic for moral theory, are not fully shared.

The least satisfactory essay is the one on rights, and the problems here re- flect back on her account of trust. In "Claims, Rights, Responsibilities," she asserts that "we are a right-claiming and right-recognizing species" (p. 225), that there will regularly be challenges to any such claims because we are also "a challenging and defensive species" (p. 226), and "rights by their very na- ture tend to clash" (p. 227). This overstates the difficulties of developing, in the contexts from which she draws her examples of how we often do trust our neighbors, a scheme of more or less consistent rights which may itself con- tribute significantly to the climate of trust.

She also claims that lists of universal rights, to be coherent and gain as- sent must be "so vague as to be virtually empty" (p. 228). This misstates the force of many existing international human rights documents, recognized in international law, which specifically rule out not only torture and imprison-

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ment without charges, but also the kind of nonrecognition of the rights of the poor to basic necessities upheld by the Republicans' Contract With America. In many parts of the world, the resources are not available to implement wel- fare rights; in the U.S. the will is absent. Neither condition means that international human rights covenants proclaiming the right of every child to enough food to sustain life are vague or empty.

Baier also sees rights as attaching essentially to individuals thus giving inadequate attention to how they can attach to groups. Correspondingly, she does not acknowledge how group rights may not be "self-apportioning" to individuals. A poor district's right to state funding for education equal to a rich district's may leave open the apportionment of that funding between talented or handicapped individuals. She argues that although rights attach to individuals, it is not as single individuals that we enjoy them, but as "participant in a cooperative practice" (p. 242), for "it is only as participants in a cooperative practice that we can have any rights" (p. 243). While it may be true descrip- tively that rights cannot be effectively upheld except as part of an actual practice, it can be the normative assertion of the moral rights of individuals or groups that can transform actual practices into ones that recognize such rights. Baier, like Hume at levels deeper than his famous is/ought passage, in effect rejects the distinction between the normative and the descriptive. The deficiencies of such a rejection are perhaps clearest in the case of rights, if perhaps not much less so in the case of trust.

Among other essays relatively unrelated to trust are ones on violent demonstrations, on sharing responsibility, on the difference it makes to have women in philosophy and writing on ethics, and essays on various aspects of the thought of Hume and Kant. The "moral prejudices" in her title are illus- trated in her merciless focus on some of the least attractive positions and pas- sages in Kant, together with her willingness to overlook Hume's grave deficiencies in dealing with problems of economic injustice. Her well-established admiration for Hume is displayed throughout the book, as is her own remark- able and refreshing style. There is much here to show why Annette Baier is one of our foremost philosophers, amply deserving the recently bestowed honor of being the first woman ever to give the American Philosophical As- sociation's Carus lectures.

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Documents

Review Essays: Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics; Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics.;