Govier, Trudy - Dilemmas of trust-McGill-Queen's University Press (1998)

Dilemmas of Trust
Every human relationship, whether between lovers, friends, family

members, or colleagues, raises questions about trust. When we trust,
we take for granted that others are not out to harm us; we relax and
feel safe. When we distrust, we are fearful; we withdraw and try to
protect ourselves. In Dilemmas of Trust Trudy Govier explores the pro-
found effect trust and distrust have, not only on our relationships but
on our outlook on the world and our sense of self.
Trust facilitates communication, love, friendship, and cooperation
and is fundamentally important to human relationships and personal
development. Using examples from daily life, interviews, literature,
and film, Govier describes the role of trust in friendship and in family
relationships as well as the connection between self-trust, self-respect,
and self-esteem. She examines the reasons we trust or distrust others
and ourselves, and the expectations and vulnerabilities that accom-
pany those attitudes.
But trust should not be blind. Acknowledging that distrust is often
warranted, Govier describes strategies for coping with distrust and
designing workable relationships despite it. She also examines situa-
tions in which the integrity of interpersonal relationships has been
violated by serious breaches of trust and explores themes of forgive-
ness, reconciliation, and the restoration of trust.
By encouraging reflection on our own attitudes of trust and distrust,
this fascinating book points the way to a better understanding of our
relationships and ourselves.
TRUDY GOVIER is an independent philosopher who lives and works

in Calgary, Alberta. Her other books include Social Trust and Human
Communities (McGill-Queen's), God, the Devil, and the Perfect Pizza, and
A Practical Study of Argument.
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DILEMMAS OF TRUST
TRUDY GOVIER
McGil -Queen's University Press

Montreal & Kingston. London .Ithaca
© McGill-Queen's University Press 1998
ISBN 0-7735-1797-9 (cloth)
Legal deposit fourth quarter 1998

Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec
Printed in Canada on acid-free paper
This book has been published with the help of a

grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences
Federation of Canada, using funds provided by
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada.
McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges

the financial support of the Government of
Canada through the Book Publishing Industry
Development Program for its publishing
activities. We also acknowledge the support of
the Canada Council for the Arts for our
publishing program.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Govier, Trudy
Dilemmas of trust
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-7735-1797-9
1. Trust. 2. Interpersonal relations. I. Title.
BF575.T7G76 1998 177 C98-900800-2
This book was typeset by Typo Litho

Composition Inc. in 10/12 Palatino.
Contents
Preface vii
1 Why Trust? 3
2 The Focus of Friendship 21
3 Trust and the Family 50
4 Problems of Trust in Families 73
5 Self-Trust 87
6 Self-Trust, Self-Respect, and Self-Esteem 99
7 Reasons for Trust and Distrust 119
8 Distrust and Its Discomforts 139
9 Restoring Trust 165
10 Forgiveness and Reconciliation 183
11 Dilemmas of Trust 204
Notes 213
Bibliography 231
Index 239
Preface
When I began to explore the topic of trust in 1989, I found that there
were few comprehensive works on the subject. After several years of
study, I started to write a large book intended to explore issues of
trust and distrust in personal, social, and political contexts. This
combination of themes proved to be unmanageable, and as a result, I
divided my material. My reflections on social and political trust may
be found in Social Trust and Human Communities (McGill-Queen's
1997); those on self-trust and trust in personal relationships consti-
tute the present work. Both books are secular in orientation.
In this book I offer an account of interpersonal trust and distrust,
seeking to describe and explain how and why these attitudes so pro-
foundly affect our personal relationships. Because they underlie our
interpretations of what we and others say and do, trust and distrust
do much to determine our conceptions of ourselves and others. The
book also includes an account of self-trust. I argue that there are close
logical parallels between self-trust and interpersonal trust, and that
self-trust is essential for personal autonomy. Broadly descriptive con-
siderations about family, friendships, and self-trust occupy the greater
part of chapters 1 through 6. In these chapters I make no claim to offer
an original account of friendship, family, or the self. Rather, I have
used the work of others to state a plausible contemporary view and
have then tried to show, against the background of that position, the
important roles played by trust and distrust.
Friends and acquaintances who heard about my work on trust
urged me to treat the topic of "values." When is trust reasonable and
appropriate? When not? When do we trust too much or too little?
When we judge - as we often do in ordinary life - that someone is to
trusting or too suspicious, what is the basis for such a judgment? These
issues are treated in chapter 7, where I explore the kinds of evidence
viii Preface
we appeal to when we judge people to be more or less trustworthy

and the reasons we may have for deeming people to be "paranoid" or
"gullible" or "too suspicious." Philosophical interviews about sensi-
tive particular cases formed part of the basis for this work.
Although I remain impressed by the significance of trust in our re-
lationships and its largely unremarked centrality in our lives, I do not
argue that trust is always good or that distrust is always baneful.
Whether trust or distrust is the more appropriate attitude, morally
and epistemically, depends on evidence and circumstances.
Distrust is sometimes warranted. Yet it can become a practical prob-
lem in any relationship that we cannot sever at will. In chapters 8 and 9
I examine some phenomena of distrust and consider strategies for cop-
ing with it or trying to restore trust. Several of the approaches dis-
cussed are drawn from current work in the area of conflict resolution
(sometimes known as "alternate dispute resolution"), which I have ex-
plored over some years through workshops, conferences, background
reading, and my own experience as a volunteer mediator. Chapter 10
treats themes of forgiveness and reconciliation, raising the question of
the relationship between trust and forgiveness. Some modest conclu-
sions are stated in chapter 11.
In addition to appreciating the trust that we take for granted and
the trustworthiness that makes it possible, we can usefully reflect on
many absorbing and important dilemmas of trust. In such dilemmas
we do not know whether to trust or not; neither trust nor distrust
seems to be the appropriate attitude, and we know too much to be
agnostic. I make no pretence here to solve such dilemmas, but I do
attempt to describe them clearly and to understand their implica-
tions. Because of my conviction that attitudes of trust and distrust
should be of interest to a broad audience, I have tried to write in an
accessible way, seeking to keep scholarly notation and intricacies of
back-and-forth argumentation within reasonable limits. Most exam-
ples are drawn from everyday life, politics, literature, or contempo-
rary films.
I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council

of Canada for a generous grant (#410-89-0199), which supported my
work on this topic between 1989 and 1994. It was because of this grant
that I was able to employ James D.D. Smith and Donald Conrad, who
gave able assistance with research in 1989-90. I want to thank them
both for their enthusiasm and hard work. In addition, I am grateful to
Helen Colijn, Janet Keeping, Bev Delong, Hank Stam, Janet Sisson,
Doreen Barrie, Martha McManus, Beverley Kent, Bela Szabados, and
Risa Kawchuk for moral support and helpful comments about various
Preface ix
phases of this research. Members of Calgary's "public philosophy"

group, the Apeiron Society for the Practice of Philosophy, provided a
stimulating audience at several stages, and I would like to thank Petra
von Morstein for her role in sustaining that group and inviting me
to speak to it. On occasions when portions of this study have been
presented in Vancouver, Victoria, Amsterdam, Warsaw, Regina, and
St Cloud, Minnesota, questions and comments from members of the
audience helped me to develop my ideas. Those of David Boyer at
St Cloud State University were especially memorable and insightful. I
have also benefited greatly from published works, especially those of
Annette Baier, Sissela Bok, H.J.N. Horsburgh, Diana Meyers, Doris
Brothers, C.A.J. Coady, Primo Levi, Roger Fisher, Francis Fukuyama,
Steven Shapin, Robert Putnam, Niklas Luhmann, and Mark Snyder.
Parts of this book have been published previously in Cogito, Hypa-
tia, the Journal of Social Philosophy, and the International Journal of
Moral and Social Studies. I would like to thank the editors of these
journals for permission to use some of that material here.
Most of all, I am grateful to my husband, Anton Colijn, for his
prolonged moral support. He has almost certainly heard more than
he would have wished about trust and distrust and the vicissitudes of
my prolonged saga of reading, interviewing, reflection, writing, and
editing on these subjects. At one point, he had heard so much about
my pet project that he dreamed he was reading a newspaper article
about trust. In his dream the newspaper reported that scientists had
discovered that there was far more trust in the world than people
had previously thought. It was as though, unexpectedly, there had
turned out to exist an additional reserve of a treasured substance. The
discovery of "more trust" was like finding gold. This dream could be
interpreted as a metaphysical parody of my ideas. I do think that
there is more trust in the world than we often suppose, although I do
not, of course, believe that it is a commodity like gold. I would indeed
argue that there is more trust - and more trustworthiness - than we
commonly suppose; not because trust has been buried in a previously
unknown location, but because we tend not to notice when things go
right.
It would be rash to put forward as definitive any analysis of a topic as

broad and fundamental as that of trust and distrust, and I make no
such claim here. If my work interests others and helps to inspire fur-
ther reflections on the subject, I will consider my energy well spent.
Dilemmas of Trust
CHAPTER ONE
Why Trust?
Whether it is between lovers, friends, family members, or colleagues,

every human relationship features some degree of trust or distrust.
And attitudes of trust and distrust have a profound effect on our
relationships, influencing almost every dimension of them.When we
trust, we take for granted that others are not out to harm us, that
they are basically well intentioned, that we have nothing to fear from
them; we can relax and be safe, enjoy each other, or work towards
common goals. If we distrust, we are not at ease. We are fearful and
suspicious and feel a need to close off, try to protect ourselves, or
control the relationship.
For all this, there are not many books on themes of trust and dis-
trust.1 One reason may be that these attitudes are rather elusive and
hard to define. Trust seems warm and fuzzy, somehow good, perhaps
a little Pollyannaish; it is nice to be a trusting soul, but risky. People
who are trusting may be nicer in many ways than suspicious and
cynical ones. But one may suspect that they are rather simplistic in
their thinking, that they are gullible and naive and too accepting of
others. It is difficult to generalize sensibly about trust. We trust this
person; we do not trust that one. We trust a friend; we want a doctor
whom we can trust; we do not trust politicians. But what more can be
said? Why think further about trust and distrust?
For me, at least part of the answer is that trust and distrust are end-
lessly fascinating. So, at any rate, I have found them to be, and my
hope is to inspire others to share my fascination. Because trust and
distrust so strongly affect our responses and attitudes to other people,
thinking about them sheds a useful light on many relationships. Trust
and distrust affect what we come to believe about other people and
how we interpret their actions and intentions. Those other people
affect us through the ways we think about them and respond to them.
4 Dilemmas of Trust
We have feelings and beliefs about another person, we have a sense of

who that person is and what sort of person he or she is, and it is on
the basis of this construction of another person that we engage with
him or her. Our attitudes of trust and distrust affect our outlook on
the world and our sense of ourselves and others. They are centrally
important in personal and collegial relationships, affecting the people
we live and work with, the quality of our interactions with them, and
our broad sense of human nature and the social world. We judge and
allocate trust differently. Some people are more trusting, others less
so; some people trust mostly themselves and their immediate family,
whereas others quite readily trust acquaintances and strangers. For
all of us, however, it is impossible to cope in this world without trust.
With trust, we have, and continue to build, a positive picture of an-
other person. Small omissions such as lateness, missed appointments,
forgotten birthdays, and occasional tactless remarks we will write off
as just that - minor matters not implying that the other is unfeeling or
does not care about the relationship. When there is trust in another
person, a basically positive picture continues to strengthen itself, and
a significant rupture or departure will be required to undermine that
picture. With distrust, just the opposite occurs. We look at a person
with some suspicion, feel nervous, and tend to see every omission
and possible insult as evidence that the other is a bad type who does
not care whether he or she hurts us or not. We construct a negative
image, and that image has a strong tendency to perpetuate itself.
Understanding our own attitudes of trust and distrust - where they
come from and how they affect our responses to other people - helps
us understand our relationships and, through them, the other people
who are our lovers, friends, and colleagues.
Self-trust also merits attention. Just as we construct a picture or
image of another person, we form one of ourselves. If we trust our-
selves, we have positive beliefs and expectations about what we can
do - about ourselves and our competence - and a sense that we ca
rely on our own judgment. This self-trust is a fundamental aspect of
our persons and personalities. It is essential for our self-esteem, self-
respect, and personal autonomy. Like trust in others, self- trust
should have a foundation in reality. It should be based on evidence,
on our own experience of what we can do and who we are. Self-trust
is an essential aspect of functioning as a person. To lead an autono-
mous and meaningful life, we need to reflect on ourselves - on our
experiences, our memories, our talents, goals, and desires. To do so,
we must be able to trust our own sense of who we are, where we are
in the world, and what is happening around us. We need a basic,
implicit confidence that we are worthy and competent creatures with
Why Trust? 5
a capacity to make sensible, independent judgments. Thus self-trust

is fundamental to our attitude to ourselves, and understanding it
offers fresh insights into our attitudes to ourselves and others.
We tend to take trust for granted: when the people whom we trust
do as we expect, we barely notice the fact. To understand the nature
and importance of trust, we have to make explicit what is characteris-
tically implicit. In reflecting on trust, we make ourselves aware of
tacit feelings and expectations - vulnerabilities that we have always
had, but never much noticed before. One reason that we underrate
the significance of trust is our strong tendency not to notice it until it
breaks down. The "normal" situation, we assume, is the one where
things go as we expect - where people act reliably, institutions func-
tion as anticipated, and our trust is not betrayed. In such situations,
husbands and wives are supportive and loyal, children go off to
school to encounter reasonably good teachers and return home at the
expected time, cars stop at the red light, dentists do honest, compe-
tent work, and so forth. When these things happen as we assume
they will, we do not think much about that fact. We take it for
granted. The husband was not a betrayer; the child was not abducted;
the teacher gave a good and appropriate lesson; the friend was not a
spy; the visitor did not steal the silver forks; the policeman was help-
ful; the restaurant food was safe and delicious; the garbage was
picked up at the right time; and so on. Here the words "and so on"
may be the most revealing of all: the range of our trust is wide, and
indefinitely so.
We do not normally notice how many people have to be well
intentioned and competent, have to care about each other and func-
tion as they should, for things to go right. Ordinary people notice,
and remember, when something goes wrong, upsetting their char-
acteristically unconscious expectation that things will usually go
right. There are exceptions, of course. Hobbes argued that competi-
tion, greed, animosity, and suspicion were the most significant fac-
tors in human relationships, and these were the aspects he expected
to find in the social world. His observations lived up to his expecta-
tions; in this area, as in so many others, observations turn out to be
affected by organizing concepts. Freud regarded apparently benign
relationships as underlaid by a lustful unconscious, and he expected
in personal and social life the acting out of furious hidden desires.
Relatively few people are wholeheartedly Hobbesian or Freudian. In
everyday life we tend to trust other people much of the time, and we
generally expect smooth functioning, reliability, and loyalty as rou-
tine aspects of our social world. Ironically, however, these very
assumptions - that people should, for the most part, be trustworthy
6 Dilemmas of Trust
and that institutions should, for the most part, work appropriately -
mean that we are especially shocked when things go wrong. We tend
to focus on the striking and disturbing cases where distrust is
deserved, where things do not go as we expect. And then this focus
works to suggest a negatively biased picture of human nature and
human life, one in which at the conscious level we tend to downplay
and underestimate the competent functioning and good intentions
of other people. Reflecting on the grounds for trust and distrust can
help to sort out this tangle of positive expectations and highlighted
disappointments.
In so many ways, we depend on other people and are vulnerable
to them. And in so many ways, they do not let us down. In complex
modern societies, nearly everyone nearly every day implicitly places
his or her trust in dozens - even hundreds - of other people when
speaking, listening, reading, shopping, banking, driving, cooking,
and performing numerous other mundane activities. Trust, sociolo-
gists have said, is the "glue of society." We are in this world together.
We trust; to a very large extent, when we interact, we are implicitly
trusting. To be sure, things often go wrong, and people can act care-
lessly and maliciously towards each other. As anyone who reads a
newspaper or watches television news is bitterly aware, things go
horribly wrong sometimes. But in tolerably well run societies, many
things go perfectly right. To understand this fact is illuminating,
even inspiring. It helps to set the horror of the television news in per-
spective, giving us a more positive picture of human nature and the
social world.
WHAT IS TRUST?
Trust and distrust are attitudes that affect the way we think, the way
we feel, and the way we act. Trusting, we are more likely to let
ourselves be vulnerable to others, to allow ourselves to depend on
others, to cooperate, to confide. We feel relaxed, comfortable, safe,
and at ease. Trust also affects our understanding of other people, our
sense of who they are and what they are doing. In fact, it affects our
basic conception of human nature and our general sense of what sort
of world we live in. Trust is in essence an attitude of positive expec-
tation about other people, a sense that they are basically well inten-
tioned and unlikely to harm us. To trust people is to expect that they
will act well, that they will take our interests into account and not
harm us. A trustworthy person is one who has both good intentions
and reasonable competence. Trust is a relational attitude: one person
trusts another, or several others, or a group. When we trust, our pos-
Why Trust? 7
itive expectations have two basic dimensions: motivation (the other

intends to act well and does not intend to do harm) and competence
(the other knows enough to be capable of doing as required). A trust-
worthy person is one who has both good intentions and reasonable
competence.
Consider, for example, the matter of hiring a babysitter for a young
baby, a situation where trustworthiness is of paramount importance.
To hire someone as a babysitter is, implicitly or explicitly, to trust that
person. She must be of good character - not an abuser, not cruel, not
careless or neglectful, dishonest, or mentally unstable. She must be
well disposed towards the baby and towards us. If she is willing to
babysit, she must want to keep the baby comfortable and happy and
to take good care of him. If we trust her to care for the baby, we
assume implicitly that that is the sort of person she is - a good type,
not someone who would neglect or wilfully harm him. But good
character is not enough. Competence matters too: the babysitter has
to know how to change a diaper, heat up a bottle, burp the baby, sup-
port his head when holding him, lock the doors, call 911 in an emer-
gency, handle telephone messages, and so on. In this explanation, the
"and so on" is again highly significant. Our expectations, when we
trust, have an open-ended quality; we expect the trusted person to do
the appropriate thing, whatever that is in the circumstances. In hiring
someone to babysit, we are trusting her - entrusting to her the care
of a small and helpless creature whom we dearly cherish. For this
entrusting, both character and competence are essential.
Our trust is based on our beliefs, and our beliefs are grounded on
evidence from experience. Trust is not pure faith; we need not trust
blindly. We may trust a babysitter because we have evidence, based
on past experience, about her character and competence. We may
trust her because friends or colleagues, whom we also trust, have told
us that she is honest and reliable. Or we may depend on a kind of
instinctive sense of her character and competence, based on the way
she strikes us when we meet her or talk with her. Often we have an
intuitive sense of whom we can trust and whom not, relying on a life-
time of experience of human expressions, gestures, and character.
One might say, "Her face lit up the minute she came in and saw the
baby. I knew she'd be good." Or, "The moment I saw him, I knew I
could trust him." Or, "There was something fishy about him right
from the start."
Such intuitions are obviously fallible, but we use them anyway.
Lacking particular evidence or intuitions, we base our trust on gener-
alizations about what sorts of people tend to be reliable and honest;
we may rely on almost stereotypical beliefs - a neatly dressed person
8 Dilemmas of Trust
is seen as more reliably than a sloppily dressed one, a middle-aged

women as more trustworthy than a young man.2 Some people are
more trusting, others less so. Whatever the grounds for our attitudes,
they are based upon underlying beliefs about what other people are
like and what they are likely to do. When we trust others, we expect
them to act well towards us. When we distrust them, we fear that
they will act badly.
Trust is a risky business because the people whom we trust can let
us down, and we are vulnerable to harm when they do so. It is impor-
tant to attend to the risks of trust and not to take the simplistic view
that trust is always good. Sometimes we trust too easily and risk a
great deal in doing so. Our trust is generally based on experience
with other people; on the basis of that experience, we construct a
characterization or picture of them. But other people are free agents,
with dimensions and depths that go beyond our beliefs about them.
We never fully or completely know another human being. Neverthe-
less, when we trust, we feel confident that another's words and ges-
tures represent that person as he or she is; we do not feel that we have
to probe a superficial appearance to make estimations as to what the
real person is like.
Trust is a presumption of meaningful communication: we must
believe that the other says what he means and means what he says.
Listening to another is usually worthwhile because we assume that
we can believe much of what he says; speaking to another is worth-
while because we credit her with the capacity and desire to hear
what we are saying and to understand it. Given this centrality of
trust in communication, we may also expect it to be pivotally impor-
tant in education. To learn, a student must believe (most of) what
the teacher tells him or her and must have some confidence in the
teacher's values. That is to say, a workable student-teacher relation-
ship presumes a considerably degree of trust. In developing our self-
trust, we are dependent on responses from other people. And for
those responses to confirm us, we must trust that they are genuine.3
For all this, trust remains risky. There are always surprises, some of
them nasty. The other person may do something we did not expect or
fail to do something we did expect. He or she may fail to cope in diffi-
cult circumstances, let us down, hurt us, or betray us. When we trust,
we are vulnerable to those possibilities: we take a chance. Sometimes
we are unaware of these risks, comfortable and even complacent in
our assumption that things will be all right. When we trust - even
though we know, at some level, that things could go wrong - we con-
fidently assume that they will not. If we trust, we believe the risk is
small, and we are prepared to accept it.
Why Trust? 9
Trust, then, is an attitude that affects our emotions, beliefs, actions,

and interpretations. When one person trusts another, he or she has a
positive feelings towards that other person and positive expectations
about what the other is likely to do. Trust is based on the belief that
the trusted person is competent and well motivated and therefore
likely to live up to these positive expectations. Consider the case of
Juan, who trusts his wife, Elena, but has been told by a friend that she
has been seen leaving a fancy restaurant with another man. Because
he trusts her, he does not leap to the conclusion that she must be
having an affair; he does not immediately assume the worst. Instead,
Juan gives an innocent meaning to the event. Perhaps Elena had a
business appointment; perhaps she was visiting with a relative or an
old friend who had arrived from out of town. It is even possible that
she was not lunching out at all, and the story was based on a mistake.
If Juan were suspicious of Elena, he would react differently, crediting
the story immediately, leaping to the conclusion that she was having
an affair, and beginning to wonder how long this had been going on
and what he should do about it.
As this example illustrates, trust involves vulnerability to harm.
Clearly, a trusting husband, like any other trusting person, could be
wrong. If the lunch date was not so innocent, if he later discovered
that his wife was indeed having an affair, Juan might someday come
to regret his trusting attitude and assumption that the lunchtime tete-
a-tete meant nothing. Trust brings risks which the trusting person
accepts. However, the fact that trust is risky should not be taken as a
reason for generalized or systematic distrust. There are many argu-
ments against a stance of systematic distrust, which has risks and
costs of its own.4
ETHICS, TRUST, AND EVIDENCE
Trust facilitates many good things - communication, love, friendship,

partnership, cooperation, knowledge, and economic development, to
name just a few. For this reason, we have a tendency to think that it is
good. Should we "moralize" trust, assuming that it is always some-
thing good? Is trust always better than distrust?5 At one level, this
question can be answered simply with a firm no. We may trust too
easily, on the basis of weak evidence, with no evidence at all, or in the
face of all evidence. And we may bring harm to ourselves and others
by doing so. In such cases, trust is not the best attitude to have; dis-
trust or neutrality would clearly be better. When much is at stake, the
fact that things "seem all right" or that we "have a good feeling about
that person" is simply not an adequate basis for trust.
io Dilemmas of Trust
Consider, for instance, the case of Betty and Alfred, middle-aged

parents whose son Bob was killed in a skiing accident. They were still
grieving for him when Carol arrived at the door of their suburban
home with a small child, Nicholas, in tow. She said that she had been
Bob's girlfriend and this child was their grandson. The parents had
never heard of Carol or Nicholas, although the boy was old enough to
have been born before Bob's death. Nevertheless, they accepted the
story without question and welcomed them into their family. They
gave Carol ample financial support and came to prefer Nicholas over
their two other grandchildren. Betty and Alfred trusted Carol com-
pletely, on no evidence at all, in quite peculiar circumstances. They
did so at a time when they were emotionally vulnerable and much
was at stake. Was their trust "good"? Did they employ sound judg-
ment when they trusted in these circumstances? I think that, without
rejecting Carol and Nicholas outright, Betty and Alfred would have
been more responsible to investigate the connection and ask some
questions before taking them into the family. Why had they never
heard of Carol before? Did any of Bob's friends know her? Could any
friends vouch for the relationship? Where was Nicholas born? Was
Bob's name on his birth certificate? If Carol had been Bob's girlfriend,
how long had he been involved with her before Nicholas was born?
Was there any evidence that Bob had believed Nicholas was his
child? In this case, unquestioning trust seems naive and unwise to the
point of being irresponsible, especially given the emotional impact of
Nicholas on them and their other grandchildren. An initial suspen-
sion of judgment and a process of seeking further information would
seem more appropriate.6
There are many ways, small and large, in which we naturally trust
strangers. In many contexts, if we did not do so, life would be difficult
indeed.7 But there are also, quite rightly, ways and contexts in which
we are taught not to trust strangers. Children learn not to accept
candy or rides from strangers and not to go into homes or rooms with
adults whom they do not know. They are at risk of assault and abduc-
tion, and they have to be taught not to trust. Most women retain such
lessons for a lifetime: feeling nervous if they accept rides from men
they do not know and refraining from walking alone after dark be-
cause they fear that some man might attack them. If a young woman
accepts a ride from a man late at night and accompanies him to his
apartment, though she has never met him before, she is trusting a
stranger. She may or may not be assaulted as a result, but she is taking
great risks. Such trust is careless and foolish, not virtuous. To say this
is not to fall into the trap of blaming the victim. Obviously, any
assault is the responsibility of the assailant, and he is properly blamed
Why Trust? 11
for it. If a young woman is assaulted after accepting a ride unwisely, it

remains that case that she is the victim; she did not wrong the other,
and she is not blameworthy for the assault itself. Nevertheless, her
trust was careless and ill-founded, and she trusted foolishly.
Trust is necessary for relationships and society to work smoothly.
We need it to cooperate, and only through trust can we rely on each
other for knowledge. Trust has been called "social capital," a social
good that facilitates economic growth and development. Trusting, we
see the best in other people. The fact that trust is in so many ways
presupposed by other goods makes it natural to think that trust itself
is good. And talk of the benefits of trust in society, which are neces-
sarily couched in general terms, may seem to imply that it is always
good.8 Another factor which may make this assumption seem plau-
sible is that, from an internal point of view, the position of one who
trusts, trust cannot be separated from value judgments. When we
trust others, we expect them to do what we regard as good or benefi-
cial and not to do what we consider evil or harmful.. Thus we trust
our friends to be sympathetic and responsive, to keep us company, to
be dependable about arrangements; these are things we regard as
necessary and good. We trust our friends not to betray confidences or
gossip about us behind our backs; these are things we consider harm-
ful and bad. Each person makes judgments of trust and distrust with
reference to his or her own values. When we distrust people, we sus-
pect or fear that they will do things harmful to us, things we regard as
wrong. A woman who distrusts her babysitter enough to set up a sur-
veillance mechanism fears that the babysitter is neglecting or abusing
the child.
Remarks such as "You can trust that treasurer to confuse the
accounting every time" or "You can trust a specialist to leave out
everything important" are ironical. Needless to say, we do not want
treasurers to confuse the accounting or specialists to omit important
matters; in such comments we express our belief that they will nev-
ertheless do so. What is meant is that we can expect these people to
make mistakes; we can (also ironically) "count on" them to do some-
thing unwanted.
Trust is a necessary condition of many other good things, and each
of us, from his or her own point of view, makes judgments of trust
from the perspective of expectations of benefit and harm, based on
personal values. These phenomena suggest that trust is a "good
thing." And indeed, it often is good, being in many cases based
on understanding and a reasonable and flexible open-mindedness,
and generally expressing a positive attitude towards other people.
Other things being equal, trust is a good; other things being equal, an
12 Dilemmas of Trust
attitude of trust is preferable to one of distrust. But other things are

not always equal. In some contexts, and with some people, it is nec-
essary and right to be suspicious.
In a trusting relationship there are two sides: the one who trusts
and the one who is trusted. Ideally, each person trusts and is trusted
in turn. Within a relationship, trust is less risky when the trusted per-
son is trustworthy. A trustworthy person is one who can be counted
on to be reliable, consistent, loyal, and dependable. When we count
on someone trustworthy, that person does not let us down. Suppose
that John and Michel are friends; each trusts the other, and both are
trustworthy within the relationship. From the point of view of trust,
their relationship would seem ideal: each trusts the other, and each is
trustworthy so far as his actions towards the other are concerned.
Neither puts the other at risk; each can count on the other; neither is
likely to betray the other. John and Michel can be open to each other,
talk easily together, readily understand each other, make and keep
arrangements, and work and play together. When small things go
wrong, their relationship is not jeopardized. Mutual trust enables
them to ride the bumps. If John fails in a small way - misses an
appointment or neglects to repay a small loan - Michel does not infer
that John is disloyal or uncaring; he simply assumes that something
has gone wrong. John forgot, was too busy, or was preoccupied with
other things; Michel knows that John is his friend, and he can accept
that John has other things on his mind too. All this suggests that
Michel and John have a good relationship and that their trust is
mutually beneficial and a good.
Relationships really do go better with trust; in fact, most go very
badly without it. But praise for trust cannot be unqualified: there are
moral caveats. When we think of a trusting relationship, the positive
moral tone of the word "trust" suggests a benign context. In the story
just told, John and Michel probably sound like nice people because of
the way the trust between them is described. John will trust Michel to
do things that he, John, thinks are good, and Michel will trust John on
the basis of his own values. If the two men have a close, trusting rela-
tionship, whether it is a friendship or a business partnership, they
probably share many values; this much can be inferred from the story
so far. But all this says nothing about who John and Michel are or
what they are doing. If the two men are bank robbers, terrorists, drug
traders, or pedophiles, the trust in their relationship is not a social
good. It serves their own relationship and projects and might be
deemed good with reference to their values and goals, but it will only
facilitate their harming other people. In such a case, it is misleading at
best to think of the trust between the two as contributing to "social
Why Trust? 13
capital" - that general availability of social connections which facili-

tates knowledge and economic development. If John and Michel are
drug dealers, then the fact that they have a smoothly working part-
nership, based on mutual trust and trustworthiness, is so much the
worse for the rest of us.9
Disturbing cases of trust and trustworthiness are described by
Primo Levi in his moving book The Drowned and the Saved. Levi writes
of Auschwitz, noting that the history of the camps has been recorded
almost exclusively by those who, like himself, never fathomed the
bottom. He suggests that it was the "worst" people who were the
fittest and who survived the camps; the "best" all died. To bear life
after the camps, Levi suggests, victims have amended their memories
so that the most painful things are screened out, fashioning for them-
selves a kind of consolatory truth. He discusses various forms and
degrees of collaboration in the camps, taking care not to blame any-
one for what they did under such utterly desperate circumstances.
Many prisoners were craftsmen accustomed to take pride in doing
good work. They were employed in the camps, where some did their
jobs well, thus preserving for themselves a degree of identity and
self-respect, while at the same time contributing to the appalling
death system. Some prisoners, a "special squad," were entrusted with
the running of the crematoria. These people were regarded by the
German camp administrators as trustworthy in their jobs; they were
trusted to continue in their "good work." Of such people, Levi com-
ments that love for a job well done is a deeply ambiguous virtue.
The use of such words as "trust" and "entrust" in the context of
Auschwitz is jarring because we are inclined to use "trust" according
to our own values, and we do not value the efficient running of these
camps. From the point of view of German camp officials, these
prisoners could be "trusted" to do their job; they were "trustworthy,"
so far as the internal operations of the camps were concerned. Obvi-
ously, such trust and trustworthiness are not to be commended from
an external moral point of view in which the efficient organizing and
running of death camps are not regarded as goods.10
Trust, then, is not always and in every respect a "good thing." It is
sometimes a good thing, sometimes not, depending on evidence, the
risks, the relationship, and the broader ethical context of that rela-
tionship. From his writings, we may infer that Primo Levi valued
trust but only in appropriate contexts. Acknowledging the ongoing
political violence after the Second World War and reflecting on such
horrors as the massive slaughter in Cambodia under the Khmer
Rouge, he states that he can see no need for political violence, that
any problem can be solved around a table provided that goodwill
and reciprocal trust are present. When Levi writes in this way, we
find trust in a more familiar context. When we think of it as an aspect
of relationships that may facilitate agreements and prevent violence
and atrocities, we find it in its natural moral context - facilitating
something good - and we deem it good. But that is not to say that
either trust or trustworthiness is always, in every context, good.
WHO TRUSTS? WHO IS TRUSTED?
This book is primarily about people trusting other people, as individ-

uals. These cases seem to me to be central ones and likely to be those
that we think about first when we hear about problems of trust, and
issues of trust. Interpersonal trust is a central factor in friendships, in
family life, and indeed in all good working relationships between
people. It is also the foundation of social trust, when we trust people
as anonymous individuals, in their roles in institutions and groups.
Without trust between individuals, we would not have trust within
and between groups and nations.
Interestingly, however, it is not only individual people whom we
trust. We also speak of trusting and distrusting animals, objects, insti-
tutions, nation states, and God himself. Before turning to my main
topic, which is personal and interpersonal trust, where the subjects
and objects of trust are individual human beings, I will make some
comments about these other cases, both because of their intrinsic
interest and because they serve to illustrate the wide range of con-
texts in which we speak of trust and distrust.
Animals
We often think of ourselves as trusting animals. For instance, it seems

clear that blind people trust their seeing-eye dogs. Watch a blind
person walking with his dog towards a curb. The dog stops; the man
stops. The dog moves ahead; the man follows. He trusts the dog to
guide him, to see whether there are dangers or obstacles. If the dog
goes ahead, the man does so as well, counting on the dog to have
made a good "judgment" about the obstacles that lie beyond. Dogs
may also be trusted to guard sheep or cattle, or even children and the
family home. Horses and donkeys can also be objects of trust. Tour-
ists riding donkeys on mountain paths have to learn that the animals
naturally keep to the outside of the path; after some moments of
panic, the rider is likely to learn to trust the donkey to know its way
and not fall off the precarious path.
Why Trust? 15
A somewhat different, and particularly dramatic, case of trusting

animals is that of Charles Russell and Maureen Enns, two researchers
from Canmore, Alberta, who spent four months living in a primitive
cabin in northeastern Siberia. Although the territory was heavily pop-
ulated by grizzly bears, Enns and Russell took no guns. Russell argues
that when grizzly bears lash out at people in such areas as Banff
National Park, they do so only because of the aggressive approach
that humans in the area have characteristically adopted. In these
places, humans tease bears with food, shoot rubber bullets at them,
chase them with helicopters, and wear bear bells that make an annoy-
ing sound. Russell says, "I go on trust. These are intelligent animals.
If people would put themselves in the bears' position, they might
understand them better." He and Enns encountered grizzlies fre-
quently and reported that they were able to keep themselves safe by
acting unprovocatively and speaking softly to the animals.11
It would appear, then, that animals can be the objects of our trust.
Furthermore, there is behavioural evidence suggesting that they can
be subjects of trust, that they themselves can trust or distrust. A dog
trusts its owner, but does not trust strangers, and so it barks loudly
when they approach the house. A horse trusts the girl who usually
rides it, but baulks when a new rider gets on. A dolphin trusts one
trainer, not another. Still more fascinating is the fact that animals
seem, in some contexts, to trust each other. In Peacemaking among Pri-
mates Francis de Waal describes how chimpanzees groom and stroke
each other to maintain peace. He quite naturally sees the animals as
seeking to reassure each other; they groom and stroke each other to
overcome animosities and conflicts. One might say that they do this
to restore trust.12
Objects
We speak as though even mundane everyday things can be the

objects of our trust. The social philosopher Rom Harre offers the
example of a mountaineer and his rope. Think of the man clinging to
a rope while he dangles over a cliff. He is counting on that rope to
support him. Similarly, a person might trust a life jacket to hold him
up should he fall into the water. In Katherine Govier's novel Angel
Walk a woman living on an island makes her two-year-old son wear a
life jacket all summer. The boy cannot swim, and his mother is relying
on the life jacket to keep him safe if there is an emergency. At the end
of the summer, they leave the island for the mainland, and she throws
the life jacket into the lake. It sinks. She had been wrong to trust that
jacket: if her son had fallen into the water, the jacket would not have
supported him.13
We may also think of trusting or distrusting computer hardware or
software. A man buys an expensive new computer and the latest soft-
ware to enable him to do a complex accounting chore. If a number of
unexpected things go wrong, he may lose confidence in the system
and come to be suspicious of it. The system does not seem to function
as it should; it is unreliable. Perhaps there is something wrong with
the hardware or the software, or both. In an indirect sense, people are
still involved when we speak of trusting such objects as life jackets,
ropes, and computers; it would be a mistake to think that we can
place our confidence in such objects instead of trusting people. (We
might trust a life jacket instead of a lifeguard, but then people manu-
factured, tested, and distributed the life jacket.) When we assume
that an object will serve its function, we are, in effect, assuming
that the various people who manufactured and marketed it did their
jobs honestly and properly. If these objects do not perform, someone
somewhere made a mistake. The complexity of computers is such
that mistakes somewhere along the line are quite probable. Any com-
puter user has learned that trust, or confidence, in computers should
be qualified, and precautionary measures such as making back-up
files should be taken.14
The Dead
Would it make sense to trust someone who is dead? The question

seems at first a silly one, but it has been raised and taken seriously,
and it raises some interesting issues.15 Trusting means positive expec-
tations about how another's actions will affect us. Expectations bear
on the future; trust and distrust are attitudes that look forward. We
might naturally think, then, that if the dead are truly and literally
dead, they cannot act. And if this is the case, it would seem that they
cannot do anything that would affect us and cannot properly be the
objects of our trust or distrust. Of course, the matter changes if we
assume that the dead are not so in the complete sense, but live on in
heaven, hell, or some other realm and are capable of intervening in
events on earth. In Charles Dickens's well-known story "A Christmas
Carol" Ebenezer Scrooge's old partner, Marlowe, appears from a
world beyond the grave to convince Scrooge that he must change his
way of life. Marlowe comes back "from death" and talks. Scrooge,
terrified and confronted with Marlowe's powers and presentations,
does trust him, to the extent of believing him and reforming on the
basis of his exposure to Christmases past, present, and future. In this
Why Trust? 17
story, being dead does not prevent Marlowe from acting. In fact, his
post-mortal status and powers give him a unique authority.
If the dead live on and can affect us, then they can act benignly
or malevolently towards us, and it makes sense to trust or distrust
them. In this metaphysical framework, questions of whether to trust
the dead really do arise. However, for many modern readers, such
assumptions will not seem plausible. If we assume, on the contrary,
that the dead literally are dead, then it will follow that they cannot act
after death. From this viewpoint, it makes no sense to trust or distrust
dead people in terms of expecting them to do various things that may
affect us.
Nevertheless, people sometimes speak of trusting or not trusting
those long dead. One might say, for instance, "I wouldn't trust Kant
on sexual morality. After all, he was a bachelor all his life." That is to
say that Kant is not to be believed, should not be regarded as a trust-
worthy source, on matters of sexual morality. The claim is that when
Kant speaks to us about sexual morality, he is not to be believed
because he lacked the necessary experience to write about this topic.
Kant does speak to us, though not in the metaphysical manner in
which Marlowe spoke to Scrooge. Though dead, Kant speaks to us
through his writings, and because this is so, for those of us who read
him, issues of trust may arise.
Consider another example. A grandmother dies and leaves a will
in which nothing is provided directly to her grandchildren; she is
relying on their parents to make arrangements for them. The question
then arises as to whether this will was a sound and appropriate one,
whether her arrangements were realistic. One of her children might
express confidence in her mother, saying that she could nearly always
be trusted to do the right thing. But the reference is to actions the
grandmother took before her death. What lies in the future is the
impact of the will and how her adult children will handle it. In this
sort of case, trusting a woman after she is dead would mean believing
that she showed good judgment in the way she drew up the will, that
the arrangements she specified would work well.
Groups and Institutions
As for institutions and groups, we often speak of trusting or distrust-

ing the city council, the Hudson's Bay Company, Revenue Canada, the
Alberta government, France as a nation state, or the United Nations.
We express our confidence or trust in the postal service when we mail
a letter; our level of trust in another nation state when we vote
for arms and disarmament politics; our distrust in a bank if, having
i8 Dilemmas of Trust
noticed many errors in its administration of our account, we cancel

that account and move our money elsewhere.
Trust in individuals and trust in institutions often interact and go
together. Consider, for instance, the case of a volunteer mediator
working under the auspices of the Better Business Bureau. Two dis-
puting parties come to meet with her. The situation of mediation calls
for trust: given that they have come for mediation, these parties, who
are in a situation of some conflict and stress, have indicated that they
trust the mediator to be impartial, not to divulge confidences, to
understand them, and to have the skill and motivation to work with
their case. If they reach an agreement, they must trust the mediator to
state that agreement accurately and handle the necessary paperwork
appropriately. If their case has been submitted to a court and has been
resolved in mediation, it must be withdrawn at the right time and in
the right way. Disputing parties have enough trust in the Better Busi-
ness Bureau as an institution to submit their case. When they meet the
mediator for the first time, they have to trust her at least enough to
begin; they do this because they trust the surrounding institutions.
Then, as the mediation proceeds, they will build on this trust or lose it
depending on how the mediator acts as an individual. Her actions in
turn will be based on mediation training, which has come from
practitioners schooled under the auspices of such institutions as the
Alberta Arbitration and Mediation Society or the Justice Institute of
British Columbia. If the mediator is not trustworthy as an individual,
the disputing parties are likely to lose confidence in the Better Busi-
ness Bureau and related institutions. But if there were no confidence
in such institutions, they would not come for mediation in the first
place. The case illustrates the fact that interpersonal and institutional
trust may depend on each other.16
Trust is an attitude based on the past and extending into the future;
it reduces the complexity of the world for us, but leaves us with some
risk. It is in all these cases a matter of positive expectations and dispo-
sitions: we confidently assume, usually on the basis of partial, not
complete, evidence, that the trusted thing will perform in such a way
that we will not be harmed. When we trust, we assume that compe-
tence and appropriate motivations on the part of the agents in ques-
tion underlie this expected performance. This can be said implicitly of
animals and of institutions (because people function within them),
but it cannot be said of ropes and life jackets or of the literally dead.
In these cases, there is neither competence nor motivation, except
indirectly, through the trustworthiness of people who are capable of
action. When we trust objects, we assume that those objects will func-
tion adequately, that they will do what they have been made to do
Why Trust? 19
and what we are counting on them to do; we are, in effect, trusting

that people have made them properly. And when we trust the dead,
we imply that we can rely on, or count on, what they have left behind
- products they created when they were alive.
God
For religious believers, trust in God is paramount. It is a unique and

special case, one that is profoundly important and likely, through reli-
giously derived conceptions of human nature, to affect attitudes of
trust towards individual people and institutions. For some, belief in a
Christian God is reason to trust human beings, whom they regard
as creatures made in God's image. For others, such belief warrants
acceptance of original sin, and it provides a basis for generalized sus-
picion and distrust. Religious beliefs have supported inclusive sys-
tems, a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood among all human beings.
They have also supported exclusive systems, in which a contrast
between True Believers and the Others is the basis for suspicion of
outsiders. Whatever the effects of religious belief are on our attitudes
to other people, there are bound to be some.
In the case of trusting God himself (or herself), trust is closely tied
to faith. There are at least three dimensions to this trust. One, a pre-
suppositional dimension, is faith in the existence of God. In order for
the question of trusting God to arise, one must believe (and that on
the basis of objectively insufficient evidence) that he exists. A second
dimension is trust in God as an agent in human history, involving a
sense that he is somehow implicated in its direction and meaning.
The belief that God exists and has some role in history implies a dis-
position to interpret historical events in ways consistent with those
beliefs, and it may greatly affect the meaning given to those events, as
can be seen in Jewish and Christian fundamentalist beliefs about the
significance of the establishment of the state of Israel. A third dimen-
sion of trust in God is a sense that he with whom one communicates
in prayer is a divine force with a role in one's personal existence and
the meaning of events in one's own life.
Clearly, such matters are profoundly important for religious believ-
ers and affect their attitudes towards human nature and the trustwor-
thiness of other human beings. But such issues will not be explored in
this book because they do not arise for agnostics, of whom I am one.
Whether God exists or not, we have to conduct relationships with
other people, whom we may trust or distrust, and we have to manage
our own actions and emotions, which raises questions about our trust
in ourselves.17
2O Dilemmas of Trust
In this book I do not explore issues related to trust in animals,

objects, dead people, or God. Questions of social, institutional, and
political trust are discussed only insofar as they are inseparably con-
nected to interpersonal trust.18 My interest here is in trusting our-
selves and trusting other people as individuals. Thus the book is
about personal and interpersonal trust and distrust, about grounds
for these attitudes, and about means for managing distrust and seek-
ing to restore trust, when appropriate.
CHAPTER TWO
The Focus of Friendship
We human beings are naturally interdependent and unwilling to

spend our lives alone. Part of being human is needing other humans.
To enjoy life, we need to share and construct it with others. We cannot
flourish as human beings unless we take an interest in other people
for their own sakes, and this we do primarily through friendships.
Friendship is not the only relationship where trust is important; atti-
tudes of trust and distrust are highly significant in all human relation-
ships. Nevertheless, it provides an important context for reflecting on
the nature and significance of trust, because trust is absolutely central
and necessary to it. Trust is certainly possible, and actual, outside
friendship. But friendship is not possible without trust.
WHAT IS F R I E N D S H I P ?
Being a friend is not a fixed role in life. We expect friends to be avail-

able to do things, to hear us out, to be loyal, and to provide help or
care when we really need them. And we expect ourselves to do the
same for them. We count on, rely on, and trust our friends. We our-
selves, in the role of friends, are expected and trusted to do various
things and to accept various obligations towards our friends. Friend-
ship is an informal, largely undefined relationship that people can
negotiate and construct for themselves. Friends have differing rela-
tionships, and their expectations of each other also vary.
The fluidity and openness in friendship is one of the things that
makes trust between friends so important. There is no determinate
list of things a friend should do, no fixed role specifying just what
it is to be a friend. We choose what to do with our friends. We trust
them to be there for us, to go on liking us, to be loyal, to keep confi-
dences, to share with us, to care for us; and we expect ourselves to
do the same for them. But just how much is required is flexible.
In thinking of someone as our friend, we trust that person to do the
right thing for us and know what that is.
It is no accident that we speak of people making friends. Friends
find each other, choose each other, and construct a relationship. In
making friends, we respond with affection to a whole person. Most
fundamentally, we value a friend as a whole person, not because she
is witty, athletic, white, Chinese, a Christian, a musician or psycholo-
gist, but for the particular person that she is. Friendship is based on
affinity and similarity, but also on difference: the chosen friend is
different from other people we know and is treated differently. The
aspect of friendship most discussed in contemporary moral philoso-
phy is just this: friendship is partial and thus apparently at odds with
the impartiality that a moral perspective seems to demand. We can-
not love everyone equally or be friends equally with all. In modern
industrial societies, most people have between three and seven
friends, but between five hundred and twenty-five hundred acquain-
tances.1 We may like and enjoy our acquaintances, but a relationship
that is merely one of acquaintance is not characterized by mutual
care or intimacy, and hence is not a friendship and not necessarily a
relationship of trust.
When we develop friendships, we have contacts based on some
degree of mutual attraction. We talk together, do things together,
come to like each other, talk more intimately, acknowledge each
other, and help and care for each other. As friends, we feel a bond,
feel committed to each other. We appreciate the fine and special qual-
ities of our friends: one's warmth and patience; another's keen mind,
fairness, and sense of humour; still another's idealism and deep gen-
erosity. And we feel cherished and valued by our friends, whom we
have chosen and who have chosen us. We are born into families and
exercise only limited choice as to our co-workers and colleagues, but
we choose our friends. When friendship lapses into a sense of tired
duty, it is friendship no longer. In a meaningful friendship, there is
mutual care and trust. Each friend cares for and supports the other,
and receives care from the other in return. Helping the friend, we are
at the same time actualizing or realizing ourselves.
Trust that the other person will grow and develop, and that we are
able to care for her as she does so, gives us courage to go ahead with
projects and activities. Having friends, we can better face and accept
the risks in life and proceed confidently. To care for another person,
we must be able to see inside that person's world as though we our-
selves were inside it and have a sense of what life is like for him or
her, what that person is striving to be, and what he or she requires
The Focus of Friendship 23
for growth. As friends, we help one another to grow and develop,

sometimes nurture and protect, advise or exhort. In deep friend-
ships, we can encourage the striving and development of another
person without losing ourselves. We can feel life's triumphs and
tragedies in the heart of another and reach out to that heart without
diminishing our own lives.2
Friends enjoy being together, like each other, and may even love
each other. They share confidences and care for one another. Each
appreciates and cherishes" the other for what he or she is. Friends
meet some of our deepest needs. This fulfilment would not be possi-
ble were it not that we like or love our friends for themselves, for
what they are. If our involvement with our friends were purely self-
centred, we would not regard them as independently worthy beings;
they would not be our moral equals or individuals with whom we
could grow and share our experiences. If we were purely self-centred
in our friendships, our attitude would be implicitly exploitative. An
exploitative "friendship" is not a friendship at all, but only a pre-
tence at one. A friend is another self, an equal self, and we trust our
friends to value us in this way. We trust that the social surface of
friendship - that it is an affectionate, caring relationship - is also
its reality: the friend genuinely likes and values us as persons and is
not merely using us for some purpose of his own. True friendship
requires valuing and cherishing another person as a separate being
with his or her own emotions, needs, insights, and position in the
world. If the other person is not seen in this way, he or she is not
acknowledged and accepted as a person in his or her own right, but
only as an instrument to fill another's needs and desires. The sup-
posed friend who cultivates a relationship only to make better career
connections or visit a summer cottage is not a true friend. Neither is
he or she a person to be trusted.
Through friends, we extend our experience of the world. We hear
our friends' stories and jokes, share their hopes and fears, participate
in their successes and failures. Metaphorically as well as literally,
where our friend has travelled, we can go. If she is raising a handi-
capped child, we may gain a sense of the struggles, pains, and joys
from years of hearing her experiences. We acquire understanding
and appreciation for aspects of life that we have not directly expe-
rienced. C.S. Lewis put it this way: "We want to be more than our-
selves ... we want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other
imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as our own."3 Because
we have friends, we experience more of the world. They tell us their
stories and their problems. From them we learn a style of response
that may be different from our own. In this way, friendship provides
an opportunity for moral growth. Through our friends, who share

their experiences with us, we gain new insights and a chance to ex-
pand and amend our own ideas. A friend can tell us what harms her,
what offends her, what gives her courage and hope, what sorts of
initiatives she would take. Not only do friends give us company, sup-
port, and joy, but they open new windows on the world by providin
us with vicarious experience. To a degree, we can become these other
selves. Friends enlarge our world, and it is trusting intimacy that
makes this enlargement possible.
Our joys and successes are heightened, our sorrows lessened, when
they are shared with friends. Human beings naturally seek out others.
Aristotle said long ago that without friends life would not be worth
living, and this claim holds true for most people today. When things
are going well, we seek conversation, fun, and good times with our
friends. We seek pleasure in their company, and company for our mu-
tual pleasure. If things go badly, friends are a source of help and con-
solation, lightening our burden of worry and despair. Solitude is
sometimes to be cherished, but its pleasures and consolations exist by
contrast. Were we never to have the company of good friends, life
would be a misery. Human beings are not by nature solitary. In most
prison systems, being put "in solitary" is one of the worst forms
of punishment. Our nature is to go outside ourselves, to seek other
people to enjoy and love, empathize and identify with, care for and
cherish. We need and want these relationships, naturally seek them,
and are lonely and miserable if we cannot find and retain them.
In 7 and Thou Martin Buber said: "It is not as if a child first saw an
object and then entered into some relationship with that. Rather, the
longing for relation is primary ...In the beginning is the relation as a cat-
egory of being, as readiness, as a form that reaches out to be filled, as
a model of the soul ... the innate you."4 Buber emphasized intimate
interpersonal relationships, which he understood to be the founda-
tion for truly human development. A child comes into the world with
an instinct and need to relate to other human beings. It is the nature of
human beings to seek out another: I seek You. The connection is fun-
damental: without You, there is no I. The Self alone is incomplete,
reaching out for relation like a cupped, outstretched hand waiting to
be filled. The other person is not an object to use and manipulate,
but a living being who can be present to us in a reciprocal relation-
ship. In human encounter that is genuine and complete, we accept
and acknowledge the Other. This does not always mean harmony of
purpose or belief. We may disagree; we may confront. Intimacy is
not the same thing as harmony, and it need not be grounded in same-
ness. Where we differ in response, in feeling, or in belief, we should
acknowledge and communicate those differences. Failing to do so will

cut us off from each other.
A special feature of friendship is intimate talk, which clearly pre-
sumes trust. Trusting our friends to take an interest, to sympathize, to
understand, and not to betray confidences, we tell them what has
happened to us, how we feel, what worries us, what excites us. Much
of the joy of friendship is due to the fact that with friends we can
divulge our feelings; we need not try to keep up a front or make an
impression. Confident that our friends appreciate and respond to us
for what we are, we feel relaxed. We need not pretend; we can be our-
selves. Friends tell each other things that they would not tell just any-
one, trusting each other to keep them confidential.
Such exchanges are central and important in friendships, especially
those between women. Psychologists refer to such revelations as "self-
disclosure": we disclose ourselves when we reveal our experiences,
emotions, and needs to our friends. This sort of intimacy is a key to the
joy and healing force of friendship. Being intimate is not only an emo-
tional relief; it contributes to our knowledge of our own selves and
our own feelings. By talking things over, we come better to know our-
selves, gaining an enhanced awareness of who, what, and how we are.
From a moral point of view, we can grow and develop. To a friend we
may confide anxiety about a child or a concern about personal unat-
tractiveness. In such contexts, we may receive advice or reassurance.
But if not, there is still relief in simply telling someone. Joys too are
better for being shared. Excited about a new relationship, promotion,
hobby, or pregnancy, most people feel the urge to tell someone. Who?
Families and lovers, of course, but also - and most significantly -
friends.
In his famous essay on friendship, Aristotle claimed that it was the
very basis of human flourishing. Plato had regarded friendships as
phenomena of the fluctuating, unstable, and devalued world of sen-
sory experience, and as requiring justification with regard to some-
thing higher than this mundane life. According to Plato, friendships
could be so justified because our love for our friends (based, Plato
thought, on their physical attractiveness or beauty) could lead us to
the appreciation of beauty in other people and ultimately the eternal
form, Beauty Itself. Unlike Plato, Aristotle valued friendship for itself,
as it exists in the experienced world. That we seek and value friends
testifies to our social nature: human beings do not want to live alone.
Aristotle regarded friendship as an expression of human nature and a
necessary condition of human society. He distinguished true friend-
ships from those based purely on pleasure or utility. People (for
him this meant free men; he assumed that women and slaves were
incapable of friendship) could have friends of pleasure, with whom

they enjoyed activities, or friends of utility, who were useful to them
for some purpose or other. But Aristotle believed that the deepest and
best friendships were founded on mutual appreciation of good moral
character.5 In perfect friendships, people support each other in their
virtue. Their mutual knowledge of their virtuous characters is the
basis for their trust in each other; each can be confident that the other
would not wrong or betray him.
The moral seriousness of friendship has also been a theme in
some contemporary philosophy. In his book Living Morally, Laurence
Thomas explains the friendship as a relationship in which friends
develop their moral characters and help each other to become the best
people they can. Friends are not afraid to "tell it like it is" when they
see each other going astray, Thomas says. They work out together
how to behave in life, what sort of life to lead, and what sort of person
to be.6 These comments fit many friendships of early adult life, when
young people are chosing educational programs, careers, and mates.
Struggling to shape their adult lives, many young people exhaus-
tively explore possibilities with others. Often, parents or other adults
do not play the key role of listening patiently and engaging in endless
discussions; rather, the friends of late adolescence who together work
out what is worth doing, how one can do it, and how best to live.
But virtue and the development of moral character and a way of life
are certainly not all there is to friendship. It is more than cooperative
moral criticism and mutual cultivation of virtue. Shared pleasure and
plain fun are also important. Typically, friends enjoy each other's
company, being together, and doing things together. They may dine
together, swim together, see movies together, sing or dance together,
or share other favoured pursuits. Friendship brings joy and pleasure.
For all his emphasis on virtue, Aristotle also granted that pleasure
was a feature of friendships. In fact, he judged friendships based on
pleasure to be more authentic than those based purely on the useful-
ness of the friend. Where there is pleasure, there is some valuing of
the relationship for its own sake and not merely as a means to some
further purpose. A friend of utility is one with whom we have
friendly relations because she is useful to us - a woman we play
tennis with because we both need exercise or another whose well-
behaved children make convenient playmates for our own. There is
nothing wrong with these useful relationships as such, provided that
they are understood to be what they are and not confused with deeper
friendships.
Kinships are unalterable and unchosen, making them different
from friendship, which is a voluntary relationship. A sibling, aunt, or
cousin may become a friend as well, but it is still one thing to be a

relative and another to be a friend. Friendship is essentially a rela-
tionship of equality, hard to sustain where there are significant dis-
parities of age or status between people. At its best the relationship
between parents and their adult children can be wonderful and ful-
filling on both sides. But even when it is, it lacks equality. The parent
has known the child from birth, has known his or her vulnerabilities
and dependencies over a lifetime, and has played a large and essen-
tial role in making that child into the adult that he or she has become.
The adult child remembers this; so does the parent. In such circum-
stances, parent and adult child are not, and can never become,
psychological equals.7 To become so, they would have to do the
impossible: blot out the past. Between the parent and an adult child
there lies always the history of the childhood itself: the memory of
long phases of adult authority and care and nearly complete depen-
dence on the part of the child. These factors continue to count against
equality, even if an aged parent has become completely dependent
for her own care on the child she nurtured decades ago. Our parents
can never be our equals, and for this reason even the best relation-
ships between parents and children are not in the fullest sense friend-
ships.
Nor is the relation of neighbour the same as that of friend. We do
not choose our neighbours; we move somewhere and find them. If
we are lucky, we trust them and enjoy their company, but neighbours
as such are not friends. A good neighbour is available for casual
chats, occasional help, and recourse during emergencies. We may ask
him to fetch the mail and papers or watch the house when we travel;
we may do similar small chores for him. Like friends, good neigh-
bours trust each other. But trust between neighbours is restricted to
particular functions and is not as full and deep as the trust between
good friends. Typically, with neighbours there is little intimacy or
deliberate cultivation of shared activities. If we are fortunate, our
neighbours are amiable, helpful, and undisturbing. Some of them
may become our friends. But to be a neighbour, even a good neigh-
bour, is not yet to be a friend.
The same can be said of the relationship of co-worker. With our
co-workers we have important activities and training in common and
ample opportunity for contact. We see co-workers daily and may talk
and chat with them frequently. Still, the relation of co-worker as such
differs from that of friend. It does not typically involve intimacy,
shared activities outside work, or choice of relationship. The career
ethos of some social groups and the scarcity of prized jobs in pro-
fessions leads many people to move to find suitable work. Often, we
rely on work situations to provide a basis for our social life, which
can lead us to seek friends primarily among colleagues. In congenial
working situations, we have cordial relations with co-workers. We
are certainly familiar with them, and if we are lucky, we trust them in
their roles on the job and depend on them to be pleasant and support-
ive. But relationships with colleagues are largely defined by working
roles. For this reason, they are not friendships. To confuse such rela-
tionships with friendships is likely to put stress on them and inhibit
people from seeking genuine friendships off the job.
This tendency was illustrated in several popular television situation
comedies of the seventies. On Mary Tyler Moore the central character,
Mary, worked in a newsroom. Whenever she gave a party, all her
co-workers were invited. One episode even had her say, "You guys are
my family." Another popular show of the same period, WKRP in Cin-
cinnati, featured a group of people working at a marginally successful
rock radio station. It also portrayed camaraderie and closeness among
colleagues. When disc jockey Johnny Fever thinks God is talking to
him, he turns to co-workers Andy and Venus and eventually to his
boss, Mr Carlson, to try to find out what it means and whether he is
going crazy. The popular television series M.A.S.H., which dealt with
an American medical unit based in Korea during the fifties, was
similar. Isolated from family and other friends by war, the central
characters were depicted as extremely close friends supporting each
other through bizarre wartime tribulations.
But there is a crucial respect in which such depictions are mislead-
ing. We rarely choose our colleagues, and when we do, it should not
be primarily on the basis of personal liking or affection. We function
with them in institutional or professional roles. To develop a relation-
ship of collegiality into one of friendship requires extending it out-
side the workplace and developing a broader range of shared activity,
intimacy, loyalty, and more personal bonds. Whatever the old televi-
sion sitcoms may suggest, there is a difference between co-workers
and friends.
A variation on the colleague is the comrade, or co-worker in the
context of a voluntary organization working for a common goal. Such
cooperative work provides the context for many activities and im-
portant conversations. Comrades share disappointments and accom-
plishments. In the nature of the case, they are likely to have important
beliefs and ideals in common. If they like each other, become intimate,
and develop bonds of personal loyalty, the relationship of comrade
becomes one of friend. But unless and until this happens, comrades
are not friends. They are loyal, not to each other and a special relation-
ship, but to something outside themselves: the common goal.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a recent chronicler of North American

friendships, cites two other relationships to be distinguished from
friendship: pals and confederates. Pals enjoy doing things together,
often pairing up for one particular activity. They get together and
have fun, but they are not exactly friends. Their relationship is based
on common enjoyment of some activity, not on affection and loyalty
to each other. Pogrebin gives an example of two men who jogged to-
gether for many months, enjoying each other's company and having
interesting intellectual conversations. When one moved a few kilo-
metres away, the jogging ceased and so did their relationship. These
men were pals, not friends. Confederates are more like friends of
utility. They have the sort of relationship where they use each other
to a common purpose: the joker and the straight man, for instance, or
the popular girl and the shy girl. The popular girl feels more secure
flirting when she is with someone else who is no competition in
sexual terms. The shy girl acquires status and vicarious excitement
because she has a popular "friend." So they go about together, each
meeting the needs of the other. Confederates have a friendship of
utility.
Horst Hutter, the author of a recent monograph on friendship,
maintains that deep friendships are comparatively rare in contempo-
rary industrialized societies because people tend to interact within
patterns required by institutionalized roles.8 The teacher chats with
the principal; the professor meets with her student; the dentist asks
his patient about his holiday; the boss has lunch with the secretary.
When they run smoothly, these relationships may be enjoyable and
friendly. But they are largely structured by social roles, and for that
reason they do not amount to friendships. When they work well,
there is reliability and trust, but not the intimate trust of friendship.
Little intimacy is possible in such contacts, and the equality that is
characteristic of friendship is often missing from them.
What Hutter suggests is illustrated by the case of Judy and Karen,
who did not become friends because social roles kept them apart.
Judy first met Karen when her daughter Anna was nine and had to
change schools. Anna had been placed in a school for the gifted.
Then, though bright and precocious, she was unable to handle its
demands and moved back to the neighbourhood school. Judy and
her husband had not quite agreed on how to respond to the problem,
and Judy was terribly upset. Karen was the principal of that neigh-
borhood school. Judy arrived in her office, nearly in tears, to tell
Anna's story and plead for a place for her in this "ordinary" school.
Right away she liked Karen, who struck her as warm, sympathetic,
and understanding and seemed at the same time highly competent.
She felt that she could have poured out her heart to Karen and would
have loved to have her as a friend. But the roles of "principal" and
"parent" were the basis of the connection between Karen and Judy,
and they worked to kept them apart. Karen had so much authority
and responsibility. Though well educated and articulate, Judy could
not be Karen's equal in the school, which was the only context where
they ever met. She always liked and admired Karen, but was never
able to break through the barrier of those roles, parent and principal.
How could she ask "the principal" to go to a movie or out for coffee?
Over the next several years, Judy saw Karen many times and talked
with her occasionally at meetings and on the phone. Their liking was
mutual, but they never became friends because social roles inter-
fered.
Modern social life contains many obstacles to friendship: lack of
time, social and geographic mobility, feelings of competitiveness and
resentment, urban isolation, fears of violence. Hutter finds in industri-
alized societies widespread attitudes of competitiveness, resentment,
and suspicion, which, he says, create a formidable barrier against
against civil social relations and still more against meaningful friend-
ships. He fears a developing "commodification" of social relations,
wherein colleagues, acquaintances, and even sexual partners come to
be treated as things that we need to possess. Modern society, he
claims, is structured so as to make us need friends and intimacy, but
at the same time it reduces our opportunities for friendship and inti-
macy. We tend to be isolated and occupy ourselves largely with pri-
vate concerns; these factors work against friendship. But at the same
time they make us need trusting friendships more than ever. Hutter
suggests that the result is that lonely people set out on a frantic search
for sexual intimacy.
But this bleak analysis seems to be based on armchair social criti-
cism rather than on specific empirical data about friends and friend-
ships. Studies indicate that even busy North Americans have several
close friends, deeply value their friendships, and would like to spend
more time with friends.9 Despite mobility, stress, consumerism, com-
petitiveness, and resentment, we do have friends, and we trust and
rely on them. We value our friends and try - sometimes a little des-
perately - to make time for them. To be sure, there are in modern life
many obstacles to the development of friendships. But judging from
common experience and the evidence cited in other accounts of
friendship, most people succeed in making and maintaining friends
and find their friendships extremely rewarding.
Friendship is a close reciprocal relationship between two equal peo-
ple who care deeply for each other, enjoy snared activities, exchange
confidences, know each other well, are loyal to each other, and want
to spend time together. It is a chosen relationship: friends together
construct their shared activities, their expectations of each other, and
their mutual obligations. We find and make friends and friendships,
structuring relationships according to mutual desire, need, and possi-
bilities. The relation of friend is different from that of lover, parent
or relative, colleague, comrade, neighbour, confederate, or pal. Our
friendships nourish and replenish us and are a source of fun and joy.
They provide a context for building a meaningful life, our character -
indeed, our very selves.
Time is a limited resource that we give to our good friends, and its
scarcity is one of the things that makes friendship special. We trust
our friends, who are special to us, and part of this trust is our confi-
dence that we are special for them too: they care about us enough to
take time for us. As in other relationships characterized by trust, we
allow ourselves to be vulnerable in friendship. We open ourselves to
another's pains and problems, not only to his or her triumphs. If
friendship ends, we are likely to be sorry, often hurt. If it ends in
betrayal, we are bound to be hurt. Are friendships worth the risk?
The question does not really arise: human beings by nature want,
seek, and enjoy friendship.10
TRUST AND F R I E N D S H I P
Deep friendships illustrate all the central aspects of intimate trust

between human beings. This trust is based on shared experience and
intimate knowledge of the other person. With such a background,
we make the unquestioning assumption that the friend is loyal
and dependable. We take it for granted that she will not betray us
and that we can count on her to care for us, to help out in emer-
gencies, and to be reliable about minor matters. We have experi-
enced this support already; we feel that we know her, and we expect
her loyalty and dependability to continue into the future. This trust
involves positive expectations grounded in experience. But those ex-
pectations transcend the experience; we assume our friendships will
move forward into the future, even when circumstances change. We
take for granted that our friends will continue to like us and act well
towards us.
Friendships are based on choice, affection, and attachment. With a
friend, we have a sense of being liked and valued for ourselves: that
is how friends act towards one another. We trust that the friend is
not just pretending, that he or she genuinely does like and value us.
Trusting, feeling accepted by another whom we regard as a worthy
and dependable person, we are assured in our self-esteem. We feel

safe and secure with our friends. We have a confident expectation
that good, not harm, will come to us from this relationship; friends
are people we trust. These positive expectations are based on our
sense of the friend's integrity and genuine affection.
We have a positive attitude towards our friends and interpret their
actions in a positive way. If a friend makes a slightly ambiguous and
possibly insulting remark ("You sure look tired" or "That's a rather
dramatic purple vest you're wearing"), we do not take offence. We
trust her, feel confident that she likes us, and interpret the comment
as non-insulting. Trusting our friends means that we can feel relaxed
with them. We are at ease. We are willing to let ourselves be vulnera-
ble.11 In the context of friendship, trust means that we expect affec-
tion, loyalty, and dependability; we feel confident and relaxed;
we interpret what the friend says and does in a positive way; we can
accept our own vulnerability.
Trust in this sense is absolutely necessary for friendship. If we
distrust another person, we are anxious and doubtful about her
responses to us; we worry about how she will act; we feel uncertain
about what she means and suspicious when minor things go wrong.
In the company of a person whom we distrust, we feel uneasy. We
cannot relax; we cannot be open and intimate because we are fearful
that the amiability of the other person may be on the surface only.
Perhaps she seeks to use us, exploit us; perhaps she is only pretend-
ing to like us; perhaps she will betray us, let us down. We feel inse-
cure, nervous, perhaps even fearful. Obviously such a relationship
cannot be one of friendship. A friend is someone we find affection-
ate, supportive, and loyal, someone whom we believe will stand by
us, someone we trust. We can have many different relationships with
people whom we do not trust, but friendship is not one of them.
When we trust friends, there are things we assume that they will
not do. They will not deceive and manipulate us, try to exploit us, or
use us merely to gain access to other people or material advantages.
They will not spy on us - not have detectives follow us, go through
our correspondence, or report us to authorities. They will not make
fun of us behind our backs, divulge our confidences, steal our money,
or sexually abuse our children. Our friends have it in their power to
do terrible things to us, and we to them. A relationship of friendship
is based on an implicit assumption that such things will not happen.
Malicious harm, betrayal, and abuse are unthinkable. Positively, we
expect friends to be good for us, to do us good. But even more signif-
icant is the negative side: the vast range of possibly harmful things
that we feel confident our friends would not do.
In trusting our friends, we depend on them. We assume without

question that they will care for us by helping when we need support.
We count on them to stand by us in moments of emergency or per-
sonal crisis, and we expect ourselves to do the same for them. A char-
acteristic example is that of Robert, who was deserted by his wife and
left in charge of three distraught children at a time when he was terri-
bly disturbed himself. After months of juggling work, disturbed chil-
dren, and household chores, he desperately needed a few days to
himself. Robert called his old friend Laura and asked her to take care
of his children for a weekend. For Laura and her husband, who had
two lively boys themselves, the timing was not convenient. But see-
ing Robert's need, they came through.
Friends exchange confidences, have intimate communications, tell
each other things they would not tell just anyone. This confiding re-
quires trust that the other will listen and understand, will continue to
accept us, keep secrets, and not use confidential information against
us. Talking with friends means being able to tell them what we would
not tell just anyone and have our feelings and stories acknowledged.
A friend will empathize with us, react, comment, question, perhaps
contradict us, work out what things mean, share joys, commiserate,
seek solutions for problems. To share intimate confidences with an-
other person means trusting that person to accept and care, to be and
remain loyal. The fact that intimacy is essential to friendship means
that trust is essential too.
Intimate confidentiality is mutual: we not only tell things to our
friends, but we listen to what they have to say. And this too requires
trust: openness to the other, acceptance of her as a person in her own
right, as one who feels and experiences from her own viewpoint and
is honestly sharing her feelings and experiences. As friends, we listen
and hear gladly, sharing when we can share, responding with feeling
and honesty, differing gently and constructively when we differ.
We accept that a friend has her own perspective on the world, and we
take that perspective seriously even when it differs from our own.
What has happened to her? How did she feel? What did she think
about it, and how is she going to respond? We are interested because
she is a friend, and listening, we come to know. This openness also
requires trust. Our friends are other people whose feelings, beliefs,
and situation may differ significantly from our own. Because we
accept and care for them, we trust them to tell us the truth as they see
it, and we are open to learning from them.
Trust in a friend is based on shared experience and accumulated
knowledge over time. With a friend, we have played or worked to-
gether, shared joys and pains, lived through triumphs and crises. Trust
in a friend is based on accumulated evidence - sometimes a great deal

of evidence. Yet for all this evidence, for all the many years we may
have known our best friends, we can never say that we completely
know them. Changing circumstances may result in changes in people,
as in the case of the friend who has been relaxed, affectionate, and
flexible but later becomes tough and hard to keep in touch with when
she accepts more economic responsibility within her family. People
change, and so do circumstances. In trusting a friend, we assume that
that she will not cease to like us, that she will never betray us, that
whatever she does, whatever she becomes, she will seek to continue
our caring relationship. Of course, these are assumptions, and they
cannot be guaranteed, but in good friendships we make them without
question. In friendships, we reveal ourselves, give of ourselves, let
ourselves feel and care. For these reasons we can be hurt or harmed;
we are vulnerable. In being friends, we accept this risk. In fact, so com-
pletely do we accept our vulnerability that we are unlikely to recog-
nize it at all.12
Friendships can tolerate a certain degree of distrust, provided that
it is restricted to certain areas. We may know that a friend is careless
about small loans, and when we lend him twenty dollars, we may
doubt that we will ever get the money back. He is generally a trust-
worthy person, but careless about money. Or we may cherish a friend
and trust that he cares for us, while recognizing that he sometimes
overestimates his own ability to get things done and can be unreli-
able about the details of plans as a result. We like him and appreciate
him as a person, but would not trust him to proof-read a lengthy
technical manuscript or arrive on time with party treats for sixty peo-
ple. In good friendships, trust is central and strong. But that does not
mean that it must extend to every single aspect of a friend's behav-
iour. Friendships, after all, are between people who are imperfect and
know each other to be so.
According to a Psychology Today survey, adult Americans regarded
loyalty as the most important quality of a friend.13 This result points
to the centrality of trust in friendship: a loyal friend is one in whom
our trust is not misplaced. He or she is the friend we can count on,
one who cares for us as the person we are and not for our wealth,
reputation, beauty, popularity, or connections. The loyal friend is one
who will not betray us or let us down, who keeps our secrets, keeps
his or her promises, and comes through for us in emergencies. Trust-
worthiness in a friend is truly a necessary element for friendship.
However entertaining and fascinating he might be, the acquaintance
who tells tales behind our back or is pleasant because he wants an
invitation to the summer cottage is not a friend. If we know that he
does not keep confidences, he will not fulfil our needs the way a
friend does. More than anything else, a friend is an equal intimate
whom we trust and in whom that trust is not misplaced.
Trust is essential in virtually every aspect of friendship. It is built
into our understanding of who and what the friend is. We regard her
as affectionate and loving, as one who accepts and cherishes us for
what we are. We assume that we are special for her and she for us. We
allow her to know us, and she allows us to know her. She does not
hide herself from us; when she seems to be open with us, she is really
herself, not just someone trying to make an impression. She is what
she seems to be; she means what she seems to mean; we need not
probe through an appearance to access what might be underneath.14
If we sense that another person is pretending to be something that
she is not, or putting up a kind of screen between herself and us,
we cannot experience the very special pleasures of friendship. The
open and genuine communication of friendship requires intimacy
and openness between people who are freely committed to a frank
and honest relationship, a relationship that is special and acknowl-
edged to be so by both parties.
TRUST AND C H I L D R E N ' S F R I E N D S H I P S
Children's friendships are based to a large extent on play and shared

activities. Until adolescence, they play together more than they talk
together. Their friendships depend largely on proximity at home or at
school and, where such proximity is lacking, on cooperative support
by parents who make arrangements. There is evidence that children
as young as six are sensitive to violations of trust and regard trust-
worthiness as a key attribute of a friend. Peter Kahn and Elliot Turiel
interviewed children ranging in age from six to eleven to discover
their attitudes about trust and friendship. They asked questions based
on stories in which a friend failed to meet expectations.15 Kahn and
Turiel distinguished three categories of trust: moral trust, psychologi-
cal trust, and social-conventional trust. As they used these terms,
moral trust is the expectation that a friend would respect basic moral
principles - keeping promises, not lying, not stealing, and so on. Psy-
chological trust is the expectation that a friend will be understanding,
kind, and helpful when a person is in trouble and needs support. So-
cial-conventional trust is the expectation that a friend will more or
less conform to accepted social conventions - dressing neatly when
going out to a restaurant, for instance. These researchers found that
the children they interviewed saw moral and psychological trust as
essential to friendship. Violations in moral trust - acts such as stealing
and lying - had the most serious effect on friendships. Social-conven-

tional trust seemed to be relatively unimportant.
Younger children, ages six and seven, were barely able to say why
violations of moral and psychological trust made them unhappy
with their friends, but they were unhappy nevertheless. They were
inclined to state their reactions in terms of what they liked and dis-
liked. They did not like it if friends lied to them or took toys. They
clearly perceived violations of moral and psychological trust as in-
compatible with friendship. A real friend would play with you if you
were sad (psychological trust) and would not lie to you (moral trust)
Children ages eight and nine tended to focus on the magnitude of
the violation - how many times the friend failed to return a toy, did
not show up to play, told a minor lie - and how serious were the con-
sequences. By ages ten and eleven, children were able to discuss how
and why the violation of an important expectation affected their
relationship with a friend. In all cases, moral and psychological trust
were central to their idea of friendship.
My own discussions with some sixty Calgary schoolchildren ages
nine to eleven also suggested that trust and trustworthiness are cen-
tral in children's friendships.16 Asked what a friend is, many chil-
dren said a friend was someone to "hang out with," to have fun with,
and to talk to. A friend should "have a good sense of humour and be
fun." In other words, a friend should be a pal. But there was a more
serious undertone too. These children added that friends will cheer
you up and help out when you are in trouble. Talk was important.
You feel comfortable with your friends: you can talk to them about
your problems, and they talk to you about theirs. You like your
friends and they like you. You trust them - to keep secrets, to take
care of things you might leave with them, to be there when you
needed them. A favourite example was that of a pet. If you went on a
trip and left your cat with a friend, you could trust him to take good
care of it. Asked what was the most important thing in friendship,
nearly two-thirds of these children referred to trust.17 Two other
favourite themes - "a friend likes you for yourself" and "a friend
will help you out if you are in trouble" - also allude to trust.
Asked what they would do if they could not trust a friend, the
children were baffled. The question hardly made sense. If there was
someone you could not trust, she was not your friend. If a person was
your friend, well, you could trust her - to keep secrets, take care of
your things for you, and help in times of trouble. Trust was explained
by these children in terms of expectations that were not to be violated.
A trusted friend would not steal toys or money and would return bor-
rowed property, care for property or pets if asked, keep promises and
secrets, refrain from gossiping, and tell the truth. She would be some-
one you could rely on and count on. She would never blackmail you
or threaten you; she would be there when you needed her. She would
like you for yourself, not just for your possessions or connections, or
for what you could do for her.
If a friend acted in an untrustworthy way, you would feel unsafe
and insecure, embarrassed, insulted, and sorry for yourself. You
might even be frightened if you had told this friend things that you
did not want other people to know. Some children said they would
feel "ripped off" and cheated. They would be mad and angry and not
want to be friends any more. One boy said he would feel "cheap,"
thinking that he had too freely given of himself. If he had trusted
someone who was not a good person, well, he had made a mistake;
this would make him feel stupid. He would blame himself, but from
the experience he would learn not to make such a mistake again.
Finding that a friend was disloyal would make a person feel foolish
and inadequate, and perhaps less likely to try to make new friends.
You might feel that there were signs you should have recognized; you
should have known this person was not a real friend, so the fault was
in you. Or you might feel that the reason this false friend did not care
about you was that you were not a worthy person, not worth caring
about. In other words, discovering that you had a false friend would
weaken your trust in yourself.
In their study of adolescent friendships, William Rawlins and
Melissa Holl found that the preservation of established trust was the
"overarching concern." Rawlins and Holl interviewed thirty-two
high school juniors, half boys and half girls, in a small city in the
northeastern United States.18 They draw an interesting distinction
between teenage popularity and friendship. Among teenagers, popu-
larity is a matter of public reputation and acceptance. A popular per-
son is one regarded as likeable and desirable as a companion or date.
Friendship, on the other hand, is private and intimate. It is a close re-
lationship between two people who trust each other, have chosen
each other as companions, and acknowledge and accept each other.
Somewhat paradoxically, teenagers who are "popular" may have
few or no close friends. Their public reputation and status may be
intimidating and function to prevent others from becoming close. For
adolescents, friends should above all be trustworthy, accepting, and
positive (not critical) towards their friends. The worst thing that a
friend could do would be to undermine her friend's public image by
telling negative stories in public or revealing secrets.
The girls interviewed by Rawlins and Holl tended to have a best
girlfriend whom they continued to see and remained close to when
they were dating a boy. Boys had male friends, but tended to lessen
their commitment to them when they had a girlfriend, who usually
became their best friend. These teenagers made distinctions between
various types of friendship. When they did so, the depth of trust and
the kind of talk in the friendship turned out to be the crucial features.
When trust in the friend was less, talk was not as significant to the
friendship, and shared activities were relatively more important. In a
best friend, a person could have "absolute confidence." The relation-
ship would be intimate and exclusive.
One cannot simply be a certain kind of person unless other people
accept one as that sort of person. Friendships are crucial for the devel-
opment of identity during adolescence. Forming one's own identity
and self-concept and experiencing intimate relationships with others
are closely related. What a person is and how others see him or her
are always bound together. In the case of adolescence, with its
extreme self-awareness and real embarrassments, the linkage is espe-
cially tight. Somewhat paradoxically, the adolescent preoccupation
with self leads to extreme deference to the opinions of others. Charac-
teristically preoccupied with themselves, adolescents tend to assume
that others share their preoccupation. A girl who has a pimple on her
chin feels it and sees it in the mirror. She finds it terribly important,
thinks it wrecks her appearance, and assumes that everyone will be
looking at her and noticing just this feature of her appearance. Having
one pimple, she will be an ugly person with blotchy skin; that is how
others will see her. Adolescents tend to put on a show for an audienc
which they imagine to be large and critical. Uncertain of themselves,
moving away from their parents as guides in life, they need positive
support from friends. Keeping confidences and refraining from gossip
and back-stabbing are especially important in friendships at this stage
of life. A friend, a trusted other, supports the self and the self-image.
MEN'S FRIENDSHIPS AND WOMEN'S FRIENDSHIPS
At the psychological level, survival depends on having at least one

true and trustworthy friend. In interesting ways the nature of that
survival and the nature of friendship itself differ between men and
women. Friendship is deeply affected by gender. Most women's
friendships are with women, most men's friendships with men. Ou
society may be heterosexual, but it is homosocial. And men's and
women's friendships differ considerably.
Although men and women mingle at school, at work, and in com-
munity groups, successful and lasting friendships between them are
relatively rare. We seek people who are similar to us when we set
about to make friends, and gender still marks vast differences in life
experience. For all the lifestyle changes that have resulted from femi-
nism, girls and boys still grow up differently. We find different cir-
cumstances even in the same family, class, or school, and respond to
people and circumstances in different ways. Gender differences per-
sist in adult life. Being a girl friend is a very different role from being
a boy friend. And despite all efforts by men to do more to care for
children, being a mother is a quite different thing from being a father.
There are exceptions, but in general, women have more in common
with other women than they do with men, and men have more in
common with other men than they do with women. The pattern of
friendships varies accordingly. Sexual attraction between men and
women who become close friends tends to press relations of friend-
ship towards romance and sexual intimacy, dramatically altering
feelings and expectations. Friendship can survive as a component of
sexual partnership, and when it does, the partners have an especially
wonderful relationship. All too often, though, romance displaces a
male-female friendship, and when the romance fades, the friendship
ends.
Men and women tend to have different expectations and values
about life and different styles of interacting and talking with each
other. In general, women emphasize and value personal relation-
ships more than men do. They want to feel connected, they feel
uneasy when they are in a role marked as superior, and they cherish
intimate conversation. A woman who is especially successful in her
work or with her children is likely to downplay this success when
talking with another woman, emphasizing instead various problems
and difficulties she is encountering. She is anxious to relate as an
equal, not to boast or even appear to be boasting.19 Women friends
like to be together and talk, and when they talk, common subjects are
children, feelings, other people, and relationships.
Men, on the other hand, seem to value independence and status
more than relationships as such. Many friendships between men are
based on shared activities and have a strong "pal" component. Men
generally like to joke, exchange anecdotes, have fun, and enjoy
sports and other activities. When they talk, they are more likely to
share information or discuss women, politics, or sports than to ex-
plore feelings, character, or relationships. There is a kind of intimacy
that women cherish, which is at the very core of their friendships,
and seems rare in friendships between men.
Obviously, such differences between men and women are general,
not universal; there are exceptions to the pattern. Some men cherish
closeness and have no interest in sports; some women are uncomfort-
able with much talk and little activity. Some girls and women seek
male friends; some men seek female ones. But in general, women's
friends are women, men's friends are men, and the styles of relation-
ships vary with gender. Women's friendships tend, on the whole, to
be more intimate than men's. Right from the girlhood tradition of
having a best friend, women place a high value on relationships with
each other, receiving considerable solace, joy, and support from each
other. They listen and are listened to, support and are supported,
identify, empathize, and care. They expect intimacy and care from
each other, and generally they receive it.
From Aristotle onward, the classic Western literature on friendship
exalts friendships between men. Legend had it that women could not
really be friends. For women, relationships with men would always
come first; women competed with each other to attract men. As
recently as the sixties, this was the prevailing myth about women
friends. Their friendships with each other were less important than
their quest for a man, and thus were vulnerable to relationships with
men. In the fifties and sixties, young women would not go out to-
gether for dinner, coffee, or a movie on a Saturday night. To do so was
shameful: we were supposed to have dates. To be seen together in
public on a Saturday evening would reveal the shocking truth that
women had to settle for each other because no man had chosen to pay
for our company.
Under the influence of the feminist movement, all this has
changed. Since the seventies, popular culture, always an expression
of changing lifestyles and ideologies, has shown considerable interest
in women's friendships. Contrary to the classic tradition in Western
philosophy and literature, contrary to early popular culture, contem-
porary popular culture tends to exalt women's friendships. The film
Beaches illustrates the trend, telling the story of two girls who meet by
chance and become extremely close. They are room-mates in college
and share early work experience. Eventually, when one is fatally ill,
the other cares for her. After her friend's death, she adopts and cares
for her child. A girlhood friendship becomes a deep, lifelong relation-
ship between adult women. Through the daughter, the friendship
survives even death. Another film, Thelma and Louise, also shows inti-
mate women friends. They go off on a holiday together, an "escape"
that is to be a major treat for both of them. Louise, the stronger
woman, is fiercely protective of the more innocent Thelma, who is
abused by her husband. When Thelma is assaulted by a man after a
dance-hall fling, Louise intervenes with force in an attempt to protect
her. They begin to fight back together against men who make sugges-
tive remarks and obscene gestures. Eventually they launch into a
criminal campaign. Together they head off on a madcap adventure of
crime, leading to murder and finally joint suicide. The adventurous
and implausible dynamics of their escapades are more characteristic

of the violent adventure narratives of heroic men than of women's
friendships. But the ideology of the film, which was a popular suc-
cess, was to exalt the trust and intimacy between women who sup-
port and fight for each other - in this case, even to the death.
Ways of Talking, Styles of Intimacy
Men's and boys' friendships are often depicted in contexts of adven-

ture, danger, heroism, and war. Physical tasks and quests are central
to the story and men's relationships. These relationships are charac-
teristically less intimate than those of women and girls, featuring
little exchange of confidences about career success, family life, or sex-
uality and tending to pal relationships focused on common activity.
Men may talk about computers, politics, sports, and guns and think
they have had a satisfying, intimate conversation. Boys and men who
want more intimate exchange often seek out girls and women. Partic-
ularly fascinating are recent investigations of female and male con-
versational styles. Men and women tend (with exceptions, of course)
to talk in different styles and to different purposes. Girls and women
converse in order to make connections with others and seem most
comfortable with a relationship of same status, or equality. They seek
to share problems and relevant experience and confirm each other's
feelings. Most women tend to feel uncomfortable proclaiming their
accomplishments and successes. Boys and men, on the other hand,
approach conversation with an intense concern for who is up and
who is down. They seek to confirm their status on a pecking order.
Men are often unwilling to ask for help, take advice, or even to ask
directions - much less confess feelings of failure and inadequacy -
because that would imply accepting an underdog position.
These and other differences are described by Deborah Tannen in
her entertaining popular book You Just Don't Understand: Women and
Men in Conversation. Tannen, a sociolinguist, studies the way people
talk. She argues that men tend to see themselves in a hierarchical
social order. Women, on the other hand, picture themselves in a
"network of connections" in which "conversations are negotiations
for closeness." We want to feel connected and close to people we
are talking to, especially when they are intimate partners or other
women. When negotiating for closeness, we try to confirm and sup-
port each other. We tend to want to reach agreement or consensus,
not victory in an argument. Women seek intimacy and connection
with others, with whom they want to relate as equal and similar, not
superior, beings.
Tannen stops short of saying that the characteristically female style

is best. She thinks that both male and female styles serve important
purposes. All human beings value and need both independence and
intimacy. The male style tends to cultivate and protect independence,
and the female style to cultivate and protect intimacy. What we
should understand is that these styles differ, have different merits,
and serve different functions. If we do not appreciate this fact, we are
likely to be extremely frustrated.
Tannen offers enticing examples. "When men change the subject,
women think they are showing a lack of sympathy - a failure of inti-
macy. But the failure to ask probing questions could just as well be a
way of respecting the other's need for independence."20 As far as Tan-
nen is concerned, men and women approach conversation and social
interaction so differently that communication between them is virtu-
ally cross-cultural. There is as much of a gap in style between men's
and women's talk, culturally speaking, as there would be if an English
lawyer were talking to an Iranian rug dealer or a Turkish housewife to
a Jewish stockbroker. "Instead of different dialects, ... they speak dif-
ferent genderlects."21
Talk is an important element in friendship, crucially related to self-
disclosure and intimacy. If Tannen is right about the differences
between men's and women's conversational styles, then we would
expect their friendships to be different too, and this difference would
affect the nature of the trust between them. Indeed, this seems to be
the case. Stuart Miller, a psychologist, interviewed one thousand
Americans and Europeans, searching for "true friendship among
adult men." He found so little intimacy, self-disclosure, or meaning-
ful contact that he reluctantly concluded that men simply did not
value or cultivate same-sex friendships in the way that women
did. Most men had no real male friends, many tending to confuse
acquaintanceship, pal relationships, or relations with colleagues with
genuine friendship. Another social scientist, Michael McGill, studied
five thousand men and women over a ten-year period ending in
1985. He concluded that few men had intimate friendships, and most
did not seem to value friendship very much. McGill found that only
one man in ten had a friend with whom he discussed work, money,
and marriage, and only one in twenty experienced a friendship in
which he disclosed feelings about sex or about himself. He regret-
fully concluded that most men's relations with each other were
superficial to the point of being shallow.22
The characteristically male style of conversation seems not condu-
cive to deep friendship or to the development of intimate trust. In fact,
it would appear to inhibit expressing feelings and attitudes, revealing
concerns, and sharing problems. Honesty about a whole range of top-

ics is ruled out; one cannot express anxiety or sorrow or dismay, con-
fess feelings of inadequacy, or accept help and advice. The traditional
male sex role presumes a structuring of the world as a competitive
place where a man must constantly struggle to prove his mettle and
maintain his position. One author concluded that men's talk is really
about proving manhood, commenting that conversation between men
was "an ongoing pissing contest."23 The contrast with women's
friendships could scarcely be more dramatic.
Many men do not like to discuss problems or feelings, and for this
reason friendships between them are less intimate than those between
women. But this does not mean men are not close in another way; nor
that they do not count on each other for help and support. Trust
between men is tied more to action than to talk. When there is talk, it
is of a different kind. And talk is not valued as it is between women. A
man will expect himself to know somehow, without talk, that his
friend is unhappy. When he responds, he will respond by doing
something - loaning a car, taking the family out for dinner, or perhaps
suggesting that they play golf or paint a fence together.
One older man went to considerable lengths to have a bottle of the
very best whisky delivered in a distant city to his friend of sixty
years, who was dying miserably of cancer. "I know he won't be able
to drink it," the man said, giving careful directions to his grand-
daughter as to how she should deliver the gift. "It's the gesture that
counts." Had he been at his friend's bedside, this man would proba-
bly not have been able to talk about death, the end of their friendship,
or what his friend had meant to him over so many years since their
high school days. And had he tried to do so, his friend, a frail man in
his late seventies, would probably only have been embarrassed. Even
if never to be consumed, the whisky was something they could man-
age emotionally. Men do care; they just express their concern in ways
other than words.
Adventure films and stories model men's friendships in contexts
of danger and adversariality. Men face challenges or enemies to-
gether, risk their lives together, and are loyal to the death. The excite-
ment and hazard of adventure or war brings them close together in
contexts where life is at stake, so that they can acknowledge their
bonds to each other. They work together, are bonded to each other,
love each other, try to protect each other, even die for each other.
There is trust: these men depend on each other for their very lives. It
is a profound trust, but one with an entirely different tone and basis
from that of women's friendships, with their intimate talk, exchange
of problems and feelings, and expectations of day-to-day small-scale
support. Many men cherish war experience and regard "war bud-
dies" as their best friends ever. These are deep, close, intimate, and
loyal friendships among men, very different from the friendships of
women.
The closest male friendships are often set in a context of battling
against a common enemy.24 Competition between individual men is
displaced by competition between us and them. Perhaps for this
reason, close friendship and deep loyalty in a context of war or ad-
venture may not survive the mundane realities of everyday life.
Men's friendships seem strangely polarized between pals having fun
together and warriors risking their lives for each other. The middle
zone is often missing.25
Perils in Female Intimacy
In significant ways, women's friendships can be imperfect. Women

are entirely capable of triviality, cattiness, deceit, disloyalty, and be-
trayal. They can be too captivated by relationships, or too dependent
on a single "perfect" friend to accept that that friend will have other
good friends or love relationships with men. Women may be so keen
to establish connection that they are unwilling to express honest and
constructive disagreement. Their quest for connection can inhibit
the very intimacy it is intended to facilitate. And the intimacy that
women establish makes them extremely vulnerable to betrayal.
Nancy Thayer's novel, ironically titled My Dearest Friend, tells of
one such betrayal. It describes an intimate friendship between two
young women, both wives of faculty members at a small college in
the northeastern United States. Laura and Dora spend a tremendous
amount of time together, enjoying glorious outings in the country,
shopping excursions, parties, activities with children, and luxuriously
long telephone conversations. They talk intimately about men, sex,
marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, children, their own pasts, and their
ambitions for the future. When Laura's husband leaves her for an-
other woman, she is devastated. In one of many intimate exchanges,
she tells Dora that she has never had an orgasm, a revelation that
Dora reports to her own husband, Jake.26 Dora works hard to care for
Laura; the two continue to spend long hours together, though less
exuberantly than before. Eventually Dora begins part-time teaching,
and Laura helps her out with babysitting and household chores. After
some months Dora is devastated to discover that Laura is having an
affair with Jake. Confronted, Jake insists that he wants a divorce to be
able to marry Laura. She really needs him, he says, whereas Dora,
who is working part-time, can manage her child and her work with-
out his support.
Enraged and devastated, Dora feels absolutely betrayed both by

her husband and by her "dearest friend." What hits deepest is Laura's
appalling exploitation of intimacy: she lied about never having had
an orgasm. She used Dora; she expected what she said to be told to
Jake. She then used sex, and Jake's pride in giving her an orgasm,
to manipulate their sexual affair into a relationship which he saw to
be as unique and as demanding marriage. Laura calculatedly ex-
ploited the intimate talk of friendship, using it to manipulate both
Dora and Jake. Hidden behind the warm person Dora thought she
knew was a false friend, willing to manipulate and betray her to get
another husband. The example is fictional, but the points it makes are
real: intimacy can be exploited and friends can betray us.
Common pitfalls in women's friendships are explored by Susie
Orbach and Luise Eichenbaum in their book Bittersweet. Therapists,
colleagues, and friends since their college days, the two authors co-
wrote the book to explore jealousy, alienation, and competition in
women's friendships. Describing the quarrels, jealousy, animosity,
rivalry, and pettiness that they and many of their clients had experi-
enced, Orbach and Eichenbaum conclude that women's desire for
intimacy can also work against good relationships. Women seek rela-
tionships and connectedness. They want to talk to their friends fre-
quently, telling them all the significant things that are going on in
their lives, share tears and laughter, and feel in constant touch. In fact,
women want so much to be connected to others that they may have
trouble accepting differences and acknowledging disagreements.
They expect a strong connection, one that takes a lot of time and
energy. The danger is that women may expect so much from their
friends that they cannot get it, given the stresses of busy adult lives.
When women are disappointed, they begin to feel anger and dis-
trust. They tend to avoid expressing these feelings to their friends
because they do not want to rupture relationships; they do not want
to disagree, to admit to being jealous and frustrated, or to express
other awkward feelings. Ironically, women's longing for closeness
can pull them apart; such failures of frankness mean that communi-
cation is flawed and notes of inauthenticity slip into the friendship.
When women are unable to acknowledge difference and disagree-
ment, they deprive themselves of opportunities to resolve their con-
flicts, put their friendship on a realistic adult basis, and re-establish
intimacy and trust.
Orbach and Eichenbaum hypothesize that women unconsciously
model female friendships on their own original closeness to their
mother. For most women, Mother was the first intimate partner. She
was the one with whom the daughter was extremely close in early
years, and from whom she (apparently) did not have to separate in
order to develop into a mature person. For boys it is different: for

them too, Mother was the first intimate, but she was also the parent
from whom the boy must distinguish himself in order to become a
man. From the point of view of daughters, Orbach and Eichenbaum
suggest, mothers were desired as total intimates. But they were
always imperfect intimates because the practical circumstances of life
meant that they were unable to offer total attention and unremitting
devotion.
It is just such total intimate dedication, Orbach and Eichenbaum
speculate, that women seek in friendships with other women. (They
are not speaking of sexual intimacy in lesbian relationships, but of
close friendships between women.) In seeking this complete intimacy
with closest friends, women are almost certain to be disappointed.
Most adult women have rather full and hectic lives outside their
closest female friendships. They have husbands or romantic partners,
children, work, parents, community commitments, and other friends
and are thus in no position to devote themselves to a single friend.
Given the intense demands that many women are inclined to make
on friendships, trouble awaits. There are too many competing claims.
Wanting more company and support than an adult friend can realisti-
cally give, women easily become jealous and resentful. They are set
up, emotionally, to expect and want far more from their female
friends than many of them are able to give. Their friendships often in-
volve a sort of merged attachment attractive in its connectedness and
intimacy, but hazardous to personal growth when taken to extremes.
A woman wants to find herself. Craving connection, she may look to
others to define what she is. Closeness and connection are valuable,
but they have their limits. Orbach and Eichenbaum recommend
acknowledgment of conflicting emotions and opinions and honest
communication about difficulties as strategies for coping with envy,
rivalry, and alienation in women's friendships. We must accept that
liking and loving are compatible with differences of belief, lifestyle,
and emotion. It takes trust and confidence to acknowledge these dif-
ferences and try to deal with them honestly.
When Aristotle said that "no one would choose to live without a
friend" and referred to friends as "other selves," he was thinking
only of friendships between men. He assumed that women's friend-
ships were not relationships between morally mature people and that
they deserved no special attention. In this respect Aristotle repre-
sented his age and many to follow: he studied and exalted friend-
ships between men. In contrast, some contemporary reflection on
friendship seems to exalt relationships between women, implying
that friendships between men are generally inferior to those between
women. Women's friendships generally involve far more intimate

talk and self-disclosure than those of men, and women seem to value
their same-sex friendships more than men do.
But such claims need to be qualified. Women's friendships are by
no means trouble-free. Male friends trust and support each other;
intimate talk is not everything. They may establish a kind of quiet
intimacy that does not depend on talk. There is such a thing as quiet
companionship, which can be relaxing and fulfilling. If two people
experience together a beautiful mountain hike or a spectacular sun-
set, they may be close and share the occasion without putting their
feelings into words. This too is trusting friendship.
THE RISKS OF F R I E N D S H I P
When we trust our friends, open ourselves to them, reveal our

secrets, rely on them, and depend on them, we make ourselves vul-
nerable. If our friends have been dissembling, or if they change in
ways we do not expect, we can suffer great harm as a result. There
are friends who cease to be friends, friends who betray us, and false
friends - people who appeared to be friends but never were. A
friend may simply lose interest in our well being because she has
acquired new interests and other friends; she may come to find us
unattractive and boring, or limiting in various ways. She may let the
friendship lapse or suddenly break it off, leaving us feeling hurt and
vulnerable, lest she share her intimate knowledge with others who
are not our friends. We may think that we have a friend in a co-
worker or political colleague, only to discover that when the context
of the relationship changes, the relationship ceases to exist. Anyone
has a right to end a friendship. But some reasons for doing so are
selfish or trivial, and some ways of ending friendships injurious and
disloyal. When friendships end, we are often hurt. We have given
our affection and trust, have allowed ourselves to be vulnerable,
have assumed a reciprocity and lasting relationship, only to find that
it is faltering or is over.
Even more disturbing are cases where the friendship was false
from the beginning. The person who seemed to be a friend may have
been using another person for some purpose of her own. There may
be love and affection on the one side and only utility on the other. The
other person in the relationship will feel betrayed and worthless. She
has been manipulated; she is hurt, probably angry. She is likely to feel
incompetent, even stupid. Why was she duped? Why could she not
see through it? Someone betrayed by a false friend will feel more hes-
itant about forming new relationships and might be inclined to avoid
friendships - to begin to distrust her current friends, to wonder what

lurks beneath the warm and genial surface of her other relationships.
She might quite naturally start to close off, to hold back from inti-
macy, to avoid even simple companionship. She may be fearful of
relaxing, of letting herself go. To find that someone who was a cher-
ished and apparently affectionate and loyal friend had been dissem-
bling all along, had never cared, and was working actively against
our interests is devastating. Two decades after Laura's betrayal, Dora
still felt the hurt. The rupture between appearance and reality threat-
ens confidence in the normal workings of the social world and could
cast other established relationships in jeopardy. And yet, for all the
naturalness of withdrawing, for all the difficulty of trusting again,
isolation from intimate relationships is not the right response.
Although Aristotle was wrong to disregard women's friendships,
he was right when he said no one would choose a life without friends.
We do take risks when we make friends; we allow ourselves to be vul-
nerable to our friends. But if we did not take these risks, life would
not be worth living. For most people, life without friends would not
even be a meaningful option. They could not choose it and remain
themselves.
Our vulnerability extends even after friendship ends. Our former
friends may have possessions of ours, things given symbolic value
within the relationship. They certainly know many things about us,
some of which we would not want to become public knowledge.
Because of their knowledge and their role in our lives, these people
retain a power to hurt us, even after the friendship is over. This lasting
power further illustrates two basic facts about trust and friendship:
friendship is based on trust, and when we trust, we are vulnerable.
We love and need our friends; life without them would be scarcely
bearable. And yet our friends can hurt us, even after a friendship has
ended quite painlessly. Should we avoid closeness to protect our-
selves? The answer cannot be yes, for in avoiding the intimacies and
joys of friendship, we would deprive ourselves of too much in life.
Rather, the solution lies in picking the right friends in the first place.
We should not make friends with people who are malicious or
cruel, who gossip or are willing to betray others. They are not worthy
friends, and were we to cultivate them, we would place ourselves in
jeopardy. Some day they might betray us. Picking the right friends
becomes a matter of trusting ourselves. Annette Baier, who wrote
about the need to trust former intimates, says: "We simply have to
develop our taste in people, then trust it. If it fails us, then our friends
may let us down. But if we do not trust it, we will have no friends.
The ethics of trust in friends, then, throws us back on the ethics, or
prudence, of trust in ourselves. Like all trust, it can be misplaced.

Like trust in our friends, it is an indispensable condition of a bearable
life."27 Even though we might on occasion make a mistake and
choose the wrong friends, it would not make sense to choose, for that
reason, to have no friends at all. We cannot get along in life trusting
no one, barricading ourselves against all who would invade that
inner sanctum that is the self.
We need friends - for companionship and enjoyment of life, co-
operation and sharing of activities, communication, maturation, and
moral growth. To be sure, we are vulnerable to our friends and take
risks when we are friends. The amiable colleague who wants to chat
over lunch might really want nothing more than to steal our latest
research ideas. The warm and sympathetic woman next door could
be a spy for the national security organization. A person who has
been betrayed by a friend may contemplate such possibilities, and we
all could be suspicious in this way all the time. But we cannot con-
duct a rewarding and meaningful life in this manner, and if we try
too hard to protect ourselves, we will only harm ourselves.
Friendship requires trust: friends cannot control each other. When
we trust, we accept our vulnerability. Most friendships will not last a
lifetime; some will end with pain. All leave us vulnerable, even
when they are over. We may be unlucky enough to have friends who
betray us or friends who were false from the start. Yet acting only on
these possibilities will not give us a meaningful life. We need to be
open to each other. We need friends who are close. And to cultivate
and maintain close friendships, we need to trust each other.
CHAPTER THREE
Trust and the Family
Once upon a time a woman put up ten thousand dollars to bail her
husband out of jail. He was there because he had been arrested for
attempting to slit her throat. She forgave him. She let him move back
in with her. She listened to him; she believed him; she thought he
wanted to be reconciled with her. But life did not run smoothly; they
did not live happily ever after. In the end, he killed her.1
This story tragically illustrates the psychic centrality of the family.
For better, for worse, people do value their family connections.
Women, especially, often try desperately to retain family connections,
even in cases where they have been beaten or abused. One thing that
makes many of us want to preserve our family connections and go to
immense lengths to keep families intact is that we need intimate
companions and may not know where else to find them. The good
aspects of good-enough families are so essential to human develop-
ment and thriving that even members of bad families may cling des-
perately to them.
What is a family? How should a family operate? Is it better for
people to live in families than alone? Is it possible to live and work in
families while maintaining our individuality, autonomy, and self-
respect? Family relationships and duties pose many problems. Roles
in the family are changing: caring for children, providing for the fam-
ily, and domestic work are now shared by men and women - though
seldom on an equitable basis. But heterosexual gender roles are far
from being the most controversial aspect of contemporary families.
The hottest political topics are gay and lesbian families and the "fam-
ily values" cherished by the religious right. Gays and lesbians are
challenging the old definition of the family with mom, dad, and the
kids. At the same time, and in vocal opposition, conservatives are
pushing a return to so-called family values as the source from which
Trust and the Family 51
solutions to all our social problems will flow. According to "family

values" advocates, if men and women would just refrain from getting
divorced, if men would only remain employed to provide for the
needs of the household, and if women would just stay home to bake
cookies and wait for the children to come home from school, things
would be right with the world. The need for welfare, unemployment,
and old-age support would greatly diminish; children would behave
well in schools; juvenile delinquency would virtually disappear; un-
employment would be wonderfully reduced. Families would care for
their own, and governments would save a lot of money, which they
could use to reduce their deficits and pay off the debt.
Women and men should be suspicious of this agenda, not least for
its assumption that a man who wants to be the sole provider for a
family can readily do so in the contemporary economy. So-called fam-
ily values are old-fashioned patriarchal values based on the convic-
tion that the man is the head of the household. They assume a narrow
conception of what the family has been, what it is, and what it can be.
The father is the provider and authority figure; around him the family
is to live, move, and have its being. Such families limit opportunities
for women, undermining their autonomy and self-respect and en-
couraging them to find their identity through their husbands and live
through their children. Worse yet, men in patriarchal families have
perpetrated appalling abuse on wives and daughters. The dominant
male claims authority over their very bodies. The good old days of
the Leave it to Beaver family were not as good as many people thought.
While the religious right calls out for family values, others reflecting
on the family have become increasingly doubtful.2
After more than a decade of intensive press exposure of battering,
incest, and abuse, many people - and many women especially - are
becoming suspicious not only of so-called family values but of fami-
lies themselves. Confidence in the nuclear family as an institution is
diminishing. From a feminist point of view, a major underminer of
confidence in the family is that families have worked to keep women
down. For all the changes in women's and men's work, women still
have more responsibility for children and household tasks than men
do. Studies indicate that women work an average of fifteen hours
more per week than men, because of extra work in the household.3 It
is a lot of work to be a wife and mother. And women's work, so easily
and so naturally taken for granted, is taken for granted in the home
most of all.
Married women with jobs outside the home are still handicapped
by the notorious "double shift." Many sacrifice career and educa-
tional opportunities by moving with their husbands to enable them to
pursue their careers. Gone are the days when a woman could lose
her job just because she was married. Nearly gone are the days when
a young woman would not be hired because she might become
pregnant. But problems of family mobility and pressures of domestic
work still function to limit women's opportunities. Young women are
told they can "have it all," but in practice this is far from easy. Family
responsibilities and loyalty to a husband and his career remain major
obstacles for many women.
There are worse problems in families than restriction of opportuni-
ties for women - problems of violence and physical or emotional
abuse. In families, people live intimately and are deeply vulnerable to
each other. In those where there are women and men, women are vul-
nerable to men. Thousands - in fact, millions - of women have been
battered and abused by their husbands and ex-husbands. For many
women, home is more dangerous than the street. Patriarchal tradi-
tions, which gave men authority over their wives and daughters, have
not entirely died. In male-headed families, women are vulnerable.
Somehow, for whatever reasons, women, like men, still seem to want
to live in families of some description. Why? To avoid loneliness; to
have a home where we have companionship and company; to share
life with others; to have a sexual partner, a sexual life; to bear and raise
children; to link ourselves with the future and the broader society; to
connect through our children with the rest of life. For most women
these are good, or overwhelming, reasons.
For most people, the family means home. To feel safe and secure at
home, we must trust others who live there. If home itself turns out to
be somewhere from which we need shelter, the world is a fearful
place indeed. Trust begins within families.4 Children must be nur-
tured and cared for; when this happens well enough, they trust their
parents and come naturally to trust other people and the world at
large. From the trust developed within the family, they can move on
to trust themselves, form friendships outside the family, and partici-
pate reliably and responsibly in society at large. Without a founda-
tion of trust in the family, trust in other contexts has little chance to
develop and survive.
The fundamental family relations that shape us as individuals are
almost never a matter of choice. We enter our first family because we
are born, the product of our parents' passion and desire for children,
or because we are adopted, chosen by our parents. The relationship
between a child and its adult parents is fundamental for individuals
and for society itself. If women did not give birth to children and en-
sure that they were cared for, human society could not persist. Grow-
ing up in an intimate group and being strongly attached to particular

adult human beings who supply love, care, and the material necessi-
ties of life is essential for human development. Membership in a fam-
ily is a basic aspect of human life. We are social creatures who need
affection, companionship, love, and intimacy to maintain our human-
ity.5 We grow up in families we do not choose, but when we have
grown up, most of us choose to live in families. We need support and
sympathy, connection and commitment.
WHAT IS A F A M I L Y ?
A man and woman, married to each other but with no children and
no intention of having them, constitute a family. A man and woman
living together unmarried in a committed intimate relationship also
make a family, whether they have children or not. A lesbian or gay
couple living with children, however acquired, constitute a family. A
man and his children, living in a household without his former wife,
constitute a family. Adult siblings living with their elderly mother,
whom they care for, form a family. Heterosexuality is not essential
for a family, nor is the presence of two sexes within a household. A
marriage ceremony between the partners is not essential; nor are
children; nor is the biological reproduction by adult partners of the
children they are raising. Within a family there may be two genera-
tions, three or four, or only one.
It seems impossible to pin down the essence of a family without
arbitrarily favouring some particular culture, historical period, or lif-
estyle.6 Among the aristocracy of the eighteenth century, households
included dozens or hundreds of servants and hangers-on, and bonds
between parents and children were slight.7 In modern Hong Kong
the extended family remains more common than the nuclear one,
and mothers-in-law continue to exercise considerable authority over
young brides. Anthropologists report that, among the Zinacantena-
cos of southern Mexico, the basic social unit is identified as "a
house." This "house" may include from one to twenty people. The
Zinacantenacos speak of parents, children, wives, and husbands, but
do not have a word to mark off a wife, husband, and their children as
"a family," distinguished from other social units. Tribal peoples,
apparently, speak readily of lineages and clans, but they rarely have
a word for the nuclear family of mother, father, and children.8
Wittgenstein spoke of "family resemblances" between things that
do not share a neatly definable essence. His favourite example was
games. Wittgenstein claimed that games have no common essence;
there are many kinds of games from ring-around-a-rosy to chess, ten-

nis, card games, the Olympic games, ball games, and many more.
... we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-

crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.
I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than
"family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a
family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and
criss-cross in the same way. And I shall say: "games" form a family.9
Charmingly, Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblance fits families

themselves. They resemble one another in various ways, sometimes
closely, sometimes less closely. There is no fixed essence, but rather a
variety of similar features. Married, common-law, or single-parent;
lesbian or gay; nuclear or extended; with or without children - fami-
lies today have a family resemblance to each other. They are similar
in various respects, and they tend to serve similar functions - pro-
viding for intimacy, companionship, sexuality, nurturing, home, and
the care of children - without sharing a common logical essence. But
for any supposedly necessary feature of a family (man, woman,
marriage bond, children, common household), it seems easy to find
an exception. There are families without a man, families without a
woman, families without children, families without a home, families
with three living generations, families with only one living genera-
tion, families with two living generations. Most families are founded
on the intimate partnership of two adults and provide (or have pro-
vided or intend to provide) for children.
But not all: in 1986, national statistics taken in the United States
indicated that only 7 per cent of households fit the old fifties pattern
of breadwinning father, full-time mother, and at least one child under
eighteen. The most common household - near half of all households
in the survey - had an adult male wage earner and an adult female
wage earner, with or without children. A Canadian social survey in
1995 showed that 44 per cent of families had a man and a woman,
married to each other and with children; 30 per cent had a married
man and woman and no children; and 14 per cent had a single parent,
male or female, with children. Common-law relationships between a
man and a woman with children constituted another 5 per cent, and
common-law relationships between a man and woman without chil-
dren 7 per cent.10
Yet these statistics seem to omit entirely the following small family.
Judy and Jill are a lesbian couple living in Vancouver with their twin
sons, Bob and Michael. Judy was over forty when she gave birth to
the twins. Her friend Alex, who lives with his partner, Joel, in Mon-
treal, is their biological father. He and Joel knew Judy from their years
as graduate students, and when Judy told Alex about her intense
desire to have children, he agreed to donate sperm. Frozen, the sperm
was flown from Montreal to Vancouver. Jill and Judy inserted it using
a syringe. After a rather difficult pregnancy, Judy gave birth to
healthy twin boys. She and Jill are both their mothers. Judy went back
to work about nine months after the twins were born; a nanny helps
to look after them. Alex and Joel keep in touch with the women and
their boys. Judy, Jill, and the boys are a family. Alex, the father, and
his partner, Joel, are close friends.11
Asked to envision a family, few of us would think first of all of such
a grouping. Is it a family? Yes, though hardly a "standard" case. But it
is not the only "non-standard" case. Few of us would think of the typ-
ical family as that of an older heterosexual couple with two children
adopted from the same young, handicapped woman, who was unable
to care for them herself. Or of the single-parent father who got his
child by making contractual arrangements with a surrogate mother.
Though widely publicized, such reproductive innovations are still
statistically rare and have not penetrated our deep emotional expecta-
tions about parents and children. For all the changes in customs and
morals, the word "family" still calls up images of mother, father, and
children.
In the nuclear family of the fifties, a full-time male wage earner was
supported in his efforts by a wife working in the home and available
to respond to various exigencies, such as the illness of children and
elderly parents. Now, when both adult partners work, there are fre-
quent conflicts between responsibilities at work and those at home.
Although women are no longer available for permanent domestic
duty, many social institutions fail to take this fact into account - as
every working woman who has had to cope with school professional
days is painfully aware. The nuclear family continues to have a con-
siderable influence on social institutions, on emotions and expecta-
tions, and thus on daily life. Although it is disappearing in reality,
this "ideal" family persists in our institutions and imaginations.
HEARTH AND HOME
Characteristically, a family lives in a household, although not every

family is contained within a household. Family members may leave
for a time, as when a man takes a job in another country, sending part
of his wages home and returning every few months to visit his wife
and children, or a grown child leaves for a summer job or university
elsewhere, still retaining emotional and financial ties to her family of

origin. Nor does every household constitute a family. Non-family
households are, in fact, rather common, as, for instance, in the shared-
accommodation arrangements that frequently occur among students.
For most of us, though, family, household, and home coincide.
Home is a special place of safety, warmth, security, and comfort. At
home we can relax, put down our guard, and be ourselves. We have
recourse to home to rejuvenate and replenish ourselves. From the
public world, we come home to relax, eat, sleep, clean ourselves and
our clothing, and be ourselves in our own secure place, which we
have established as separated off from the broader world. Home
should be secure and safe, cozy and warm. There we take shelter from
the wider world and receive emotional support from companions. We
can let go emotionally, lapse into rages, weep, fight, throw tantrums,
or sulk. Not that this behaviour is especially welcome at home, but it
will be more tolerated there than among friends and colleagues. We
can express ourselves in the physical surroundings of home, in select-
ing furnishings and decorations, food, plants, pets, and sleeping
arrangements. Most people can take a home for granted. They have a
place which is theirs, which provides considerable privacy and
respite from the wider world. Robert Frost described home as the
place where, if you have to go there, people have to take you in. We
have, or should have, a virtually unquestioned refuge at home.
Home can be the sanctum it is because of boundaries. There is a
respect for people's living space; the outside world does not enter
without permission. We trust others outside the household to respect
our boundaries and treat our home as a private place. To a consider-
able degree, people are able to preserve control over who is in the
home. Those who do not live there must ask permission to enter, typ-
ically by knocking or ringing the doorbell. If they are not given per-
mission, they will go away. The idea that home is a reserved space for
those who live there, set off from the public world, enterable by out-
siders only when they are granted permission, is one that few of us
would relinquish. To have the privacy of our homes, to feel safe and
be able to refresh ourselves emotionally and physically, we have to
assume that others will not enter at will; that means that we trust
them to respect our rights over our private space. The special nature
of home is founded on social norms that we trust other people to
respect. When our home is violated by outsiders or becomes an
unsafe place, we feel a special horror. Victims of domestic robbery
often report being disturbed as much by the sense of invasion as by
financial loss.12 The idea that unknown persons have broken through
the physical and psychological boundaries of home to rifle through
desks, drawers, and cupboards, seeing all the paraphernalia of our

domestic lives, is profoundly disturbing.
At home we should feel safe - safe from the outside world because
we trust that people who do not live there will not enter unless
invited, and safe with others who are in the home because we trust
that they will respect our boundaries and possessions, and support us
emotionally, physically, and economically. In Western cultures, it is
important to have one's own private space within the home, whether
this is a separate bedroom, our own workspace, a drawer no one
pries into, or merely a single journal or bundle of letters. We trust that
others who live with us will respect this privacy. The husband trusts
his wife not to go through his papers and decide which should be
discarded. A mother trusts her children not to root through her
underwear drawers or rifle through her correspondence and papers.
Children quickly gain a sense of their own possessions and their own
space, which they expect their parents and siblings to respect. Home
should be safe and secure, a place of respite for individuals and fami-
lies. And it can be so only because we trust each other to respect
boundaries.
Home is not only a psychological state but a physical place. If we
keep possessions, run households, and take refuge in several differ-
ent physical places, then to that extent we have several homes. The
cottage is an obvious example. When we travel temporarily to work
or study, we acquire a secondary temporary home. Even a hotel room
may become a "home away from home," invested with minor
domestic comforts. For whatever reason, Western societies tend to
place great value on the privacy and cosiness of home. Those who
have no home are to be pitied, even when they are relatively affluent
individuals who have no home because they have chosen a nomadic
style. Travel may bring on a longing for home, family, and domestic-
ity, a longing so acute that even mundane objects such as vacuum
cleaners and dish towels can make us feel lonely and wistful.
Far more pitiful than the traveller without his family are the liter-
ally homeless, forced to exist on the streets, sleeping in the open or
under bridges or staircases, using public toilets and washing facili-
ties, and begging for food, work, or money. With nowhere to go for
rejuvenation, the homeless tend to look tired and dirty all the time.
They live constantly under the public eye; they can assert no bound-
aries over a physical place that is their home. For them, the world is a
cold and brutal place, without warmth, security, or companionship.
Most of us are fortunate enough to have homes, and most make our
homes with other people. Typically, the family lives together at home,
providing love, companionship, support, security, and nurture. Much
of the significance of the family lies in the fact that it provides this
physical centre of intimacy and privacy, where we have companions
and can restore ourselves. From the safety of home, we move out to
the public world and back again. Those who can take home for
granted have a safe and comfortable place to be, a venue for self-
expression and material maintenance, a place for physical and psy-
chological restoration. To be unsafe at home is a special horror.
LOVE AND CARE IN THE FAMILY
Unique in its emotional significance, the family has been called a sys-
tem of love objects. Three-quarters of the people surveyed in a Yale
University study were prepared to define the family as "a group of
people who love and care for each other." In the same survey, 71 per
cent of the people interviewed declared themselves to be very satis-
fied with their family lives.13
Trust is central in every family relationship. If a family is function-
ing well enough, the children within it are fed, nurtured, cleaned,
taught, loved and cherished, and given a sense of sexual and personal
identity. What can we say about contemporary homes and families?
As sons or daughters, we acquired from our family of origin our
genetic, psychological, and social heritage, our location in the world,
and our most basic cultural and intellectual knowledge. As adults,
most of us live in families of some sort: as wives, husbands, partners,
parents. For most of us, it is our families that provide our main locus
of abiding affection and mutual support. In families we are not sim-
ply individuals; we are interconnected. We grow up in households,
guided and cared for by others, sharing in communal tasks, and sub-
ject to customs and expectations that make us what we become. We
identify with something greater than ourselves. We have obligations
of support and cooperation, and we acknowledge those obligations
because we grow within them and grow into them. Ideally, in a fam-
ily household all are committed to all. Family members depend on
each other considerably, in ways both practical and emotional.
There are, of course, many families in which things go wrong, and
bad families can do devastating harm to their vulnerable members.
But the fact that bad families exist does not prove that there are no
good ones. There are vast numbers of good and good-enough fami-
lies that provide company, nurture, intimate relationships, warmth,
and security for their members. Most of the time, most of us need and
appreciate our families. Intimacy is necessary for flourishing in a
human life. We live with a small number of people, typically others in
our family, sometimes friends, to whom we are deeply attached and

whom we love and cherish as the particular people they are. At an
abstract level, we may acknowledge that the moral value and human
dignity of a faraway stranger is equal to that of cherished loved ones.
But to say this is not to say that we value our loved family members
in the same way as we value distant strangers. With strangers, we have
no history of relationship and connection, no love, no debt, no inti-
macy, no detailed sense of a shared fate in past or future. And it is just
these things that are essential in family relationships. Members may
fight and irritate each other, but they usually love each other deeply
and to a considerable degree accept responsibility for each other's
well-being. We have special relations and special obligations to our
families, households, and family members because we are part of
them and they of us. If we did not favour them in significant ways,
we would not have these intimate relations. Without them, we could
not develop and flourish as human beings.14
HOW SHOULD FAMILIES FUNCTION?
In what is referred to as the "traditional" nuclear family, women were

accountable for virtually all childcare and for the emotional well-
being of all family members, especially husbands. Men were prima-
rily responsible for meeting the family's economic needs. When
something went wrong, the response was almost automatic: it was
mom who dealt with relationships and emotional problems - blame
mom. Understanding that placing such demanding responsibility on
women was unreasonable, the psychiatrist D.W. Winnicott argue
that mothers can be "good enough" without being perfect. The good-
enough mother provides sufficient physical and emotional care for an
infant to thrive and develop, but does not sacrifice her whole life and
being in order to do so.
More recently the family itself has tended to be deemed responsible
when things do not go well. The family therapy movement developed
throughout the sixties and seventies. In this movement, therapists re-
gard the family as a system, a small system of closely interrelated and
interdependent people operating by unexpressed rules. People trust
each other to act according to these rules, though they seldom under-
stand what they are. Suppose that something goes wrong: a teenage
daughter is anorexic. She is the "presenting patient," the one who
presents symptoms, but family systems therapists do not assume that
she is the only one with a problem. There is something deeply wrong
with the interactions of family members. The tacit rules, implicitly
trusted by all members, are not working as they should. Family thera-
pists of the Milan school used brief, sometimes paradoxical, interven-
tions (daughter should take dad to a picture show; mom and dad
should leave all the housework to the oldest son; and so on), seeking
by behavioural change to alter the interactions, and the tacit rules, of
the family system.15 The technique often worked. Not only was it
fairer than simply blaming mother, but it was more efficient.
But despite its theoretically innovative character, much of the
theory and practice of family systems therapy was conservative to the
point of being sexist. The theory was based on the assumption that
"normal" families with well-defined boundaries between the genera-
tions and the sexes and honest open communication were basically
all right. Family systems therapists generally presumed that families
were units in which married mothers and fathers lived with their bio-
logical children and roles were clearly divided along the lines of age
and gender. In the ideal family of family systems theories, communi-
cation lines were open and relatively non-authoritarian. But in other
respects such families were straightforwardly patriarchal in the man-
ner of "ideal" North American families of the fifties. Fathers were the
breadwinners and had more power in determining family affairs than
mothers. Mothers worked in the home and took most of the responsi-
bility for caring for the children. Sons and daughters were brought up
in clearly differentiated gender roles. These families were generally
assumed by therapists and academics to be functional and healthy
and to require no therapeutic intervention. Any notion that there
might be significant similarities between "sick" and "healthy" fami-
lies was usually rejected.16
But far from being essential for mental health, these "normal"
nuclear families put everyone at risk. Women were isolated, economi-
cally dependent on their husbands, handicapped in personal and ca-
reer development, overburdened by childcare and household duties,
and given too much responsibility and power with regard to the fam-
ily's intimate and emotional life. Men were economically exploited,
exposed to heartlessly competitive industrial relations, alienated from
life in the home, encouraged to repress their emotions, and discour-
aged from developing meaningful relationships with their children.
Children were vulnerable to a variety of harms ranging from too
intense mothering to physical battering and sexual assault. With the
identity and self-esteem of men dependent on their status as wage
earners in an unstable external economy, such families were especially
vulnerable to economic downturns. What is wrong with the call for a
return to family values is that it ignores the many respects in which
these supposedly traditional families simply did not work very well.
Dysfunctional Families ?
Far from presuming the normal functionality of fifties nuclear fami-

lies, many counsellors and therapists of the eighties and have nineties
followed the ideas of codependency theory, according to which pre-
cisely the opposite is the case. In these circles the tendency is to be-
lieve that most families, even the most apparently "normal" ones, are
dysfunctional. If we find ourselves in trouble, we should not trust our
families: they are likely to be the very ones who mixed us up in the
first place. A plethora of books advise injured adults who have been
by-products of "toxic parents" how to recover from childhood abuse.
Prominent theorists such as John Bradshaw have proclaimed that
over 95 per cent of North American families are "dysfunctional."17
Dysfunctional families fail to provide an environment in which
children can thrive and develop without suffering emotional damage.
Children have to trust their parents, and yet (apparently) they should
not. According to this theory, we are nearly all survivors of some
childhood abuse from which we must recover. If we dispute the inter-
pretation, thinking that our families were functional and normal and
did not abuse us, we are deemed by codependency theorists to be "in
denial." If we suspect that we were abused, we almost certainly were.
If we do not suspect it, we almost certainly were; we are "denying it."
In this event, we should not trust our own impressions and memo-
ries. Families are unhealthy places for children to grow up in. There
is almost always something deeply wrong. Codependency theorists
advise us not to trust our families. If we are inclined to do so, that
means we should not trust ourselves.
On this theory, those of us who do not remember abuse, who deny
being abused as children, are "in denial" because we are unwilling to
acknowledge unpleasant facts about our pasts. A logical problem
here (one that, regrettably, has made the theory seem more plausible
in some circles) is that this theory is impossible to refute. If a person
thinks he was abused, he was abused. If he does not think he was
abused, he is in denial: he really was abused and is simply unable to
face his past.18 So either way, he was abused. Given the logic, it is sur-
prising that only 95 per cent of families are dysfunctional - why not
100 per cent?
Obviously, to make Bradshaw's theory even superficially plausible,
one has to define the term "abuse" very broadly. It includes not only
sexual assault, physical beating, or gross negligence but being encour-
aged to assume adult responsibilities, not being informed of family
secrets, having to compete with a more favoured sibling, or being en-
couraged to become an "overachiever." Bradshaw's notions of abuse
and dysfunctionality appear to be seriously inflated and have been

convincingly criticized as such.19 The idea that adults are "adult chil-
dren" with a wounded "child within" encourages people to think of
themselves as victims, perpetuating self-indulgence, immaturity, and
a simplistic understanding of human development. Codependency
theory is contradictory in its assumption that our parents can be held
responsible for their mistakes whereas, being "adult children," we are
(blameless) victims of their abuse - victims needing tender care in
order to recover.
Adults who think of themselves fundamentally as sons or daugh-
ters may find the analysis tempting. We all have feelings of anger and
resentment and problems in living, and they must have had some
cause. Tracing these problems to childhood abuse gives a ready
account of our inadequacies, and twelve-step programs provide a di-
rection to emotional stability and self-improvement. But if we think of
ourselves as mothers and fathers, rather than daughters and sons, our
viewpoint should change; parents are highly vulnerable to therapeu-
tic rewritings of the past that isolate them from their children. A case
in point is that of Barbara. She lost contact with her talented young
daughter, who became convinced that her parents had warped her
childhood by encouraging her to pursue science and mathematics.
When they denied her extra money at one point during her university
studies in literature, she wrote her parents off completely, accusing
them of abuse. Even when Barbara's handicapped son died as a result
of a tragic accident, her daughter refused to be reconciled with this
"abusive" family.
Ten or twenty years from now, do we who are parents want to be re-
jected by our own children, ostracized and accused of abuse because
we encouraged a daughter to study physics or a son to take up jazz
dance? Because we moved several times when a daughter was in
elementary school? Because we placed a son in a French-immersion
elementary school? Or because we did not? Because a daughter did
some babysitting, a son had a flyer route, or children had to share a
bedroom when money was scarce? Because we did not have the moral
energy to insist that our children cut down on sugar and eat vege-
tables? Because we missed a music recital for a business trip? No one
should place confidence in any therapeutic approach that allows "vic-
tims" or "adult children" to work out a version of the past with a ther-
apist and cling to it dogmatically, placing blame for current problems
on something that parents did wrong decades ago.
Codependency theories assume that a newborn human being has a
flawless pre-family self that would have developed into something
quite perfect and wonderful had its parents only done a good job in
rearing the child.20 One can make this claim true by definition: a
person did not do a "good job" unless his or her child turned out to
be perfectly "healthy" by the standards of health set in codependency
theory. But the notion of a flawless pre-family self has nothing to rec-
ommend it. In fact, it is just plain naive. The newborn infant has no
natural self, good or bad. It has a genetic heritage affecting skills,
talents, and personality. A human being, a person, a self, grows into
being in a family and a broader culture.
The Myth of the Perfect Mother
In reflecting on trust and families, we need to strike a balance be-

tween the fifties assumption that "normal" nuclear families are quite
all right and the contemporary tendency to regard virtually all fami-
lies as dysfunctional. When we think about families, it is especially
important to develop a realistic conception of motherhood. Perhaps
as a result of infantile recollections, the belief in the all-powerful
mother persists in our culture and practice and in theoretical writings
on motherhood and the family.
It is easy - terrifyingly easy, I think - to blame mother for every-
thing that goes wrong. Mother is responsible for all, does all. Unwit-
tingly, even some feminist writers seem to echo the sentiment. They
may claim that mothers in contemporary societies are handicapped
by their relative powerlessness because those societies are inadequate
in so many ways. But if societies were to reform in feminist directions,
mothers would do everything "perfectly," and the world would be
full of self-directed and happy people living in justice, harmony, and
peace.21 Many writings suggest an unfortunate lack of realism as to
just how much mothers can do to shelter and nurture their children
and protect them from the hardships of the world. Anyone who has
been a mother knows from experience that there are hurts in child-
hood and adolescence that mother cannot fix. For instance, Johnny,
who had developed muscular thighs by the age of seven, was teased
at school for having fat legs. He came to dislike sports and gym
because he did not want to change with other boys who might "bug
him." Andrea, who as a teenager was rather attractive and exceed-
ingly intelligent, went right through high school without ever having
a boyfriend or a date. She did have a male friend, an extremely nice
young man with whom she chatted at school and on the subway. But
he was a Muslim, and his parents would not allow him to date non-
Muslim girls. Both situations deeply hurt these children, and their
mother was powerless to change them.22
Mothers are not perfect and they are not omnipotent. Even if they
were perfect, their children would suffer hurts and bruises in the
tumult of childhood life which their mothers could not prevent.
Besides, mothers have their own lives to live and deserve some inde-
pendence as autonomous, self-respecting beings. Even in ideal societ-
ies these realities would remain. No one should fall into the trap of
trusting mothers to do everything and blaming them if they do not -
not in our present society and not in an ideal one. To trust women too
much as mothers is worse than unrealistic and naive; ultimately, it is
cruel.
A mother can be "good enough" without being "perfect" - what-
ever perfect would mean in this context. A mother can be good
enough without abdicating her autonomy and relinquishing every
shred of independence to fulfil every infantile want of her children.
The same, obviously, may be said of fathers. And a family too can be
good enough without being perfect.
TRUST AND THE GOOD-ENOUGH FAMILY
In the good-enough family, if there is an adult couple - heterosexual

or homosexual, married or not - that couple has a working, intimate
relationship. Partners supply each other with care and companion-
ship and cooperate in earning a livelihood and running a household
for themselves and any dependents. These adults provide tolerably
well for the physical and emotional needs of any children in the
household. If there is only one parent, there is no adult intimacy, and
that parent has the sole and challenging responsibility of providing
for the needs of the children. Difficult as this situation is, many
women and men have met the challenge. Some single-parent fami-
lies are good-enough families.
In the good-enough family, there is no sexual abuse or domestic
violence, and material resources are adequate for health and day-
to-day maintenance. Good-enough families may lack many desirable
characteristics, and life within them may be far from perfect. There
may be less-than-perfect justice and equity between members.23 But
despite their flaws, good-enough families provide a home, security,
nurture, intimacy, and many other essentials to the adults and chil-
dren who are their members.
Reflecting on these essentials, we can see that trust is a fundamen-
tal aspect of the good-enough family. Adult partners must trust each
other as dependable, reliable, and caring companions who are com-
mitted to each other, the household, and an ongoing relationship.
Children must trust adults to care for them and provide security. And
adults must trust children enough to give them space to grow and
develop. Of necessity, a good-enough family is one in which there
is substantial trust between members. In these families, women and
men can preserve their autonomy and self-respect. And in these fam-
ilies, all members will be safe.
In a good-enough family, adult partners have an intimate relation-
ship that gives them company and support. They are able to commu-
nicate feelings, ideas, and concerns, and to rely and depend on each
other. We cannot comfortably depend and rely on someone whom we
do not trust. Nor, in most cases, can we relax and be sexually or emo
tionally intimate with another person whom we do not trust.24 To be
intimate with another person, we must trust him or her to accept us as
we are; we must trust that we love each other, that the other person i
fundamentally honest, caring, and committed to the relationship. Inti-
macy, whether physical or emotional, requires trust in many ways.
TRUST, SEX, AND INTIMATE PARTNERS
It may be undesirable, but it is true: people are perfectly capable of

maintaining sexual relationships with others whom they do not trust.
Such involvements, though highly risky, are apparently rather com-
mon. There is considerable room for untrustworthy behaviour in
sexual relationships. Partners may lie about emotions and intentions,
previous involvement, HIV exposure, venereal disease, birth control,
orgasms, and much else. They may hold back verbally or emotionally,
hesitating to express what they want and need. However, sexual inti-
macy, as contrasted with sexual activity, does require some level of
trust. If we distrust a partner, fearing that he or she has not been
honest about crucial matters, we are unlikely to relax, fully express
our feelings, or respond freely to him or her. In these respects, distrust
and lack of ease with a partner inhibit intimacy and sexual pleasure.
In sexual relationships, we are vulnerable. We expose our body to
another, open ourselves, and disclose our selves and our feelings. And
we are at risk, emotionally and physically. Sexual contact evokes
strong feelings, and rejection after sexual contact will be emotionally
hurtful. Physical vulnerability is obvious. Even with birth control and
access to abortion, vulnerability to pregnancy is still a factor for
women in heterosexual relationships. Men are vulnerable to manipu-
lation and deception. Women may trick them into parenthood before
they are ready or deceive them about whether offspring are really
theirs. The risk of AIDS looms even larger than that of pregnancy.
Sexual relations are literally life-threatening; promiscuous people pose
serious risks to their partners. So far as HIV exposure is concerned, we
do not sleep only with our partner, but with everyone our partner has
ever slept with. Trust should be paramount because life itself is at
stake. From the point of view of common sense or plain self-interest, it
is abundantly obvious that we should not enter into sexual rela-

tionships with those whom we do not trust. Sexual relationships
should presume trust. But in reality, many do not. People frequently
become sexually involved, quite spontaneously, with others whom
they scarcely know, much less trust. And such people take enormous
risks, often causing tremendous harm to themselves and others.
Within the context of a good-enough family, where there is an
enduring relationship between partners, risky behaviour with an un-
trustworthy partner on the basis of a sudden flamboyant passion is
unlikely. But people are still vulnerable in sexual relationships. Ideally,
in such relationships there will be understanding about whether preg-
nancy is desired and, if not, how it is being prevented. There will be
honesty about feelings and needs. There will be confidence between
partners about sexual loyalty, both for emotional reasons, as a basis for
intimacy, and to remove fears about AIDS and venereal disease. Sexu-
ality in committed relationships implies expressing our feelings, being
intimate, and experiencing pleasure and physical satisfaction with a
familiar partner. In this context, we would expect and find a degree of
trust, and also a degree of prudence, exceeding what we would find
for casual sex.
But even in long and deep relationships, there are many failures of
communication, triggers of unhappiness, and acts of disloyalty. If a
woman loves someone enough to live with him, sleep with him, and
plan a life with him, then surely (we would think) she is not going to
fake orgasms or trick him into becoming a father before he is ready
to take the step. But these things do happen. There are countless
ways, large and small, in which loving partners can be untrustworthy
with regard to sexuality. The emotional and physical risks of sexual
activity and the harmfulness of sexual betrayal argue against casual
sex and for honest and committed long-term relationships, where
intimate and deep trust is developed and maintained.
In a good-enough family, adult partners trust each other enough to
be close and to have a satisfactory sexual relationship and a healthy
intimate life. But sensitive to high divorce rates and broken relation-
ships, many men and women hold back from sexual and emotional
intimacy and commitment. They fear that they will lose their auton-
omy and independence if they succumb to marriage or living to-
gether. One twenty-seven-year-old woman wrote to a national paper
to say that she and her partner in a relationship that had lasted over
five years felt unable to commit themselves to getting married. Their
parents had not stayed married, and they could not imagine doing so
themselves; between them they had witnessed eight marriages, four
divorces, two common-law marriages, and one separation, and they

had so many half-siblings, step-parents, and step-grandparents that
they could hardly keep track of them. This woman said that her
parents had had such a transient style in their relationships that she
herself was incapable of making commitments to a partner. The de-
tails were poignant and impressive, but there is a flaw in the account.
The young writer told her story as though she had no good model for
responsible partnership and parenting, and hence no choices about
commitment in her own adult life. She wrote as though her distrust of
commitment were an inevitable result of her past experience, appar-
ently oblivious to the real possibility of living a life of loyalty and
responsibility, of choosing a path different from that of her parents.
Her own choice was to enrol in Harvard Business School instead of
getting married.
Many men and women want intimacy, commitment, and a family-
based household, but fear that it may result in confinement and
restraint, in a lack of freedom to pursue careers and economic self-
sufficiency.25 In a close relationship, people are dependent on each
other and likely to fare better if they can acknowledge that fact. Obvi-
ously, if we depend on others, we are better off when those others are
trustworthy. When they are not, we are at risk. If a woman trusts her
husband to repair the roof and he fails to do it but tells her that he
has, the family is at financial and physical risk. If a man trusts his
wife with confidential talk about his workplace and she gossips irre-
sponsibly, he, his colleagues, and his job will be at risk. Trust and
trustworthiness in intimate relationships are extremely important.
Adult partners in a good-enough family will have an intimate rela-
tionship that is, for the most part, satisfactory. They will depend on
each other in mundane matters and cooperate reliably in earning a
livelihood, running a household, caring for its children, and arrang-
ing leisure activities. They will be good companions, friends, and sex-
ual partners and will generally meet each other's dependency needs
in an intimate relationship. On the whole, they will be honest with
each other and not keep deep secrets from each other. They will keep
promises to each other, and neither will seek to exploit or manipulate
the other. They will like each other, appreciate each other, and express
their affection honestly. They will be emotionally intimate and have a
satisfying sexual relationship. Their love and companionship will not
be based on roles mandated by social convention or on affectation
and pretence. They will be loyal to each other, not using intimate
knowledge to mock or attack each other with family and friends out-
side the relationship. They will be able to handle conflict moderately
well, having styles of discussion and argument where each can ex-
press what he or she wants and feels and resolutions can be worked
out without one party always getting her or his way.
All this is not to say that there will be no problems. But adult part-
ners are able to cooperate in earning a livelihood and running a
household, and their relationship meets many of their sexual and
companionship needs. They are friends, companions, sexual partners,
and collaborators in living a life and establishing a home.
C H I L D R E N AND TRUST IN
THE GOOD-ENOUGH FAMILY
For a child, to trust is natural. Children are born into the world pre-
disposed to trust their parents and others who care for them. In fact,
they will go to nearly any length to maintain their trust in their par-
ents.26 Children are vulnerable, dependent, and needy. To a child, the
thought that her parents might fail to provide care and might even
seek to harm her is nearly unbearable. She will do almost anything to
resist such conclusions. Things have to be really grim before children
renounce trust in their adult caretakers.
The trust of infancy and early childhood is implicit and unques-
tioning. The infant is predisposed to trust, and her trust develops
because she is cared for. Her physical needs are met. If she is wet, she
is changed; if cold, wrapped in blankets; if hungry, fed; if uncom-
fortable, held and rocked. Initially, infants are scarcely aware of the
distinction between themselves and the rest of the world. With de-
pendable physical care and emotional comforting, they learn that
others are stable, reliable sources of ease and thus learn to trust in their
caretakers, typically parents and for much early care predominantly
mothers. Erik Erikson referred to this early trust as "basic trust." Basic
trust is born of reliable care. Writing in the heyday of the Leave It to
Beaver family, Erikson assumed that this care would be provided by
mothers:
the amount of trust derived from earliest infantile experience does not seem
to depend on absolute quantities of food or demonstrations of love, but
rather on the quality of the maternal relationship. Mothers create a sense of
trust in their children by that kind of administration which in its quality com-
bines sensitive care of the baby's individual needs and a firm sense of
personal trustworthiness within the trusted framework of their culture's life-
style. This forms the basis in the child for a sense of identity which will later
combine a sense of being "all right," of being oneself, and of becoming what
other people trust one will become.27
This early trust is absolutely fundamental in personal development.

It is the first trust, essential for developing a positive attitude to other
people and the world at large and fundamental for developing fur-
ther trust. People who, in infancy, do not receive this fundamental
reliable care and do not learn that they can count on adults and the
world at large are likely to experience enormous difficulty learning to
trust in other contexts. In fact, Erikson maintains that resolving the
dilemma of "basic trust versus basic mistrust" is the fundamental
task of the first year of human life. As infants, we either find the
world benign, comforting, and reliable or we discover it to be fearful
and unreliable.
In growing from infancy to adolescence, a person moves from com-
plete dependence to considerable independence. In good-enough
families, adults care for children and provide the basis for this devel-
opment. Parents in such families strongly identify with young babies
and their needs. Infants are virtually helpless and tremendously vul-
nerable and appealing in their innocence and dependency. In the first
year of life an infant is a being with appetites and needs who devel-
ops affectionate contacts with his parents and becomes integrated
with them. A baby knows how to express his needs and stake a claim
on his parents.
By providing reliable care and loving support, parents launch the
infant on a process of personal development. Because they care for
her and she can trust them, she is able to develop into a person.
Discussing the process, D.W. Winnicott observes that well-cared-for
babies relatively quickly establish themselves as persons. With less-
reliable care, many babies tend to become restless, "suspicious," or
apathetic. The idea of oneself is developed against a background of
contrast: the not-self. For infants, this means the main adult caretaker.
When the not-self (mother, father, or other adult caretaker) is unpre-
dictable, an infant will develop a less-firm sense of self. The idea of
self and the reference point of not-self are necessarily connected and
develop together. Basic to the development of self in the first year of
life, Winnicott says, are handling, holding, and "object-presenting."
The social environment in which an infant finds herself is crucial
for her early development. She moves from absolute dependence to
relative dependence towards independence. If a baby does not get
support from parents or caretakers at this stage, she cannot turn into
an authentic person.28 It is through the sensible and consistent care
she receives as an infant that a child is able to develop unity of per-
sonality, becoming "a dweller in the body." In adapting to her mother
and father, she gains a sense of external reality, establishing for
herself the distinction between self and the external world of stable
jo Dilemmas of Trust
objects and reliable other people. To gain a clear sense of herself, she
needs to experience regularity in the world, a regularity that will at
the same time provide for basic trust.
A young child needs a sense that the world is durable, reliable, and
good, and that he has a secure place within it. His surroundings pro-
vide this security if he has a stable home, however humble. Fancy
toys, expensive household appliances, high-tech consumer goods, a
large bedroom, a new crib, and colourful clothing are unnecessary.
What the infant does need is a secure home where adults keep him
warm, fed, and clean, where they hold him and love him, and where
the surroundings are durable, reliable, and good. The security of
home protects a baby from intrusions of a world that he cannot com-
prehend and at the same time from some of his own uncontrollable
impulses.
In a good-enough family there is good-enough parenting. This
means that care is kind and reliable and that the infant is physically
and emotionally secure. He is not anxious; he can be confident that
he will be fed, changed, and loved by familiar people in a familiar
environment. He is sheltered from the outside world, protected, and
made secure by those who care for him. With this basis, he has
acquired basic trust and is able to develop into a more independent
being.
As the child develops, her parents allow her more freedom to
explore, and she moves from complete dependence to an increasing
degree of freedom. At this stage, too, trust is a key. Freedom is possi-
ble only insofar as parents are able to let go. For this they must trust
the child, whether it is a matter of letting her walk across the room
without support when she is two, play unsupervised with another
child at seven, use public transport on her own at twelve, select her
own clothing and take responsibility for her schoolwork at fifteen, or
drive the family car at eighteen. Growth to maturity requires both
that the parents trust their child and that the child trusts her parents.
To develop and learn, even to have a sense of self, infants and chil-
dren must trust implicitly in those who care for them. Without basic
trust, human beings cannot progress from infancy to childhood. In
early childhood we need to trust others in order to learn language,
social customs, or fundamental social skills. Later, children continue
to trust their parents or caretakers, but the trust need not be implicit
and unquestioning or total. Children are exposed to other children
and other adults in school, community, and church activities. They
acquire ideas from these sources and from the popular media and
many interests and beliefs from sources outside the family. Children
will learn that adults who care for them are not all-knowing and
perfect, and cannot manage every situation and provide every sort of
knowledge. They may find that their parents have broad areas of
ignorance and incompetence, painful inadequacies, temperamental
peculiarities, and embarrassing idiosyncrasies. The immigrant child
may have to translate for her parents. The daughter of a single-parent
father may find him inept at judging friendships between girls or
participating in parent-teacher interviews. A son may realize that his
mother's cooking is sadly lacking.
But despite these detected gaps in their competence, the child must
trust parents overall; she must be confident that they will continue
to be fundamental sources of emotional and physical security. To
mature comfortably, we should be able to take it for granted that our
parents will be caring beings who will continue to do their best for
us. To a striking degree, people do this, even as adults. When her
ninety-five-year-old mother died, one woman in her late sixties com-
mented, "Now I really have to grow up."
For nearly everyone, maturity develops in a family. We progress
from almost complete dependence to lesser dependency and then
eventually to something close to autonomy. The family provides a
home, offering physical security, companionship, and emotional sup-
port. It establishes language, norms of personal contact, and the
whole basis for later learning, setting early attitudes towards the out-
side world. In a good-enough family we receive reliable and loving
infant care, establishing a sense of external reality, basic trust, and a
primitive sense of self. Later the family continues to meet our needs,
providing opportunities for developing independence. Children who
have brothers and sisters have the benefit of a social life with sib-
lings, giving them companionship and experience at handling rival-
ries and conflicts.
A good-enough family is not perfect, and the trust within it is not
perfect either. Here as elsewhere, there are many degrees and con-
texts of trust. Family members will trust or fail to trust each other in
different ways and to different degrees. A woman may trust her hus-
band to be sexually faithful and take good care of the children, but
feel uneasy lest he forget to pay household bills on time. A girl may
trust her father to be loving and caring and give good advice about
school, but have little confidence in his ability to find a good music
teacher. Obviously there can be significant gaps in trust in the good-
enough family. Still, we can see how fundamental trust is.
A good-enough family can persist only if its members believe that
it is good enough and are committed to it. Such a family presupposes
trust or confidence by members in its own being and merit and com-
mitment to its own persistence, as well as interpersonal trust between
and among its members. To function as a family, to persist as a family,

people need confidence in their family unit and its survival. By main-
taining homes in which children are cared for and nurtured, adult
partners in a family provide the basis for further trust in friends,
teachers, and members of the broader society. Rearing children, they
will eventually produce mature people who have acquired language
and customs and can function in society at large. In this sense the
family serves as the bedrock of trust, the basis for all trust outside
the family. Trusting and confident people exist in the broader society
because they have matured within good-enough families. Thus fami-
lies can be said to create trust.
Yet at the same time, families presume the existence of social trust
and viable communities and economies outside themselves. They
exist and operate within communities.29 The good-enough family
requires trust between adults, between children, and between adults
and children. Those relationships exist in the context of a broader so-
ciety and are unlikely to survive if social institutions are malfunction-
ing or brutal. One might say that the good-enough family reproduces
trust. In a context of social trust, it may raise children who can enter
the community as people capable of maintaining sound relation-
ships. From relationships of intimacy and closeness involving confi-
dent and trusting adults, it provides care and nurture, producing
children who have trusted enough to become functioning adults.
Although no families are perfect, many are good enough. As Win-
nicott remarks, "A surprising number of people can look back and
say that whatever mistakes were made, their family never let them
down."30
CHAPTER FOUR
Problems of Trust in Families
The film Ordinary People shows a family committed to upholding a

public image of success. Beth and Calvin are the middle-aged parents
of Conrad, a miserably unhappy sixteen-year-old who attempted sui-
cide shortly after the accidental death of his older brother. Calvin is a
successful defence attorney and Beth a stay-at-home wife who has
established her role in life as that of wife and mother in a happy suc-
cessful family. The family lives in an elegant older home. Beth does
not want to acknowledge Conrad's problems and brightly insists that
everything is "great." She is furious when Calvin admits to friends
that their son is seeing a psychiatrist. When Calvin suggests that they
might visit the psychiatrist, Beth is deeply affronted. That would
mean admitting that they were not functioning perfectly well on their
own, something she is absolutely unwilling to do. As the story pro-
ceeds, it becomes apparent that Beth has never loved Conrad as she
loved his brother. She cannot give him her complete attention or
show him physical affection. Although she pretends, somewhat inef-
fectively, to be a normal mother to Conrad, he is not fooled. He can
feel his mother's lack of warmth; he can remember her attitude to his
dead brother; and he can recognize the discrepancy. Eventually he
tells his father what he perceives. Genuinely concerned for his son,
Calvin begins to reflect on Beth's concern for appearances.
With the help of his psychiatrist, Conrad learns to express his feel-
ings and stop blaming himself for the fact that he survived while his
brother died. He begins to recover. Watching as Beth stares coldly
into space while Conrad hugs her, Calvin realizes that she has been
living a lie. She wants desperately to preserve the picture of a perfect
family living in the perfect household, to maintain a comfortable and
entertaining life for herself, with a wealthy and devoted husband. But
beneath this quest for perfection is little real love for her second son.
Calvin confronts Beth with her preoccupation with appearances and

her responsibility for Conrad's suffering. The film ends with Beth
leaving home, the implication being that Calvin and Conrad, who
genuinely care for each other, will maintain a more honest and inti-
mate home together. To keep up Beth's notion that everything was
"great," the family had been living a lie.
Notoriously, there are deep problems of trust in many families.
These include pretence and hypocrisy, seriously flawed communica-
tion, falseness, lies and deception, family secrets, infidelity, break-
downs in intimacy, sexual abuse, and family violence. Often these
aspects are related. Infidelity is likely to lead to lying, deception, fam-
ily secrets, and a breakdown in intimacy between adult partners.
Secrets may necessitate lies and deception, which, when discovered,
undermine trust. Sexual abuse and violence destroy trust and any
sense of security, bringing great suffering and harm.
COMMUNICATION: LIES AND DECEPTION
Complete openness within a family is not desirable or even possible.

We want privacy and need to keep some aspects of life to ourselves.
A major problem for women has been maintaining some sense of
separate identity and projects within the family. Still, the warmth
and love that people need is provided in family life only if there is
considerable openness in communications. If we are generally able
to express our feelings and verbally communicate our conflicts, our
wants and needs can be acknowledged by other family members,
who can either try to meet them or explain why they should not. In
families, children learn to recognize and express their feelings and
needs, and gain a sense of themselves and of others by sharing them
with parents and siblings. By interacting, acknowledging responses,
and learning to recognize and resolve conflicts and acknowledge the
needs of other family members, children can gain a positive image
of themselves and others. All of this works only if a family has
what is basically a clear and straightforward style of communica-
tion. With seriously flawed communication, a family may begin to
disintegrate. In the family, as elsewhere, too many hidden meanings,
sarcastic remarks, innuendoes, or outright lies will lead to suspicion
and mistrust.
Failures in communication are common in closed families that de-
mand strong conformity and preservation of the official family image.
Beth, Calvin, and Conrad lived in such a family. Conrad's visits to a
psychiatrist were appalling for Beth because they undermined her
belief that the family was successful and able to function on its own.
Problems of Trust in Families 75
A source of stress in many families is the difference between male

and female styles of communication.1 Most women and girls feel
comfortable talking about their feelings and find relief in sharing their
problems with other people. This communication style allows them to
get support and help. It means that most girls let their parents know
what is going on in their lives. Problems with friends, school, and
activities tend to be known and understood by their parents, who can
then attempt to help out. Boys are less ready to admit having prob-
lems. They sulk, grouch, or act out.
Pedro, who was twelve, was depressed and crabby for more than
an hour until finally, after repeated aggressive questioning from his
parents, he admitted that he was worried about spending time with
them watching televised election results. His problem was nothing to
be ashamed of - only that he had a lot of homework to do that night -
but somehow he felt that it was shameful to admit it. Pedro's inclina-
tion was to clam up and worry about the homework himself, rather
than tell his parents and ask for advice. In the case of more substantial
problems, this characteristically male style can have tragic conse-
quences. In closed families a member who does not agree with the
beliefs or practices of the others is usually branded as sick or deviant
and will often become that way in response. There is intense pressure
for all members to have the same opinions, feelings, and desires. A
family that is functioning as a closed system will go to great lengths
to maintain a picture of perfect conformity. To present that perfect
picture, central features of family history and family life are kept hid-
den and are not open to discussion. Relationships are seeded with
landmines because there are so many threats to emotional survival.
Family members need to trust each other, and to do this they must
communicate openly and honestly with each other. If one finds that
the other has been dishonest about a serious matter, that trust will be
undermined. The husband or lover who lies about his activities or
friends, the woman who pretends to have an orgasm, the child who
has lied about doing his homework or friends who smoke - all un-
dermine the ability of others to trust them. Robert's trust in himself
was shattered when it finally came out that his wife, Barbara, was
having an affair. For many months he had sensed that their old inti-
macy was gone, and he had asked her repeatedly whether her
feelings for him had changed. Barbara denied any change. Then she
suddenly left him and the children, saying she was in love with her
boss. It turned out that she had been deceiving Robert for two years,
and there were some appalling details. She had asked for expensive
lingerie for Christmas, and then after he had given it to her, she had
worn it only to work. Robert was shattered. After being deceived so
persistently and betrayed so thoroughly, he had trouble trusting

again in an intimate relationship. He experienced considerable diffi-
culty trusting other women, and for a time he lost his confidence in
his own judgment, thinking how "stupid" he had been not to have
detected Barbara's deception.2
In such cases, children may be greatly shaken. If they lose trust in
their parents as a result of repeated parental lies or dishonesty, they
may find it difficult or impossible to believe what other adults tell
them. To learn from adults, children need to believe them; so the
problem is serious. If we cannot trust family members in this way,
then we "cannot trust the universe, including our internal universe
of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions."3 It is in the family that we
first and most intimately define ourselves, our relationships, and the
broader world. When family communication is seriously flawed,
when myths are rigidly upheld against counter-evidence, when dis-
cussion is closed, lies common, or interactions based on pretence, the
whole system is faulty.
Honesty means different things in different contexts. One family
may practise it as strict factual accuracy, another as meticulous
respect for personal property, yet another as emotional openness and
spontaneity. When honesty means saying what we think or express-
ing what we feel, it should be tempered by a sensitivity to context.
The mother who thinks her teenaged daughter looks lumpy and un-
attractive will be ill-advised to say so just as the girl is setting out on
her first date or rushing off to an important job interview. In being
honest with our children and our partners, we need to exercise some
restraint, tact, and proper timing. Sensitive honesty presumes com-
mon sense and prudence. We cannot simply blurt out painful truths
at any old moment. Telling the truth in a confrontational way can be
an attempt to impose change on another person or, worse yet, a way
of fighting. But tactful and balanced honesty helps to build a realistic
picture of the family and enhance trust between members. Dishon-
esty and pretence, obviously, have opposite effects.
Lying is the most verbally explicit form of deception, the form
giving the clearest linguistic indication that a speaker is trying to
manipulate others into false beliefs. A lie is an explicit statement,
uttered so as to lure the audience into assuming that the speaker be-
lieves what he says (when he does not). "I was at the school doing
extra work on my report," says Jill, who was in fact at the home of a
drug-using friend her parents have forbidden her to see. She says it
straight, implying that that is where she was, that is where she be-
lieves she was. It is an outright, straightforward lie. Jill intends to
deceive her mother, manipulating her into believing a falsehood, so

she can get away with breaking the rules.
But lying is not the only means of deception and certainly not the
only one that undermines trust. We may deceive by omission and
evasion, by not telling. A girl who was shoplifting may deliberately
avoid responding to questions about where her new clothes came
from. She does not lie: she deceives by misleading, by giving partial
information which, though true, conveys a false impression. Beth did
not lie to Conrad in words. She lived in falsehood - lived to uphold a
mythical representation of her family life that was not true to her own
emotions.
Writing of life in communist Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel said
that his people had lived a lie and had done this for so long that they
became morally ill.4 They had to pretend to believe in an ideology
and a regime that they knew were not working, and they mouthed so
many empty slogans that they hardly understood what they meant
any more. With less excuse than the inhabitants of a totalitarian soci-
ety, many of us lapse into living a lie. We have a notion of how things
should be, and we talk and act as though they were that way, keeping
up a falsely cheerful facade and refusing to attend to unpleasant real-
ities. Pretence is innocent enough in limited circumstances, as when
children pretend to be circus performers, princes, or dinosaurs. But
when it becomes the basis for a way of life, it is a profoundly serious
matter. Pretence can amount to living a lie, and when the truth is
known, a whole way of life will be revealed as deeply flawed because
it was founded on hypocrisy.5
We often pretend in order to keep up appearances, something that
is important in many families. By convention, adult partners tend to
present a public image of harmony and smooth functioning. It is stan-
dard practice to show a solid "front" to the public world and even to
fairly close friends. While loyalty to a partner is desirable and neces-
sary, and we should not expose every minor quarrel and domestic
misery to the world at large, such pretence can be emotionally stress-
ful and psychologically unhealthy - as it was for Beth, Calvin, and
Conrad. It can also be harmful by preventing the family from getting
help and exposing vulnerable members to damage.
FAMILY SECRETS
Nearly as much as lying, family secrets work to undermine trust. A

family secret is not merely information kept from others; it is signifi-
cant information, nearly always with negative emotional implications.
Family secrets usually involve intimate or threatening matters: addic-

tion, imprisonment, suicide, illness and death, migration status, abor-
tion, adoption, infertility, sexual orientation, affairs, incest, or violence.
Virtually every family has its secrets: the mother who gave up her first
child for adoption, the institutionalized aunt, the alcoholic uncle, the
cousin who had an abortion.6 Clearly, family secrets are a violation of
therapeutic recommendations that people communicate honestly, ex-
press their feelings and concerns openly, and articulate and attempt
to resolve their conflicts through cooperative discussion. Family mem-
bers try to hide unpleasant truths in a attempt to protect others from
shame and anxiety. But even when people have good intentions in
trying to keep things hidden, secrets tend to undermine trust within
the family.
The main problem with family secrets is that they are seldom fully
concealed. Usually, some people know the secret and others suspect
it. In families, secrets tend to separate people from one another; a line
is drawn between those who know and those who do not. The daugh-
ter who had an abortion tells her sisters, but not her parents. The
father having an affair reveals it to his brother and son, but not to his
wife and daughter. Thus secrets tend to create barriers within fami-
lies. Another problem with secrets is that deception is often necessary
in order to maintain them. Such deception is, of course, likely to un-
dermine trust, especially if it is clearly detected, but even when it is
not. People are likely to sense that something is not quite right. Facts
may be hidden, but feelings are not. Vulnerable family members,
especially children, may suspect that central information is being
withheld, become anxious, and lose their sense of trust. They may
invent explanations that are as fearful and threatening as the truth
and may blame themselves for the inexplicable fact that something
seems wrong with the family. For family relations, openness is nearly
always better than secretiveness.
SEXUAL INFIDELITY
In most intimate partnerships, people want and expect sexual loyalty.

In his recent book about sexual infidelity, Frank Pittman, a family
therapist, estimates that 85 per cent of men and women believe that
monogamous relationships are ideal. Nevertheless, some 50 per cent
of husbands and 30 to 40 per cent of wives report having had affairs.7
One would assume that loyalty between non-married partners would
be no better. Pittman takes affairs seriously, and he argues that his
colleagues tend to underestimate the threat that they pose. His fellow
family therapists, Pittman thinks, are trying too hard to be modern
and liberated. In doing so, they miss something that should be abso-
lutely obvious: the destructive effect of sexual betrayal on what were
committed relationships.
Pittman's views confirm the centrality of trust in intimate relation-
ships. His main argument against affairs is that they lead to secrets
and deception, thus undermining trust between partners. It is not
uncommon for people to be sexually unfaithful to their spouses or
partners, but it is relatively uncommon for them to admit it openly.
Affairs are kept secret from the partner and other members of the
family. When an affair is ongoing, it requires many practical arrange-
ments that necessitate deception and outright lies. Keeping all the de-
tails straight, to make sure one is giving a plausible and consistent
narrative, will be stressful. Living under such pressures, the person
having an affair is unlikely to be open or intimate with his or her
partner. If the relationship was not flawed before the affair began, it
will soon become so. While their intimacy is disappearing, there is
another person with whom the disloyal partner can be intimate and
open: the lover, called by Pittman the "affairee."
Affairs nearly always require secrets; they lead to deception, lying,
and breakdowns in intimacy. Undermining trust, they undermine
intimacy. When the affair is discovered, the many attendant lies are
often as harmful to the marriage or partnership as is the affair itself.
Unless restorative action is taken, affairs are likely to destroy what
was a workable partnership. They break the bond of marriage or
partnership and cause a person to fall out of love with his or her part-
ner. It is an illusion, a self-deception, to think that the partner is safe
because the affair is a secret and she knows nothing of it. The very
fact of the secret makes the defecting partner an ally of the affairee
and establishes a rupture in the marriage or relationship. A man who
is having an affair need not keep secrets from his lover, but he does
have to keep secrets from his wife. That very fact will make him feel
closer to his lover and more distanced from his wife, will increase
intimacy within the affair and diminish it within the marriage.
The deceived partner is likely to feel utterly betrayed when she
finds out about the affair and the deception that attended it. The very
act of love, her most intimate act, was founded on falsehoods; she
may think to herself that her home and identity, the very core of
her domestic life, have become untrue. On the basis of years of prac-
tice as a family therapist, Pittman has come to regard nearly all affairs
as self-indulgent, unrealistic, and harmful. Lying, secrecy, and decep-
tion are at least as harmful as sexual disloyalty itself. "It's not whom
you lie with. It's whom you lie to," he says.7 Pittman has harsh words
for adults who have committed themselves to marriage and children
8o Dilemmas of Trust
and who nevertheless feel entitled to indulge their every sexual wish.
Contrary to popular wisdom in therapeutic circles, he insists than an
affair begun on a whim in an unusual circumstance or unlikely mo-
ment can destroy what was a fairly satisfactory marriage and home.
People have implausible excuses for their sexual disloyalty, and
these are too easily accepted by others who do not want to be "judg-
mental" and underestimate the harm that sexual disloyalty to a
spouse or committed partner can bring. "One young man had an
affair in order to impress his heroically adulterous father-in-law. One
woman insisted she had affairs during episodes of split personality. A
man claimed he was kidnapped by visitors from outer space and
offered sexual opportunities with them. He had felt it his patriotic
and scientific duty to investigate the situation fully."8 People deceive
themselves about the reasons for their affairs and the effect that they
are having on their marriage. A man who is having an affair and
keeping it secret will feel guilty and distanced from his wife. The fact
that he can relax and be open with the affairee, yet has to hide things
from his wife, with whom he will feel uncomfortable, means that his
affair will become more fulfilling and relaxing than his marriage.
Thus the affair is likely to be the favoured relationship if he has to
choose between them.
It is misleading to insist upon a distinction between deception and
secrecy in such cases. Whether the disloyal partner is lying, deceiv-
ing, pretending, or keeping a secret does not especially matter: the
fact is that he or she is deeply involved in ways which affect him or
her physically and emotionally and which his or her spouse does not
know about. Marital intimacy and eventually marriage itself will be
undermined. In most marriages and other intimate partnerships,
sexual disloyalty and deception about it will amount to betrayal. One
partner has broken a tacit or explicit promise to preserve his or
her sexuality and sexual intimacy for the other. When this happens,
women and children tend to be the most vulnerable.
A common effect of affairs is for people to end up distrusting mar-
riage itself. Like the young woman who complained of her parents'
multiple marriages and separations and her numerous step-parents,
step-grandparents, and half-siblings, disloyal partners and people
who observe them come to believe that there is something wrong with
being married. Marriages do not seem to last, so marriage must be a
faulty institution. Observing that others can apparently be happily
married and yet their (apparent) security and comfort can be de-
stroyed by sexual whim and indulgence, many people come to
believe that the institution is not to be trusted. Pittman claims that this
is the wrong conclusion to draw on the basis of the evidence. Seeing
multiple affairs, divorces, separations, custody battles, and the like,

people should not lose their faith in marriage. Rather, they should dis-
trust the sexual indulgence that can wreak such havoc by bringing
what were apparently good marriages to sudden and irrational ends.
What causes divorce, Pittman argues, is not the fact that marriage is a
flawed institution, but the sexual indulgence and disloyalty that we
have come to tolerate or even expect. He contends that when people
are in a committed relationship, and especially when they are married
with children, they should not feel free to indulge every sexual wish
and whim.
The belief that marriages are unlikely to endure can be a self-
fulfilling prophecy. For the young woman who complained about
her uncommitted parents, the belief that she cannot achieve a lasting
marriage in which she is a responsible parent may become true be-
cause she believes it. People who distrust marriage and committed
relationships will have a hard time remaining in them. They are thus
likely to have unsuccessful marriages and to acquire further personal
experience to back up their lack of confidence in marriage. As in so
many other contexts, distrust tends to perpetuate and confirm itself.
Once marriage is viewed as unreliable and unstable, we are less
likely to try to make it work.
To ride with the daily ups and downs of a household, especially
one with growing children, we need a certain amount of trust or faith
that we will persist with what is, in essence, a basically good-enough
relationship and home. We need to think of ourselves and our part-
ner as surviving daily challenges. Commitment requires belief in
itself. To remain in a relationship, partners have to trust that it is
viable and can endure. The idea that marriage is unreliable because
such relationships can so easily be destroyed by affairs may be unrea-
sonable. Perhaps it is sexual impulses that should not be trusted. Fol-
lowing their impulses into casual affairs leads people to break up
good-enough families and satisfactory homes, thereby incurring tre-
mendous damage to their spouses and children and exposing them-
selves to emotional turmoil, financial Cost, and considerable practical
inconvenience.
Secrecy and the later exposure of secrets are especially destructive
of trust for children, who tend to be the most vulnerable family mem-
bers when a marriage ends. Children try to preserve a favourable pic-
ture of their parents and have a deep need to view them as loving and
dependable people. If they discover that one parent has only been
pretending to love the other, that one parent has been lying about
what he is doing, they feel devastated because their very life seems to
have been centred around a pretence. In cases where parents have
seemed to their children to have a good relationship, the impact can

be all the more devastating. The child's whole picture of the world
is put in question. Home is the foundation of everything else, and it is
no longer the secure place it seemed to be. Trust in parents, especially
the parent whose affair necessitates the break-up, is seriously affected,
as is trust in the institution of marriage, commited relationships, and
the adult world in general.
Pittman's account of marriage and affairs gives trust an absolutely
central role as the basis for intimate partnerships. He argues convinc-
ingly that it is not sexual yearnings for other partners or even outside
sexual relationships as such that constitute the real betrayal of the
partner. Rather, falsehood and pretence, secrecy and lying, destroy
the trust that genuine intimacy requires. For women and men, trust in
the partner is the essential foundation of a secure home.
VIOLENCE AND SEXUAL ASSAULT
When home is a place of violence or sexual assault, any notion that it

is a place of security or comfort is destroyed. Common-sense thinking
about home and family depicts the home as a secure and comfortable
base for public life. As late as 1960, experts were estimating that
incest would occur to only one in a million people. Freud had many
female patients with stories of sexual abuse by fathers and uncles. But
he could not believe that society was so rotten at its core, and to resist
that conclusion, he came to regard those stories as indicative of infan-
tile sexual longings. Recent evidence suggests that sexual abuse and
violence within families are far more common than they were for-
merly thought to be.9
A recent newspaper account in Canada estimated that one in every
three adult women and one in eight men had at some time been
sexually abused. In a recent book on families in the United States,
Stephanie Coontz quotes a poll, based on self-report, which suggested
that one in seven persons had been sexually abused. As for violence, a
common estimate for Canadian households is that one in ten is
characterized by domestic violence. A poll undertaken by Carleton
University in Ottawa indicated that slightly over half of Canadian
women had, at some time in their lives, been abused by a male part-
ner - a husband, partner, or boyfriend. Among native Canadian com-
munities in the far north, estimates are far higher: one is that some 80
to 90 per cent of households experience violence against women.
Obviously, these figures are not precise, and reporting techniques
in this sensitive area are not altogether reliable. Victims of abuse or
violence may be more likely than others to respond to surveys and
interviews, so that studies inadvertently generate an unrepresenta-

tive sample. Some statistics do not distinguish between abuse in the
home and abuse elsewhere, or between verbal and physical abuse.
The Carleton study, for instance, used an extremely broad definition
of "abuse."10 But even allowing for imprecision and overestimation,
such evidence shows that the home is far from the safe haven that we
have mythically assumed it to be, especially for the women and chil-
dren who are most commonly the victims of violence. In one memo-
rable statement, the U.S. surgeon general said that the home was a
more dangerous place for American women than the streets.11
Ninety-nine per cent of the kidnappers of young children are their
own parents, and most sexual and physical abuse of children occurs
in their own homes. There are many patterns of abuse, but most
abuse is of women and girls and is perpetrated by men. Ninety-two
per cent of the victims of child sexual abuse are girls, and 97 per cent
of the offenders are male. Though men are more often victims of vio-
lence than women, this is not true for domestic violence, where the
large preponderance of victims are female.
So far as trust is concerned, the issue is too obvious to merit much
comment. Violence, sexual assault, and physical abuse impose gross
harm on victims, undermining any trust that the perpetrator is a lov-
ing, caring person and the home a safe place to be. For children, sexual
assault by a father or mother constitutes a fundamental rupture in the
world, a profound violation of their sense of how the world should be.
The idea that a parent is someone loving and caring, someone merit-
ing authority, who can nurture and give direction and advice, is abso-
lutely shaken when that parent turns out to be a sexual abuser. What
he does hurts; it will feel confusing, painful, and wrong. Sexual abuse
by a parent or relative is virtually always accompanied by an attempt
to impose secrecy; the child is made to feel responsible, bribed, threat-
ened, or otherwise intimated into silence. Typically, abuse is accompa-
nied by a sense of feeling dirty, worthless, and shamed, feelings that
are only worsened if - as is so often the case - the attempt to impose
secrecy on the victim is successful.
Needless to say, the effects on the victim's self-esteem and self-trust
are likely to be devastating. She may repress all memory of the abuse,
only to recover it later under the influence of some particular trigger.
Though the concept of abuse has been stretched, and the dysfunction-
ality of families in general exaggerated, by theorists of the codepen-
dency movement, sexual abuse in families is a real fact of life. Families
in which there is sexual abuse or violence really are "dysfunctional" -
or worse. Whatever its nature, sexual abuse in the family is bound to
be painful and to leave persistent and terrible effects. For the battered
woman, home and family offer no comfort, only fear. A wall with
spots, a supper that does not suit the dominant lord, a crying child or
messy living room, can spark a serious beating.
The victim's sense of the abuser (especially if he is a parent), other
family members, the family as a whole, the broader world, and her
own self will be seriously affected. If the abuse is not revealed and
ended, the victim lives in a world of shame, deception, and secrecy, a
false world in which he or she plays a part in a pretence that cloaks a
terrible reality. Victims lose their innocence and are robbed of their
childhood. In this sort of context, appeals to traditional family values
are quite beside the point. If anything, patriarchal practices and the
privacy of the nuclear family tend to facilitate sexual abuse of women
and children. The family characterized by sexual abuse or violence is
typically one in which women and children are submissive and pow-
erless, economically dependent on the earnings of male breadwin-
ners, and accepting of an ideology of male domination. A man who
sees himself as the head of the household, who should and does pre-
vail over his wife and children, can more easily see himself as entitled
to sexual privileges. On this view, his needs are all-important, and he
has the right to fulfil himself however he can. Family violence seems
to be facilitated by patriarchal and traditional assumptions about
family and gender roles. It is probably not a result of male backlash
against increasing female power: domestic violence is even more
prevalent in highly patriarchal societies than in our own.12
It seems unlikely that violence and abuse in families are more com-
mon in the nineties than they were in the forties and fifties or earlier
periods of history. Probably they were always present, and what is
distinctive today is not the frequency of such abuse and violence but
public knowledge and discussion about them. Now victims need not
hide their shameful secrets as they once did. Hundreds of thousands
of women believed they were the "one in a million" case of incest and
said nothing. Journalists and researchers who came across evidence
of incest or other sexual abuse within families tended to dismiss it. If
they tried to publicize it, they were told that it was incredible or "too
depressing."13 A positive front had to be maintained: whatever the
truth might be, the patriarchal nuclear family had to be upheld as the
"foundation" of society. Patriarchal power relationships and relative
isolation in traditional families did not prevent abuse; if anything,
they helped to make it possible. Appealing to traditional family
values to solve this social problem is clearly beside the point: the
patriarchal nuclear family was more cause than cure.
Strangely, trust between men and women in battering relationships
does not entirely disappear. Women often forgive their battering part-
ners and become reconciled with them, temporarily at least. Repeated

reconciliation and forgiveness are notorious features of battering rela-
tionships.14 They can bring elements of sweet romance and make the
relationship seem attractive again - until the next attack.
REFLECTIONS
A good-enough family needs trust at all levels - trust between

parents or adult partners, trust between children and parents, and
trust among the children themselves. In a single-parent family, the
bonds between parent and children are especially important. For rela-
tionships to be genuine and supportive, for relaxation to be possible
and problems to be solved, trust is essential. Without trust, there can
be no real intimacy and security within the family. When the family
lives in a home together, relationships between members tend to be
intense. Contact is frequent and many things can go wrong. There are
so many factors that can undermine the trust between members:
hypocrisy and falseness, poor communication, lack of openness, ma-
nipulativeness, lying, deception, secrecy, and pretence. Understand-
ing how they threaten intimacy and trust serves again to indicate just
how important trust is.
But we should not in every case hold ourselves responsible for
keeping the family together or for maintaining trust in relations
between family members. In this context as in every other, there are
cases when distrust and suspicious are warranted and necessary. We
should, in many cases, try to trust, try to give our children or part-
ners the benefit of the doubt. But trust should not be based on self-
deception. We have no obligation to trust, or try to trust, when there
is good reason not to. We should not try to bend our minds to believe
things that we know are not true; we should not opt for implausible
interpretations of what is going on, just to preserve a positive picture
of the others. Trust is one thing, self-deception another, blind loyalty
another, and gullibility yet another. As in other situations, trust only
goes so far. Trying to force ourselves to trust by ignoring evidence is
no good. If we do this, we will base our trust on self-deception and
pretence. Such "trust" will not be genuine, and the family relation-
ships that are founded upon it will be false and unreliable.
All trust is risky, and trust within the family may be the most risky
of all. The old risk for women in marriage was to trust too much: to
trust that the husband would be the breadwinner, would provide
economically, and would be sexually loyal and loving throughout a
lifetime. On such assumptions, many millions of women devoted
their lives to unpaid work in the home, allowed themselves to be
economically dependent on their husbands, and left themselves

deeply vulnerable. Many gave up their own opportunities to work at
lowly jobs supporting husbands through a professional education;
others left interesting work to care for young children. Notoriously,
for many of these women, the foundation fell out. Their partners
were not loyal. They departed, leaving women and their children in a
precarious situation. Knowledge of the relative frequency of divorce
and break-ups, acceptance of the feminist view that women have
talents and should have opportunities to use them in broader public
work, and the economic advantage of having two wage earners make
this old vulnerability uncommon today. The new risk may not be
overcommitment, but rather a lack of commitment - losses because
we are unable to believe in lasting relationships.
Most people live in families in a home and work to make those
families viable. To do so we have to trust our partners and our chil-
dren, and we have to be committed to our own relationships. Despite
all our problems, this trust is still possible for many people. And
when we understand its importance, we can use it to communicate
honestly and openly, to transcend our lies, to share our secrets, and to
build a better life together. Trust in the family should not be categori-
cal or absolute; nor will it be, given the real circumstances of daily
life. Like most forms of trust in this world, it will be partial, qualified,
and compromised. But nevertheless it will be real. Without a modi-
cum of trust, the family is doomed.
For all its flaws, for all its risks, our family is our first human circle.
Most of us have created another family that provides us as adults
with our companions and home. Good-enough families are founded,
not on heterosexuality and stereotypical gender roles, not on male
providers, not on biological reproduction, but on trust between
people who live together in a home, trust each other, and are commit-
ted to building and living a life together. Adult partners who trust
each other bring up children who trust them. Those children can then
move into the greater world with basic security and confidence. In a
good-enough family a child trusts her parents and begins to trust
herself.
CHAPTER FIDE
Self-Trust
In a poignant essay the American therapist Carl Rogers described the

tragic case of a young German woman known as Ellen West. A sensi-
tive and expressive woman who married unhappily and starved her-
self into slimness, Ellen West was treated by numerous psychiatrists
and doctors, and spent several years in a sanatorium. Released de-
spite doctors' knowledge that she was suicidal, she took a lethal dose
of poison and died at the age of thirty-three. Rogers saw Ellen West as
a person taught not to trust herself. She was distanced from herself to
such an extent that she did not know or fully experience her own
emotions. Instead, she seemed to feel as others told her she was sup-
posed to feel. Her emotions, and her sense of her own emotions, were
inauthentic, and as a result she had difficulty relating to other people.
Coerced into conforming her love life to the dictates of her parents,
Ellen ignored her own feelings and wishes. The result was a "respect-
able" self through which she tried to live. Lacking all confidence in
her own responses, thought, and good judgment, she failed to trust
herself.
At twenty, Ellen West was a lively young woman who had enjoyed
a happy childhood. Then she fell in love with a young man to whom
her father took violent objection. Her parents convinced her that she
was not in love and persuaded her to give up the man. Unhappy, she
began to overeat. Then, teased about being fat, she started to diet. If
other people did not like what she was becoming, she would change
herself to conform to their expectations. Rogers commented: "It is
perhaps indicative of the beginnings of her lack of trust in herself that
she begins to diet only when teased by her companions. She feels an
increasing need to live her life in terms of the expectations of others,
since her own impulses are unreliable."1
At twenty-four, Ellen fell in love with a fellow student to whom she

became engaged. But her parents insisted that this love was not the
real thing; she did not know her true feelings. This love was not right;
she could not be feeling what she thought she felt. As a result of pa-
rental pressure, Ellen came to see herself as an "untrustworthy organ-
ism." Finally, disregarding and distrusting her own experience and
feelings, she gave up the relationship. She could not decide what to
do with her life. It seemed to be teaching her that her own feelings
were not a reliable guide to action; only the experience of others
could be trusted. Ellen turned to a doctor for help. She became ex-
tremely depressed and began to deny not only her feelings but her
desire for food and the natural shape of her own body. She dieted
ferociously.
When she was twenty-eight, Ellen West married a cousin approved
by her family. By thirty-two she was starving herself, taking sixty
laxative pills a day, and seeing analysts and doctors. Isolated from her
own feelings and needs, she became progressively more detached
from other people. Doctors saw her as an object, a strange, abnormal
mechanism that had gone out of control. They argued about what sort
of object she was. What was she a manic-depressive, a melancholic,
an obsessive-compulsive, a schizophrenic? Suicidal? Ellen wrote, "I
confront myself as a strange person. I am afraid of myself." Diag-
nosed as suicidal, she soon fulfilled the prophecy. Rogers could find
no evidence that anyone treating Ellen had tried to relate to her as a
person capable of autonomy and worthy of respect, one whose "inner
experience is a precious resource to be drawn upon and trusted." The
story of Ellen West offers a tragic illustration of the importance of self-
trust.
WHAT IS S E L F - T R U S T ?
The concept of self-trust was pivotal in a doctoral study by Doris

Brothers. In 1982 she examined trust disturbances among young
women who had been victims of rape or incest. Her sample was quite
small: she studied twenty young women aged nineteen or twenty.
Brothers distinguished three types of trust: trust in others (e.g., Mary
trusts Celeste to look after her home); trust in the self when this con-
cerns behaviour affecting others (e.g., Mary trusts herself to drive the
school bus carefully); and trust in the self when this concerns a per-
son's own attitudes and actions (e.g., Mary trusts her own judgment
and instincts when she is making decisions). The third sort of trust is
what Ellen West lacked. Brothers called it "self-trust."2
Self-Trust 89
To determine self-trust in the young women she was interviewing,

Doris Brothers questioned them about their attitudes and likely
responses to various circumstances. How did they think they would
respond to disappointments? How much confidence did they have
in their own self-control? What were their expectations about suc-
cess in jobs and careers? In personal relationships? How would they
respond to other people's opinions about them? To efforts by others
to control them? What confidence did they have in their ability to
make decisions?
In posing these questions, Brothers assumed that a person with self-
trust would believe that she could cope with problems she might face
and deal with her own responses to things that might happen to her.
To trust oneself is to see oneself as a person who can cope and func-
tion in the world, a person who does not need to be monitored,
guided, advised, or controlled by others. Brothers believed that self-
trust requires self-acceptance: when we trust ourselves, we have a
sense of our own competence; we believe that we can control our-
selves and make reasonable judgments about what to do. From this
sense of competence and adequacy, we can be hopeful about our pros-
pects for the future.
The results of Brothers's study were disturbing. The young women
interviewed, all victims of rape and incest, experienced severe dis-
ruptions in trust, most of all in the area of self-trust. Although they
had been violated by men, they tended to blame themselves for what
had happened.3 They devalued themselves and had a diminished
sense of their own competence and good judgment. This tragic
response may have been an attempt to render traumatic events intel-
ligible and preserve a sense of the world as a tolerably safe place.
(Why would this happen? What could make such a thing happen? I
must have done something wrong. There must have been something
I could have done to prevent it, and I didn't do it. It was my fault. So
there is something wrong with me.) Paradoxically, blaming them-
selves was a way of making sense of the world and reasserting a
degree of control. Sexual assaults by known persons would indicate
that even relatives and friends do not love this person, will not take
care of her. Even at home, intimacy is a dangerous thing. Attacks by
total strangers (so-called blitz rapes or random acts of violence)
would suggest that anyone might attack at any time. Either way, the
implications of sexual assault are frightening. But by blaming herself,
a young women could blot out some of the fear; if she was to blame,
then by changing aspects of her own behaviour and style, she could
prevent similar things from happening again. Blaming oneself in
these cases seemed to be a way of preserving a sense of a safe world.

It is as though a young woman is saying, "Somehow, I brought it on
myself. Fundamentally, home and the world are still all right. There
must be something wrong with me."
These results are especially tragic because lack of self-trust is a
devastating handicap in life. Without it a person cannot achieve per-
sonal autonomy. She cannot make her own judgments and decisions;
she cannot form her own opinions and beliefs. She drifts, responding
to pressures and opinions, an easy victim for others with controlling
personalities. By contrast, an autonomous person is capable of mak-
ing her own decisions and choices and controlling her own life.
One helpful way to think about autonomy is to reflect on the
thoughts we have and the procedures we implement when we are
making choices and deciding what to do. In modern Western cul-
tures, at least, individual autonomy is an important value. We have
only one life to lead in this world, and most of us feel that we should
make the best of it in our own way. That requires autonomy - inde-
pendent judgment about what to believe and do. And autonomy
absolutely requires self-trust. Ellen West, who had no self-trust and
no autonomy either, let her parents and friends dictate to her. In her
case, the results were disastrous. To exercise autonomy in planning
and leading our lives, we need to discover our own talents, feelings,
beliefs, and values. We need to define who we are, understand our-
selves, think for ourselves, and set our own goals. We seek, within
limits, to direct our own lives.4 If we do not trust ourselves, we are
incapable of judging, deciding, and choosing for ourselves. To make
autonomous decisions, we have to ask ourselves questions about
what we really want, need, and care about, and we have to seek
answers to these questions from within ourselves. Of course, we may
take advice and suggestions from others, and we should think care-
fully about what they have to say. But in the final analysis, it is for us
to make up our minds about what to think and do. Although the
opinions and suggestions of others must be taken into account, they
should not outweigh our own beliefs, instincts, and feelings. To exer
cise autonomy, to live our lives as responsible and active individuals,
we must value our own wants and needs. We have confidence in our
own emotional, intellectual, and moral competence. And this is sim-
ply to say that, in order to make autonomous decisions, we have to
trust ourselves. When self-trust is undermined, we do not rely on our
own judgment and do not make our own decisions.
As the case of Ellen West so vividly illustrates, self-trust and auton-
omy are absolutely essential for a person's mental health and very
survival. To make an autonomous decision, a person must be capable
Self-Trust 91
of introspection - looking into himself to reflect on what he feels,

wants, and believes. He must be capable too of thinking back,
remembering past events and feelings, and working out what they
meant and mean, what their significance is for his identity, goals, and
prospects. He must be capable of critical reflection and deliberation.
All this requires self-trust, the abililty to rely on one's own critical
reflection and judgment.5
THE ANALOGY BETWEEN TRUSTING ONESELF

AND TRUSTING OTHERS
When we trust another person, we have positive expectations about

that person's motivation, competence, and actions. We believe in his
or her basic integrity; we are willing to rely on him or her. And when
we do so, we make ourselves vulnerable to that person. Trusting, we
accept our vulnerability. Trust affects the way we understand another
person and interpret what he says and does. If someone we trust tells
an off-colour joke or excludes us from a conversation, we do not take
it as an insult. If he fails to call when he said he would, we do not con-
clude that he is no longer a friend. Trust between people is not an
all-or-nothing matter. It can exist in various degrees: we may trust
someone only a little, considerably, or absolutely. Our trust is often
relative to situation and circumstance. We might, for instance, trust a
person to do the gardening, but not to care for our children or man-
age our financial affairs. Usually, trusting involves expectations based
to some extent on past behaviour. Still, trust goes beyond what evi-
dence shows. Because circumstances and people change, predictions
of the future behaviour of free agents cannot be guaranteed. Trust
involves risk and vulnerability. When we trust other people, we are at
risk; we are vulnerable to them, but we let ourselves be vulnerable
because we feel confident that they will not let us down.
All these aspects of trust between persons hold true for self-trust.
The expression "self-trust" is not metaphorical; we can literally trust
ourselves. When we do so, we have positive beliefs about our own
motivations and competence. We see ourselves as persons of integ-
rity. We are willing to rely or depend on ourselves, accepting risks
attendant on our own decisions and our vulnerability to their conse-
quences. And we have a general disposition to understand ourselves
in a positive light, an implicit sense of our own basic worth and integ-
rity. A person who sees himself or herself as basically well inten-
tioned and competent and as able to make reasonable judgments and
decisions and carry out reasonable plans of action is one with self-
trust.6
Like interpersonal trust, self-trust exists in degrees and may be

relativized to various contexts. No one trusts herself absolutely and
in every respect, and no one should.7 We might, for instance, trust
ourselves to give a public lecture or do the family laundry, but not to
offer advice to a suicidal adolescent or find our way around in a Turk-
ish city. To function as an autonomous human being, to be able to feel
and value our own feelings, interpret our own experiences, and direct
our own lives, what we need is basic, or core, self-trust. This means
having a sense of confidence in ourselves as feeling, remembering,
knowing, judging, and acting agents. To have this self-trust we do
not need to be confident of our competence and motivation in every
context.
Unlike self-esteem, which is closely related to it, self-trust is not a
trendy concept. We do not hear much about it.8 Many people, even
those who are quite reflective, would not bother to ask whether or in
what respects they trust themselves. Often, as happens so frequently
in issues of trust, we become conscious of self-trust just when it is
missing. In some respect, we do not trust ourselves, and because we
do not do so just at that moment, we may become aware that "nor-
mally," we do trust ourselves.9 Set out for a walk, cook dinner, read a
book, or purchase an airline ticket - do we trust ourselves when we
do such things? We would never think of saying so; we take it for
granted that we know how to do things and can cope with what will
come up in such mundane activities. In such matters, as adults who
are sane and functioning in their own society, we believe implicitly that
we are able to do these things. We can speak the language, are under-
stood, know our names and addresses, can find our way around, and
are competent and sane.10 If this were not so, we could not function in
day-to-day life. Does all this mean that we trust ourselves? Yes, to a
degree - although we are scarcely ever aware of it.
Issues of self-trust come closer to the surface when we are chal-
lenged in some way and have to respond. Then we need our self-
trust, and then it helps to have considered what self-trust is and why
it is important. We have to make judgments about what is going on;
we have to make decisions about what to do; we then have to carry
out these decisions. In the interests of autonomy, we should do these
things ourselves. If we are making decisions with a partner, he should
not drown out or control our contribution. If we are insecure in our
sense of our own values, motives, and capacities, we may lose our-
selves too easily. We may follow a bandwagon or cave in, for no good
reason, to the pressures of a dominating boss, colleague, or partner.11
Or, for that matter, even to a demanding child. "Just say no," the say-
ing goes, and often that is right. "No means no," to be sure. But we
Self-Trust 93
can want to say no, have a strong sense that we ought to do so, and
yet not quite manage to do it. We can bend too easily to the sugges-
tions and criticisms of other people, yield too readily to social pres-
sures, or lack initiative in overcoming obstacles. Without self-trust, it
is not possible to make effective decisions.
When a person experiences something, interprets what has hap-
pened, and later remembers and recounts what she has experienced,
she may not think of herself as trusting or not trusting herself. How-
ever, should she or others begin to question her idea of what hap-
pened, the issue of self-trust will become obvious. Is it for others to
tell her what she is feeling, what her experiences meant, or what she
remembers? Self-trust may become an issue when a person has to
decide whether she can depend on herself to implement a decision
and act on her own values in a difficult situation, as is illustrated by
the following example.
Joseph is a recovering alcoholic. With the assistance of an AA group
and his supportive family, he has been dry for three months. Joseph
has been invited to a wedding reception where alcohol will be served.
He fears the event will be stressful, not only because of the alcohol
but because some years previously he had a passionate affair with the
woman who is about to be married. Officially they are now just
friends, but it was she who ended the affair, and Joseph was very
unhappy about it at the time. In deciding whether to attend the recep-
tion, he reflects on whether he can trust himself to cope with his
emotions, have the will-power to stay off alcohol when under stress,
and - if he does have a lapse with drinking - return later to his A
program. If he decides to go, he is in effect trusting himself to con-
form to his values in these trying circumstances.
In deciding whether to attend the reception, Joseph has to ask him-
self whether he will be able to stick to his decision not to drink. If,
after reflection, he goes to the reception, he is trusting himself to cope
with the situation and its aftermath. If he choses to stay away, he
has decided his control is not good enough. Though he does not feel
strong enough to attend, he can feel good about having the wisdom
to avoid a setback in his struggle against alcoholism.
Another case illustrating the effect of self-trust is that of Linda, a
single parent with three sons. She lives in an upper-middle-class dis-
trict, but because of her recent divorce, she has a lower income than
many others in the area. Her youngest son, Robert, has been in the
first grade for five months but does not yet read. Linda speaks with
Robert's teacher, Eleanor, at a parent-teacher interview. Eleanor says
that Robert is rather slow at reading, slower certainly than many
others in the class. She then suggests that he would be quite normal
and would fit into a class better if he were in a poorer part of town
where people are "slower." Describing the encounter, Linda said of
Eleanor, "She destroyed my trust."
Linda heard Eleanor's comment as expressing stereotyping, preju-
dice, and hasty judgment. She discounted Eleanor's response, finding
it so disturbing that she could no longer regard her as a competent
teacher. In this instance, she trusted herself and she ceased to trust
Eleanor - as a teacher, in any event. Linda reacted in this way because
she relied on her own beliefs and values. She made a negative judg-
ment about the teacher and preserved her sense that as a mother she
was providing a reasonable environment for her family. If Linda did
not trust herself, if she felt doubts about her own competence as a
mother and had little confidence in her capacity to provide for her
children emotionally and economically, she would have responded to
the encounter in quite a different way. Perhaps she would have wor-
ried about her ability to bring up her children; perhaps she would
have nagged Robert to speed up and prove that their family was as
good as the others; perhaps she would have moved to another, less
"threatening" district.
There are many dimensions of self-trust. We may be called upon to
trust our perceptions and observations; interpretations of events and
actions; feelings and responses; values; memory, judgment, instinct,
common sense, and will; capacity to act, flexibility, competence,
talent, and ability to cope with the unexpected. When we trust our-
selves, we have a conviction that on the whole we are competent and
sensible people who can do what the situation demands. Whether an
issue of self-trust arises, whether and how much a person trusts her-
self will vary from one context to another. To lack self-trust in some
restricted capacity or specific situation is not necessarily a serious
handicap. Few people would be restricted or burdened by the sense
that they could not rely on themselves to purchase a second-hand car,
explore Istanbul unguided, or do suicide counselling. This contextual
self-distrust may very well be helpful, inhibiting us from mistakes
and rash behaviour and from accepting responsibilities that we can-
not carry out. But core distrust of oneself - self-doubt in fundamental
areas - is something else again. To lack general confidence in our
own general ability to observe and interpret events, to remember and
recount, to deliberate and act, is a handicap so serious as to threaten
our status as an individual moral agent and our basic self-respect.12
If a person were to distrust her memory of her own childhood, her
ability to understand the gestures and comments of other people,
her instinctive feelings towards acquaintances and possible friends,
her sense of her own interests and abilities as regards occupation and
Self-Trust 95
leisure activities, and her ability to define and implement future

goals, she would lack self-trust in core areas. In such a case, she could
scarcely function as a person. Absence of this core self-trust would
make effective choice and personal autonomy impossible. To reflect
on our beliefs and values, to work out a resolution in cases where
those beliefs and values conflict, it is necessary to view ourselves as
having worthy values, competently founded beliefs, and the cogni-
tive and moral capacity to make good judgments and implement
decisions. All this is simply to say that we need, in fundamental
respects, to trust ourselves - to believe that we can do these things
reliably and dependably and need not turn over our judgmental and
decision-making powers to others.13
When we trust another person, we have experience with that per-
son and evidence about her. We know her, to some extent, through
what she does and says. We have a sense of what sort of person she is
from being with her, doing things with her, and seeing and listening
to her. With self-trust, our evidence is about ourselves. We have more
evidence because we have been with ourselves our whole life. But
despite all this experience, we do not have perfect self-knowledge.
We can forget, misinterpret, overvalue or undervalue, or deceive our-
selves.
When we trust another person, we are vulnerable to him or her. If
that person acts badly, we are in a situation not of our own making,
from which we must retrieve ourselves. If we trust someone to mail
an important document and he forgets, we have to cope with the con-
sequences. With self-trust, the predictability of success or failure may
be greater: we should know better what is going on because it is, after
all, our own self that we are trusting. This is not to say, obviously, that
our self-knowledge is perfect. Risk remains: we are vulnerable to our
own failings. As with every case of trust, self-trust is risky to some
degree. We may be hurt or harmed if we fail to do what we trusted
ourselves to do. So far as vulnerability is concerned, trusting another
person and trusting ourselves are quite comparable.
CAN WE TRUST O U R S E L V E S TOO M U C H ?
The simple answer is yes. We can trust other people too much, and
similarly we can, in various ways, trust ourselves too much.14 Our
trust can be too great, considering the evidence on which it is based.
Or, although well grounded on evidence, our self-trust can be so com-
plete as to have adverse consequences: we may rely too much on our-
selves and too little on others, or become dogmatic in our belief in our
own good character and good sense.
Our trust or distrust of ourselves is generally based on our knowl-

edge and beliefs about what we are able to do and our sense of our-
self, resulting from our experiences in life.15 An example of a woman
who came not to trust herself in a particular context because of some-
thing she did is that of Pat, who irrationally stood up in a canoe in
chilly ocean waters. As a result of her sudden motion, she and her
friend Susan capsized and barely survived the experience. Reflecting
on her impulsive action, which had nearly cost them their lives, Pat
said that she would never trust herself in a canoe again - an over-
statement probably, but she took this instance of silly and dangerous
behaviour to be evidence of something about herself. Pat has unfor-
gettable evidence that she can get carried away when she is having
a good time and that she is capable, on occasion, of acting so impul-
sively and carelessly as to endanger her own life and that of her
friend. She knows this about herself because of something she once
did; reflecting on it, she trusts herself less in this respect and in
this context. A certain amount of caution and healthy self-doubt will
result from this frightening experience. If Pat were to write off the
episode and not reflect on it at all, one would say she was rash and
overconfident with respect to canoeing. If, on the other hand, she
had many times safely paddled her canoe through the harbour, she
would feel a confidence, based on evidence, that she could do that
again.
The young women interviewed by Doris Brothers trusted them-
selves too little in the area of sexual control. Coerced by others, they
nevertheless blamed themselves for giving in, discounting the fact
that they had been forced by their attackers. A person trusts herself
too much if she trusts herself beyond what the evidence warrants,
and too little if she trusts herself less than the evidence warrants, as
the following contrasting examples illustrate.16 When Andre suc-
cessfully passed a driver's examination on the first try, he felt confi-
dent that he could drive alone to a distant city. He overestimated his
ability, inferring too much from a single success. He underestimated
the significance of inexperience and possible fatigue or hasty deci-
sions; he had too much confidence in his driving abilities, and in this
regard he trusted himself too much. Consider, in contrast, Betty, an
older woman who has driven for forty years without accident and
yet says that she would not trust herself to drive on the highway. She
has ample evidence that she is a good and careful driver, and yet she
somehow thinks of highways as more fearful than roads in town and
would not have the confidence to drive on them. Based on the evi-
dence of past performance and competence, Andre trusted himself
too much and Betty too little.
Self-Trust 97
In many ways we distort or misinterpret our own past actions. We

may see ourselves as being more virtuous and competent than the
evidence implies and become too self-confident. Or we may criticize
and diminish ourselves, failing to take seriously even our substantial
achievements.17 Selective self-history is a well-known activity, often
criticized in autobiographers. In our own story of life and the world,
we may be the hero or the victim. Either way, we may exaggerate our
own significance. A common phenomenon is the "partisan bias" in
which people are, in effect, prejudiced in their own favour. An indi-
vidual with partisan bias uses a double standard for judging her
own success and that of others.18 If a person has had three unsuc-
cessful marriages, he may "know" that it was not his fault that these
relationships failed. Yet he may believe that someone else with
three unsuccessful marriages has been "proven" impossible to live
with. A double standard: the self is judged far more leniently than
the other. A converse syndrome can also be observed. Some people
with little self-trust tend to employ a double standard in the other
direction, discounting their own successes while inflating those of
others and thereby handicapping themselves by underestimating
their own power and competence. Both syndromes cause problems.
Those biased in their own favour and trusting themselves too much
are likely to be rash and overconfident; they may easily alienate
other people. Those who trust themselves too little and undervalue
their activities will not undertake new ventures and will suffer from
diminished self-esteem.
Even when self-trust is backed up by evidence, it can be counter-
productive if it is carried too far. Strong self-trust can prevent us
from cooperating with others - refusing, for instance, to delegate
work when we are in charge. One woman is superbly organized and
competent; she can trust herself to get things done because she
knows from experience that she can do the job herself and do it well.
Her colleagues, children, and friends rely on her constantly and she
always comes through. So it has been for much of her life. Even as a
child, she took over domestic tasks from her parents. What this
woman does is called "over-functioning." The classic joke about
over-functioning is the one about the mother so accustomed to
cutting her children's meat that she unwittingly assumes everyone
needs such assistance and cuts her neighbour's meat at an adult
dinner party. People who over-function take on too many tasks and
prevent others from developing their competence.
Perversely, such people tend to encounter problems because they
are so reliable and dependable. A dependable and capable person
may trust herself more than she trusts others and for good reason: she
has found from experience that she herself can and will complete
various tasks, whereas other people are often undependable. As a
result, she becomes unwilling to rely on others and assumes too many
responsibilities herself. Such people have strong self-trust, which is
supported by evidence and in that sense not irrational. Their self-trust
can support their own autonomy and self-direction and can in those
ways be an important asset. Because they are largely self-directed,
such people are generally immune to social pressure and secure in
their self-valuing. But such strong self-trust, though in one sense
rational, can go so far as to be counter-productive when it leads to
over-functioning. People who over-function characteristically take on
too many responsibilities, overloading themselves with work and dis-
couraging the development of competence in others.
In other contexts, strong self-trust can lead to dogmatism and in-
flexibility. Trusting our own perceptions and judgments, we may be
sure that we are right and therefore unwilling to change our minds.
Sometimes our confidence can go too far. We need basic self-trust; we
need to value ourselves and have confidence in our own feelings and
judgments. But our self-trust or self-confidence should not be abso-
lute. Clearly, we can make mistakes about our own abilities and feel-
ings, no less than about other people and external events. To close
our minds to the comments and arguments of others, to assume that
our own judgments and abilities are certainly and categorically right,
is to be dogmatic and inflexible. Absolute self-trust will have nega-
tive consequences.
Obviously, absolute self-trust is never warranted. Everyone is
fallible. Our own conception of ourselves should not count for every-
thing, should not stand firm in the face of every bit of counter-
evidence or counter-interpretation. Reasonable self-trust requires an
honest and balanced appraisal of our motives, abilities, and actions,
one that takes into account the responses of friends, family, and col-
leagues. Self-trust should not shield us from all suggestions, advice,
or criticism. Nor should it inhibit us from collaborating with and
depending on others. What is absolutely crucial is that core of self-
trust and self-valuing. We must take our own feelings, beliefs, and
responses seriously, make our own choices, for our own reasons, and
be capable of acting confidently as we judge we should.
CHAPTER SIX
Self-Trust, Self-Respect,
and Self-Esteem
When we have self-respect, we value ourselves for those things that

make us persons: our consciousness, choices, capacities, and abilities.
A person with self-respect has a sense that he or she is a human being
whose interests and ends are valuable and who, as a human being,
has dignity and worth. Having self-respect, a person can stand up
when demeaned and insulted, with the conviction that these attitudes
are not deserved. Allowing ourselves to be exploited, manipulated, or
used over a long period of time is seriously undermining to our self-
respect; if we become tools enabling others to achieve their ends, our
sense that our own ends, goals, and interests are worthy is unlikely to
survive.
To have self-respect, we must value ourselves as people. We must
regard our own interests, values, beliefs, and goals as important and
see ourselves as people with dignity and moral worth - people
whose needs and goals are every bit as important as those of others.
Self-respect and self-trust are necessary for achievement and success,
whatever the undertaking. In any endeavour there are obstacles; if
we do not regard our pursuits as worthy and achievable, we will
soon give up. If we do not value ourselves and our plans, we will be
plagued with self-doubt and unable to move towards our goals.1 Self-
trust requires having a positive sense of our own motivation, compe-
tence, and integrity. To persist, we must think that what we are trying
to do is worthy and that the way we are trying to do it is fundamen-
tally good. Without this faith in ourselves, we cannot continue effec-
tively in life. If we doubt or distrust ourselves, we see ourselves as
ill-motivated, incompetent, and unable to act independently. Doubt-
ing, losing faith, we are likely to downplay our qualities and poten-
tialities; we see ourselves as unworthy, lacking integrity, unable to
implement worthy goals, and inadequately equipped to deal with the
world.
ioo Dilemmas of Trust
We often face challenges to our actions and beliefs. Obstacles

present themselves; things go wrong; relationships turn out badly;
others confront and criticize us. To preserve our own sense of our
motivation and character, we need resources within ourselves to con-
sider and respond to these sorts of challenges. This is where self-trust
enters the picture. We must be able to assess what others say, reflect
on our actions, values, and beliefs, determine the accuracy or impor-
tance of the challenge, and respond appropriately. This reflection
requires relying on our own capacities of memory, deliberation, and
judgment, and we will not be able to do so unless we trust ourselves.
To discriminate between apt and ill-founded challenges from others,
we need to trust our own memory, judgment, and conscience. With
no resources to preserve our ideas, values, and goals against criticism
and attack from others, we will be too malleable to preserve a sense of
being a person in our own right and will therefore be unable to main-
tain self-respect.
Gross illustrations of this dynamic can be seen in the battered
woman syndrome. Battered women can be so demeaned and (liter-
ally) beaten down by abusive partners that they come to believe they
are worthless beings who deserve what they are getting. They come
to accept abuse as a fact of life, something which is found to happen
to them and which they are powerless to prevent. Tragically, abuse
works to undermine self-respect and self-trust, the very inner re-
sources that are needed to escape it.
Self-trust is necessary to maintain our self-respect. It is also basic
in connection with self-esteem. Three basic distinctions help to clarify
self-esteem:
a Core Self-esteem and Situational Self-esteem Core self-esteem is our

sense that fundamentally we are acceptable persons; situational self-
esteem is our sense that we are competent and can act adequately in
some specific context or situation. Clearly, one can have core self-
esteem without having some types of situational self-esteem. A per-
son may, for instance, be quite secure about her overall worth while
nevertheless lacking self-esteem as regards her ability in basketball
or her capacity to find her way around a strange city when she does
not know the local language.
b Comparative and Non-comparative Self-esteemSelf-esteem may be in-
terpreted as comparative: we esteem ourselves, or value ourselves,
in comparison to other people. Examples are of a familiar type. A
man takes pride in his muscular body; he feels even better about
himself when he is in the locker room and compares his trim, strong
body with those of other men his age. A girl prides herself on her
Self-Trust, Self-Respect, and Self-Esteem 101
singing; she entered a competition and won first prize. In each case,
the individual's self-esteem is buttressed by the fact that he or she
has evidence of superiority over many others. Comparative self-
esteem is implicitly competitive: we cannot all be "the best," and
most of us cannot be better than most others.2 There is another,
deeper kind of self-esteem which is non-comparative and not implic-
itly competitive. We may esteem ourselves simply as the human
beings we are, without grading ourselves on any implicit compara-
tive scale. We are individual human beings; we have feelings,
desires, hopes, and fears; we love and are loved; we have talents
and projects and a place in the world. As human beings, we have a
dignity and a claim to respect, and it is these aspects of ourselves
that can provide a basis for non-comparative self-esteem. The dis-
tinction between comparative and non-comparative self-esteem has
immediate practical significance insofar as self-esteem is widely
accepted as important for mental health and as a major goal in edu-
cation. If we accept that it is desirable for everyone to have a good
sense of self-esteem, then, to be coherent, we must assume a non-
comparative conception of self-esteem. Comparative self-esteem sets
one person against others; non-comparative self-esteem does not. If
we understand self-esteem comparatively, life begins to seem like a
competitive activity. It is obviously impossible for everyone to have
well-founded self-esteem in the comparative sense: we cannot all
be better than most others. It is desirable for everyone to have a
basic and adequate sense of self-esteem; but to say this makes sense
only if we understand self-esteem non-comparatively and non-
competitively.
c Inner-based and Outer-based Self-esteemThere is a difference be-
tween our inner sense of self-esteem and a self-esteem based on
the expressed attitudes of other people. In the absence of inner
resources, a person denigrated by those around her is likely to feel
incompetent and worthless. She will be unable to maintain a sense
of self-worth and will lack core self-trust. If she has some inner
sense of worth and competence, self-trust can enable her to pre-
serve this. Self-trust makes possible independent judgments, an
understanding that ill-treatment received is wrong, and a preserva-
tion of a positive sense of herself and her future prospects. Solid
inner self-esteem is the stuff of terrific narrative, myth, and fairy
tale. Cinderella always knew that she was better than a kitchen
maid, even though she was consistently abused by her stepmother
and stepsisters. How did she maintain that inner conviction that
she was a worthy person deserving respect? Why and how did she
learn to trust herself? The fairy tale never gave us the answers. Was
1O2 Dilemmas of Trust
the Fairy Godmother responsible? Some people can preserve a

sense of identity and worth in the face of overwhelmingly difficult
circumstances, and that is an inspiring fact. But the prominence of
such heroic determination in myth and legend is no guarantee that
such inner strength is common in the real social world. Many of us
wish that we could stand up against denigration and lack of social
recognition, but fear that we cannot. The sad truth is that many
abused and downtrodden people are not like Cinderella in this
respect.
What is fundamental for self-worth and self-trust is a person's

inner, non-comparative sense of core self-esteem - that is to say, our
fundamental sense of self-worth, our basic internal conception as
to whether, fundamentally, we are worthy and adequate persons,
regardless of how we compare or fare under competition with other
people. This inner self-trust and self-esteem does not depend on spe-
cific performance in particular contexts such as sports, study, or
cooking. It does not require comparison and competition with other
people; it is not a matter of mentally checking our status or perfor-
mance to see how well we are doing in comparison with others. Nor
does it depend on luxury goods, a title, status in society, or overt
praise from other people. This basic core self-esteemis really a matter of
self-acceptance, an accepting of ourselves for what we are and a con
viction that we are worthy persons whose needs and interests, beliefs
and feelings, are absolutely as worthy of attention as those of other
people. If we do not accept our motives and goals as worthy, if we
do not believe that we have sound judgment and competence in key
areas of decision and action, then we cannot trust ourselves, and we
lack basic self-esteem.
If, on the other hand, we do trust ourselves, we can more easily
protect our self-esteem in contexts where external recognition and
acknowledgement are lacking. Like Cinderella, we can, when appro-
priate, tell ourselves that others are treating us wrongly, demeaning
us unjustly, that we are not less worthy than they. If other people
should demean or insult us, basic self-trust, supporting self-respect,
will be a major personal resource for resistance.
SOURCES OF SELF-TRUST
Obviously, a secure family background tends to make for self-trust. I

a person is loved and cared for during infancy and childhood and
feels physically and emotionally secure, he or she can form an iden-
tity as an accepted, loved, and valuable person. Treated as lovable
and valuable by those closest to him or her, such a person will natu-
rally gain a sense of himself or herself as a worthy person meriting

respect. If, in addition, a person's upbringing has cultivated the abil-
ity to think through issues, deliberate, and make decisions, she or he
is more likely to be independent and capable of the autonomous
thought and action that are essential to maintain self-trust in later life.
Important, too, are experiences of competence and success. Like
other kinds of trust, self-trust is founded in part upon experience. We
come to trust ourselves as capable and worthy persons because we
have evidence that we can accomplish our goals, make reasonable de-
cisions, and successfully conduct important relationships. Of course,
success in action and decision-making is not sufficient for self-trust.
Most people require some appreciation and positive response from
others. The family is a crucial starting point, but rarely sufficient.
Because family support is quasi-obligatory, where it exists, it may
seem so normal as to be insignificant. The insecure teenager, told by
her mother that she looks lovely, can all too easily dismiss the remark,
saying, "You only think that because you're my mother." In the sensi-
tive phase of adolescence, friends are crucial, and acceptance and
praise from family members can be too predictable to be relevant.
Self-confidence and self-esteem require acceptance and success out-
side the circle of family and intimate friends.
Unless there is strong support and acceptance outside the family,
and in the absence of a heroically independent sense of self, those
who lack love, security, and acceptance during childhood are un-
likely to have self-esteem and self-trust as adults. Even within a
secure home, an authoritarian upbringing can work against self-
trust. People are told what to do and not encouraged to develop their
own capacity to think things through, their own values, and their
ability to make and implement their own decisions. For the same
reasons, a rigid and dogmatic education is likely to work against the
development of self-esteem and self-trust. If a person is trained to
defer to authority and not to think for himself, he is less likely to be
capable of doing so in later life. When one authority is displaced, he
may seek out another, as is the case with many adherents of cults.
A person who does not trust herself and has low self-esteem will
not think of herself as well motivated and competent. If, perchance,
she should happen to accomplish something for which she receives
praise and credit from others, her self-esteem may improve. But if her
self-doubt is extreme, she may find herself unable to accept the rec-
ognition that others offer. She will tend to discount her success and
attribute it to luck or the interventions of others, rather than to her
own effort and ability. Only if she can experience and acknowledge
her own role in achieving success will she have evidence to support
trust in herself.
There is evidence that empathethic responses from other people

can strengthen self-trust. Doris Brothers makes this claim in her
recent exploration of trust and self-trust in the context of therapy.3
She claims that all her patients have experienced "trust distur-
bances." A major purpose of therapy is to work to rectify those dis-
turbances and enable the patient to use more mature criteria in his or
her estimations of trustworthiness. Trust disturbances manifest them-
selves in various ways: some patients trust themselves scarcely at all;
some trust others against all evidence, making themselves trustwor-
thy people for others, but setting themselves up for exploitation and
betrayal; some are generally suspicious of others, including her as a
therapist. Brothers maintains that it is the consistent, reliable, predict-
able, and dependable behaviour of parents or caretakers that makes
mature self-trust possible, and it is the reliable, predicatable behav-
iour of the therapist with regard to the regularity of appointments,
consistency of session duration, fairness of fee arrangements, and so
on that helps promote mature trust attitudes as a result of a therapeu-
tic relationship.
These elements are important, but the most crucial of all is em-
pathy. By her empathetic responses, the therapist shows that she
acknowledges the feelings and situation of the patient; she does not
discredit or downplay what he is feeling. The patient is thereby en-
couraged in his sense that what he is saying and feeling he really is
feeling, that what happened to him and felt bad really did happen
and really did feel bad. Because the empathetic response validates
the patient's feelings and beliefs, and because that response comes
from a person who is showing herself trustworthy, empathy helps
provide a basis for self-trust.
TRUSTING OURSELVES AND

RELATING TO OTHERS
A person who has a secure sense of self-worth and is confident of his

or her ability to cope with the world need not put up a false front
with others. Such a person will feel no need to cover up, pretend to be
what he or she is not, or try to make a good impression: he or she can
relax and act naturally. People strike others as trustworthy when they
seem reliable, consistent, sincere, and genuine, and untrustworthy
when they are unpredictable and undependable or when they seem
to be putting on an act, hiding something, or trying to deceive or ma-
nipulate. Thus other people are likely to find the self-trusting person
trustworthy. In the case of apparently inauthentic behaviour or im-
pression management, people feel unable to sense the "real person"
underneath and thus gain no understanding of the other's character.
In some situations, we trust ourselves and rely on our own judg-

ment in order to resist undermining criticisms and interpretations put
forward by other people. The example of Linda in the parent-teacher
interview, discussed in the last chapter, illustrates this pattern. Linda
trusts herself and as a result does not trust the teacher, Eleanor, whom
she takes to have put forward a criticism based on facile stereotyp-
ing. This example may suggest that self-trust and trust in others are
opposed or alternative attitudes; it may suggest that we trust our-
selves more only if we trust others less. But such an opposition be-
tween self-trust and trust in others does not hold true in general.
Because she trusted herself, Linda was able to maintain her trust in
her son Robert and keep her confidence that he would learn to read
well some day. Self-trust is needed to think through and make our
own judgments about what is going on, what we have done, and
what we can do. We need it to think things through for ourselves and
to act on our own beliefs and values. Self-trust is as necessary for con-
tinuing to trust someone who is, in our best judgment, trustworthy, as
it is for deciding, on the basis of evidence, that we now have grounds
to be suspicious of someone we used to trust. Trusting ourselves may
support us in trusting others or distrusting them, depending on the
circumstances and on what we think is sensible and best.
Self-trust requires and is required by positive relations with other
people. We develop as people because we encounter others, and we
grow because of our friends and family, with whom we talk and share
experience. In his philosophy of dialogue and encounter, Martin
Buber argued that the growth of a self comes because another self is
present to it. We need confirmation from other people.4 For another's
presence and response to confirm me, I must acknowledge that that
other is genuinely another person, a self in his own right, making
judgments on the basis of his own beliefs and values, and feeling and
responding because he is the individual person that he is. A person
whom I have dismissed as "just a party hack" or "your typical white,
male scientist" cannot confirm me in my feelings or offer meaningful
advice to me, and that not because of any intrinsic flaw in him, but be-
cause I have categorized and rejected him so as to make it impossible
for him to do so. To receive empathy and confirmation from another
person, I have to regard him as a worthy individual in himself, in his
own right. I have to approach him with the attitude that he is a
worthy human being. To do so, in certain fundamental ways, I have
to respect and trust him. And for a genuine encounter, I also have to
trust myself enough to expose myself to another.
In a meaningful encounter between two persons, each is conscious
that the other is another and may differ from himself. Buber says,
"The sphere of the interhuman is one in which a person is confronted
by the other. We call its unfolding the dialogical." When people are
really trying to make contact and to listen to each other as individual
authentic persons, when they are not trying to impress, manipulate,
or exploit each other, when the encounter is serious and not merely
trivial, then there is a genuineness that Buber calls a kind of truth.
This genuineness requires a sense of the other as a person. "The chief
presupposition for the rise of genuine dialogue is that each should
regard his partner as the very one that he is." In a situation of genuine
dialogue and encounter, I acknowledge that the other person is
unique and different from me, and I direct what I say to him as the
person that he is. I sense him as a whole, as a unity, and in my listen-
ing and responses, I confirm him as what he is. In all of this, I trust the
other person, and I assume that he is ready to treat me as his partner
in dialogue.
This interaction, in that space between two persons that Buber calls
"the between," requires self-trust. To encounter another and accept
that she really is another distinct self, an independent person in her
own right and not a tool to prop up my self-image or an instrument to
be used in my plans and projects, I need a secure sense of myself.
Confirming and responding to another person in this way does not
require agreeing with her. I may disagree; I may confront her with
that disagreement. But in a genuine interhuman dialogue, I must
maintain the recognition that the other person is one who is unique
and distinct from me, one with her own feelings, beliefs, and values,
which need to be heard and merit respect. I can help that person to
trust and realize herself without seeking in any way to impose on her.
But I must trust myself to do so. Lack of self-trust or self-confidence
can lead to failure to relax or to pretence, which make a person
appear to others to be unnatural, potentially manipulative, and un-
trustworthy. Positive self-trust, on the other hand, not only results in
more natural and flexible behaviour, but also facilitates the capacity
for genuine dialogue with others.
In describing the characteristics of helping relationships, Carl
Rogers cites features of a helping person that are crucial to a success-
ful relationship. Within the term "helping person" Rogers includes
anyone in a role that calls for nurturing or assisting another. Parents,
teachers, counsellors, social workers, and therapists are helping per-
sons in this sense. Aspects of the helping person that Rogers deems
essential to the establishment of a successful relationship are trust-
worthiness, empathy, warmth, acceptance of the other for what that
person is, understanding or trying to understand the other, and con-
gruency.5 By "congruency" Rogers means the fit between what the
helping person feels or believes and the way he acts. If a person who
feels angry tries to behave in a sympathetic, helpful way towards

another, the opposition between his emotions and behaviour is likely
to be sensed. It will make him seem insincere, not genuine - and
therefore untrustworthy. A person who trusts himself has a secure
sense of self-worth, an acceptance of his feelings, and a solid sense of
his good judgment. All this provides him with the confidence not to
hide, to "be himself." This ability to express one's self is essential for
intimacy in close relationships.
A person who is insecure and constantly trying to make a good
impression on another is unlikely to establish good relationships.
Haim Gordon is an Israeli philosopher and theorist of education who
used Buber's philosophy and existentialist literature (Dostoevsky,
Kafka, Camus, Sartre) as the basis for an educational peace project
involving Arabs and Jews in Israel. Gordon's idea was to have people
discuss literary examples of life problems, of authenticity and inau-
thenticity, and on the basis of those discussions, move towards a
situation where they could genuinely encounter each other in serious
conversations. Progress was made, but there were many problems
along the way. Describing the project, Gordon said that trying to put
up a good "front," trying to impress the other person, worked against
these goals: "the person who is concerned with making an impres-
sion is not giving all of himself to his partner in dialogue. He is giving
only one side of his being, which he hopes or suspects his partner will
appreciate ... if I always suspect that the person is trying to make an
impression, it will be hard for me to trust him. And without trust, life
is Hell."6
In the project, Gordon found that Arab men seemed to experience
tremendous difficulty revealing themselves in dialogue. He specu-
lated that one cause was their lack of emotional intimacy with their
wives, who were culturally denigrated as inferior and unequal part-
ners and with whom these men seemed to have little egalitarian
exchange. Perhaps as a result, many of the Arab men whom Gordon
worked with had apparently had little experience of divulging their
feelings and concerns to others. They were constantly trying to make
a good impression, which worked against straightforward and frank
encounters.
The relation between self-trust and empathy works in two direc-
tions. Brothers found that empathy helps to develop self-trust. When
a person has a sense that another reliable, caring person can identify
with his feelings and is not discounting them, he is strengthened in
his belief that he really does count as a person and that his feelings
are real and significant. From another perspective, however, self-trust
seems to be necessary for empathy and the willingness to understand
io8 Dilemmas of Trust
and identify with others. This connection becomes apparent when we

think of the relationship from the other side, from the point of view of
the one who empathizes with another.7 She is able to adopt that
other's outlook and point of view and better understand the other's
perceptions and feelings. To enter into the emotions of another per-
son, she needs courage and a secure sense of herself. She must have
learned that it is safe to care, to relate to the other as a person. To
empathize, to enter into the world of another and yet remain our own
distinct self with our own distinct needs, beliefs, and emotions, we
must know who we are and what we are doing, which is simply to
say that we must be able to trust and rely on ourselves. For one lack-
ing in self-trust, empathy from another can help to develop self-trust,
and in this way, empathy supports self-trust. But from another point
of view, self-trust supports empathy: it is only because she basically
trusts herself that a person is able to empathize with another.
A person who trusts herself believes that she is a morally sound
person worthy of respect, and that her practical, emotional, and intel-
lectual competence is adequate for dealing with the world. These
beliefs are social beliefs - beliefs about ourselves as members of a
social world. And there is considerable evidence that social beliefs
affect social reality: to a surprising extent, they construct social reality.8
Beliefs affect reality. We tend to make ourselves into the sorts of
people we believe ourselves to be. We have conceptions of ourselves,
and to a considerable extent we seek out opportunities to act upon
and maintain features of these self-conceptions. By acting as we do,
we often inspire responsive behaviour that supports our own self-
conception. For example, a person who is an extrovert and regards
himself as such will seek out activities and occasions on which he can
talk and relate to others. In these situations, he behaves in an ani-
mated and friendly way. He regards himself as a person who enjoys
others' company, seeks out company, and is chatty and amiable. By
and large, he gets the response he expects when he goes out into the
social world. Analogously, a person who thinks that her own actions
have little influence on events tends to seek out situations in which
the outcome is determined by chance. Seeing herself as relatively
powerless, she selects situations in which she cannot do much and
need make little effort. Thus her view, too, will be confirmed. A per-
son who sees himself as effective and competent, on the other hand, is
more likely to seek out situations in which his actions will make a dif-
ference. If it turns out that he cannot act effectively, he will tend to
explain his failure as being due to external circumstances, not the
result of a personal failing or defect.9
In addition, we tend (often inadvertently) to inspire confirmations

by others of our own picture of ourselves. Studies have indicated that
people who are depressed behave in ways that tend to arouse depres-
sion, hostility, resentment, and rejection on the part of those around
them.10 Similarly, anxious people have a tendency to inspire anxiety
in others, and cheerful people to inspire cheerfulness in others. If we
do not trust ourselves, our lack of self-confidence and self-esteem is
likely to convey itself to others in some way. If we are not confident
that we can move ahead and get things done, others will not believe
that either. Thus without self-trust we are likely to acquire the social
handicap that other people will not be willing to trust us. If we have
negative feelings about ourselves and our abilities and prospects, our
actions tend to produce negative effects on other people. A natural
corollary is that positive attitudes about ourselves and our abilities,
including self-trust, will also communicate themselves to others. If
we trust ourselves and have a confident, self-reliant attitude, that atti-
tude will convey itself to others in our gestures, actions, and words.
As a result, other people are more likely to trust us.11
Core self-trust and situational self-trust are key aspects of our self-
conception. If a woman sees herself as strong, agile, and competent in
emergencies, she might volunteer as a guide on lengthy backpacking
trips. If her conception of herself is that she is an honest, dependable
person, she would not seek employment in a questionable enterprise
or find friends among drug dealers. How we see ourselves is an
important factor in what we do with our lives, which opportunities
we seek, and which we reject.
Psychological studies suggest that how other people respond to us
seems to depend very much on how we see ourselves. In one set of
experiments, people were paired and each given a different idea as to
the partner's probable response to them. Those who regarded them-
selves as likeable treated the partner in a friendly manner, even in
those cases where they were advised by the experiment that the part-
ner did not like them. Those who saw themselves as unlikeable acted
so as to elicit an unfavourable reaction, even when they were told
that the partner liked them. Clearly, a sense of self-worth and compe-
tence is likely to be beneficial for relationships with other people. On
the whole, self-trust has positive effects on a person's activities and
relationships, whereas its lack has negative effects.12
A sense that we are unworthy and lacking in integrity and com-
petence bodes ill for our personal happiness and leaves us open to
exploitation and manipulation by others. To have goals and pursue
them, to confidently experience and remember, to interpret reality
no Dilemmas of Trust
according to our own norms and style, to assert that our own inter-
ests and needs count - all this requires self-trust. With little or no
self-trust, we are constantly open to having our beliefs and values
put aside by others; we are thereby deprived of any internal source
of constancy that could provide for the appraisal of beliefs, values,
choices, and actions and the reconciliation of conflicting desires and
goals. Since pressure from outside the self is variable in nature, inte-
gration of the self must come from within.
To value self-trust is not to claim that our own sense of reality and
our own competence should count for everything. Rather, it is to
argue that they must count for something: they must count if we are
to understand, reflect, judge, choose, and act in key areas of life with
respect to our own experience, feelings, interests, needs, goals, and
life plans. To function as moral and cognitive agents, we cannot abdi-
cate to others decision-making in key areas such as memory, interpre-
tation, judgment, intimacy, friendship, reproduction, occupation, and
use of leisure time. Our own sense of what happened, what experi-
ences mean, what our motivations were, what we can do, must be
taken seriously and rejected only if we reach our own reflectively
grounded conviction that we have made a mistake.
A person does not take her own experiences seriously if she is will-
ing to discredit and discount her sense of what happened merely
because someone else questions the account. ("You think he is prais-
ing your work because he's interested in it and thinks it's good?
That's not it at all. He's just trying to curry favour because he's up for
promotion and he's going to ask you for a reference.") Any event has
a number of possible interpretations. When we understand some-
thing one way, we should not close our minds to the possibility that
others, who understand it differently, have a more accurate interpre-
tation than our own. Sometimes we should change our minds: we
should accept other people's ideas and reject our own. But when we
do this, it should only be after serious reflection. What were the rea-
sons for our interpretation? Do they still hold up? What are the
reasons for the alternative one? How good are they? How plausible
are the accounts? What we should not do, and what we will not do if
we trust ourselves, is dismiss our own ideas merely because they are
called into question by someone else.
In autonomous thinking, we need to take account both of our own
view and of that of the other. When we trust our own judgment, we
rely on our autonomous consideration of evidence, information, rea-
sons, and arguments. We do not succumb to correction based on an
assumption that someone else must have it right just because he is
someone else.
To preserve a sense of who we are, to preserve the conviction that

we are worthy and competent, to hold to a sense that it is we who
lead our lives, to function as a cognitive and moral agents, we need
self-trust. We need to preserve and develop our belief in our own
integrity and worth, our credibility as a witness to and participant in
the world, and our capacity to remember and recount our experience.
We must confidently depend on ourselves to think accurately, delib-
erate reasonably, make sound decisions, carry out sensible plans, and
implement worthy goals. Only with self-trust can we conduct our
own lives so as to lead an authentic personal existence not open to
domination by other people, social convention, or passing fads.
LACK OF SELF-TRUST
Clearly, lack of basic self-trust is a tremendous handicap in life. With-

out it we will see ourselves as unable to confront challenges and
contend with difficulties. We will tend to restrict our experience,
avoiding new or potentially difficult situations and missing many
opportunities. We will generally choose activities, even friends, who
bear out our low self-image. We may be unwilling to love, thinking
that no good person could love us in return. If we allow ourselves to
be loved by an unworthy person, no good will come of it. "I couldn't
deserve affection from anyone worth much," a person with little self-
trust may think. She may not allow herself to love at all; she may
unconsciously perpetuate her poor self-image by seeking unworthy
partners. Low self-trust and self-esteem underlie the old Groucho
Marx joke "I wouldn't join any club that would have me as a mem-
ber." As is illustrated in the Ellen West case, lack of self-trust can be a
handicap so extreme as to result in suicide.
In the German Democratic Republic (formerly East Germany),
there was extensive spying by agents of the Stasi, the government
secret police. After the reunification of Germany, with public access to
the files, terrible revelations emerged. Many people found that they
had been victims of spying by special agents, some of whom were col-
leagues, comrades in opposition political groups, friends, lovers, or
even husbands and wives. Reactions by victims of these revelations
varied, but common among them was a lack of self-trust. Belinda
Cooper, an expatriate American who had worked with environmental
opposition groups in East Germany, was a victim of spying and dis-
covered that the Stasi had a file on her, as it did on all members of her
group. One member had been a special agent.13 Reflecting on matters
later, she felt that they should have suspected something. The man
had not seemed to share the political attitudes of the others; besides,
he was unusually well off and had an expensive car. He had been
admitted to a program on marketing to which it was difficult to gain
access. In fact, the inner circle of the group had not entirely trusted
this man; they felt that he was "mouthy" and should not be told
about some of their more risky manoeuvres. However, they did not
suspect him of being a Stasi informer, and later they came to think
that they should have. Looking back, they blamed him for betraying
them, but they also blamed themselves for not suspecting him.
Examining the role of gender in Stasi spying, Cooper found that
the tendency for victims to blame themselves and begin to doubt
their own judgment and competence was particularly common
among women.14 They felt they should have been more sensitive to
nuances in relationships and should have known that something
was wrong. The tendency for betrayal to result in self-doubt, discov-
ered by Cooper in her interviews, was confirmed by several state
officials charged with investigating allegations of Stasi involvement
and requests, both from victims and from Stasi employees, for help
in the new united Germany. On the basis of their extensive dealings
with victims of spying, these men reported that victims had begun
to question their whole system of communication and understand-
ing because they had been so undermined by trusting the wrong
people.15 Betrayed by others, they came to lose trust in themselves
and suffered grave handicaps in life as a result.
Lack of self-trust can lead to bewilderment and incompetence.
Paradoxically, however, it can also result in delusions of grandeur
and cruel attempts to dominate others, as has been argued by An-
drew Bard Schmookler, Alice Miller, and others.16 Schmookler claims
that there is a tendency in human groups and societies for the most
power-hungry and competitive people to gain control and exercise
that control in domineering ways. Such people will struggle for the
top, and if not successfully resisted, they will get there. If resisted,
they are opposed by others who have to use aggressive, competitive,
and brutal methods to struggle against them and who, if they suc-
ceed, will have thereby become usurpers trained in the cruel practice
of power. In all likelihood, they will take over only to continue its
exercise. Thus whoever rises to political power in a human society
will tend to rule by domination. Human groups and societies almost
inevitably feature relations between the dominators (usually power-
ful men) and the dominated (usually women and powerless men.)
Being dominated gives a person a sense of helplessness, vulnera-
bility, and worthlessness. For those dominated, it is difficult to pre-
serve self-esteem and self-trust. Though some fortunate people
escape domination in adult life, nearly everyone is vulnerable to it
during childhood. Parents, who are struggling themselves, who are

often treated cruelly by the broader adult society, may have them-
selves been abused as children by their own brutalized parents. And
all too often they take out their frustrations on their children. They
may unconsciously re-enact scripts from their own childhood, choos-
ing as victims the only people they can dominate and abuse. The
sense of vulnerability and helplessness that children learn from such
experiences is not forgotten when they become adults. It can have
disastrous consequences in later life.
Children become adults, and as adults, they may try to compensate
for their earlier vulnerability. Mistrusting other people and the world
at large, they attempt to make up for their own lack of self-acceptance
and confidence by self-aggrandizement and a quest for control over
others. Some who have low self-esteem and little self-trust may try to
buttress themselves with delusions of grandeur, constructing visions
of themselves as superior or omnipotent. If such people gain political
authority, they have an opportunity to exalt themselves by exercising
tyrannical power over their underlings or even entire populations.
Hitler and Stalin fit the model. Hitler had a desperately brutalized
childhood. As an adult, he sought to be acknowledged as omnipotent
and omniscient. He could not abide the thought of his own mistakes.
There are many other persuasive examples, including those of
Saddam Hussein, Nicolae Ceausescu, and Idi Amin.17 The childhood
abuse suffered by these men contributed to a sense of helplessness
and a desperate lack of self-esteem, for which millions paid dearly.
In other people, lack of self-trust may result, not in delusions of
grandeur, but in susceptibilty to the manipulations of others.18 Such
people become victims or tools of others whom they seem unable to
resist. One example of extraordinary domination buttressed by lack
of self-trust is that of the cult society, a totalitarian mini-society in
which members are dominated to an extreme degree by leaders
claiming a unique ability to interpret the word of God, spiritual truth,
morality and standards for living - including, often, minute details of
diet and hygiene - and fundamental matters of life direction, such as
choice of spouse, numbers and timing of children, and occupation.
Gurus can acquire astounding power over cult adherents.
Leaders are believed to have a special link to the divine or even, in
some cases, to be divine. In such a framework of belief, it makes
sense to trust the leader more than oneself. One should serve God or
Krishna or the Guru or the Great Mother, whatever the cost to one's
own needs or interests. Dominated cult members relinquish their
sense of competence to interpret and respond to reality. Gurus and
cult leaders define for them what life means, what actions are right,
and how they should behave, think, and feel. Cult adherents abdi-
cate their right and obligation to perceive, feel, judge, and plan for
themselves. They have lost their basic self-trust - if, indeed, they
ever had it.
Ironically, people who exhibit no self-trust in relation to a cult
leader and who have often been dominated in life prior to entering
the cult can sometimes show tremendous strength in resisting outsid-
ers who try to dissuade them of their religious beliefs. They argue
vehemently against objections to cult doctrines, refute any suggestion
that they are victims of thought control, and systematically resist alle-
gation of theological or moral flaws in the cult system. They know
what they believe, where the world is going, and what they should
do, and when outsiders bring criticism, they can be phenomenally
resistant to it. This capacity is typically based on the teachings and
personality of a leader, not on their own individual resources.
To generate the will to leave such a cult requires relying upon one's
own interpretations and judgments and valuing one's own indepen-
dent needs and interests. One has to detect something wrong - some
inconsistency or flaw in the religious system, some immorality,
hypocrisy, or act of betrayal by its leaders, or some failure of fit be-
tween one's personal needs and what the culture requires. To do so
requires independent judgment taken after autonomous thought. One
needs a sense of one's own worth, some inner conviction that one's
own beliefs and logic, interests, feelings, and needs count for some-
thing. And one needs a sense of one's own competence - the secure
belief that one has the ability to understand reality, that one's judg-
ment could be correct, even when it conflicts with the decrees of cult
leaders. That is to say, one needs just the self-trust that is likely to be
absent in a cult adherent. A certain lack of self-trust makes cult mem-
bership attractive and domination of the adherent by leaders possible.
Then the power structure of the cult and its belief system, exalting the
leader over the member, aggravates this lack.
A disciple of the Rajneesh movement who spent thirteen years in
tutelage, Satya Bharti Franklin came to understand and describe this
dynamic. During the last several years of her involvement with the
movement, she worked twelve harsh hours a day on a ranch in Ore-
gon, withstanding considerable denigration and manipulation from
cult leaders. Bharti Franklin later reflected: "Everything had a mean-
ing. It had to. We were living in a Buddhafield, building a Utopia,
growing, changing, learning things about ourselves that we'd never
seen before. For those of us who had been with Bhagwan [Rajneesh]
in India, the commune in Oregon, like the ashram in Poona, was
a mystery school. Trusting Bhagwan, we 'pointed the fingers at our-
selves' whenever we disagreed with anything, looking at our own

motivations and conditionings and finally saying yes to whatever
Sheela [an associate leader] and her coordinates said. To surrender to
Sheela was to surrender to Bhagwan."19
Finally, when exploitation grew to include violence and evidence of
poisoning and when life on the ranch became fearfully harsh and in-
secure, disenchantment began to set in. "When I was finally invited
to attend one of Bhagwan's lectures, I spent the whole evening wish-
ing it were over. The magic was gone, but I didn't blame Bhagwan; I
blamed myself. I was unsurrendered, a lousy disciple; not even a
disciple any more."20 Even when the spell was over, old habits of
thought were hard to change. If she could not be fascinated and sur-
render, the fault was hers.
The dynamic of trust in the cult phenomenon is fascinating;
what seems to be characteristic is a curious combination of under-
trust and over-trust. Both occur in two dimensions: self-trust and
trust in others. With regard to self-trust and autonomy, cult adherents
generally function poorly; in entering the cult, they have abandoned
their former beliefs and values and accepted a leader as the final
authoritative source on values, spirituality, destiny, and the meaning
of life. In another sect, the Church Universal and Triumphant, mem-
bers often wear audio cassettes broadcasting sermons with a message
about doctrine and dedication. If a cult adherent begins to doubt, he
can "cure" himself of sceptical inclinations by listening to the tape as
he goes about his daily routine. Chanting, ritual, and sleeplessness
contribute to a lack of intellectual autonomy. Almost by definition,
the cult member is not a person who shows moral or personal auton-
omy; he has entered into a way of life in which life's central decisions
are made for him by others - though he can show a kind of intellec-
tual autonomy and self-trust when friends and relatives try to dis-
suade him of the new "truths" he has learned, preserving self-trust at
least in those contexts where he is called upon to defend his own par-
ticipation in the cult. There is a lack of basic self-trust, but a capacity
for enormous self-trust in the face of objections to cult doctrine.
An analogous duality appears in cult members' attitudes to others.
Here too we find both extreme distrust and extreme trust. It is often
people who are pessimistic and suspicious about mainstream society
and traditional religions who are attracted to cults in the first place.
Disenchanted, looking for meaning and a sense of purpose not easily
found in mainstream life, they turn to a leader and a system for
answers that are definite, comprehensive, and satisfying. From a
background of considerable distrust directed against society at large
and most of its establishment representatives, they enter a situation of
n6 Dilemmas of Trust
very deep trust in a cult leader and great dependence and vulnera-
bility. Pulled from their moorings in the outside world, they focus
their entire lives on the cult system. Doctors, the mainstream media,
teachers, lawyers, governments, the United Nations, friends and
neighbours - these cannot be trusted, in the judgment of the cult
members. They are nearly always are suspicious of professionals, see-
ing them as having ill-founded pseudo-expertise, as bureaucratized,
unreliable, and lacking in deep values and spiritual understanding.
The cult leader, on the other hand, is perceived as absolutely differ-
ent. He or she is regarded by members as one who does have deep
spiritual values, who has insight into the meaning and purpose of
human existence at this time in human history, who is altruistic and
dedicated to the group, who can lead in the right path and knows
how life should be led.
Once a person is in a cult, this kind of trust polarity (tremendous
distrust of the "establishment" combined with deep trust in the
leader) will only be reinforced. Cults characteristically distrust and
fear Outsiders, who do not share the privileged doctrines, show dis-
respect and lack of understanding by questioning them, and attempt
to kidnap members and "de-program" them. Critics of cults say that
members have been kidnapped and brainwashed and are serving as
slave labour. Members see themselves as radically misunderstood by
Outsiders and as suffering for the truth in a way analogous to that in
which Jesus and many other religious leaders have suffered in the
past. They argue that they really do believe what they say they
believe and they really have chosen to live their lives this way. Mem-
bers would claim that there is no insidious mind control, and accusa-
tions that it exists are based on fear, ignorance, and bigotry. There is
no slavish obedience, only enlightened obedience. Critics see leaders
as tricksters and abusers, out to exert power and make money from
gullible and vulnerable followers.
An attitude of heightened suspicion towards Outsiders may be
manifested physically by a collection of weapons or a bomb shelter.
In Paradise Valley, Montana, the Church Universal and Triumphant
built bomb shelters as long as three football fields and capable of
holding 750 people. A bomb shelter is really something concrete (sic)
to believe in and a massive symbol of distancing from the outside
world and the Inside/Outside split. When the catastrophe comes,
some will literally be in; others will be out. Elizabeth Clare Prophet,
the "Guru Ma" or leader of the group, defends the bomb shelters,
which she argues are an affirmation of the value of life.21 Church
leaders were convinced in the late eighties that the Soviet Union was
going to launch a nuclear attack on the United States and that bomb
shelters were needed for protection; now they foresee some indefin-
able sort of world disaster. The late eighties were the time of Gor-
bachev, glasnost, and perestroika; it was a period of rapprochement
when even former cold warrior Ronald Reagan was feeling hopeful
about the relationship between the Soviet Union and the United
States. But the Church Universal and Triumphant had its own analy-
sis. Characteristically, leaders and members did not trust mainstream
media or academic scholars to offer an accurate account of develop-
ments in the Soviet Union or of Soviet intentions towards the West.
On their interpretation, those on the Outside did not understand the
risk because they did not analyse Soviet affairs properly (that is to
say, as the church did), and they had no insight into the sinister
intentions of the Soviets. Cult supporters defended the bomb shelters
as an affirmation of the value of life. They contended that Outsiders
and those who argued against the usefulness of bomb shelters were
defeatist because they were tacitly accepting death as inevitable.
Both in their self-trust and in their trust of others, cult members
seem to exhibit extremes, imbalance, and double standards. A critique
of cult attitudes could be developed, based on members' implicit
recourse to double standards concerning both self-trust and trust in
others. They trust themselves not at all in many contexts (those of
determining a life path and lifestyle), yet they trust themselves com-
pletely in others (when arguing to support cult doctrine.) They are
entirely open to ideas from cult leaders, yet wholly closed to ideas
from its critics. They trust completely in some other people (on the
Inside), yet show radical distrust of others (on the Outside.) Perhaps
these dualities contain a key to more balanced attitudes: members are
clearly capable both of self-trust and of trust in others. What is needed
for more balanced and consistent attitudes is to develop more realistic
and specific grounds for trust and distrust in each case.22
So far as self-trust is concerned, a still crueller syndrome can exist
in individual relationships. An example is that of the dominated wife
controlled by a husband who has taken the power to define events,
motivations, capacities, and standards of behaviour. Physical force
may be used to exert this control: the relation is one of physical bat-
tering, where the abused partner complies from fear of physical harm
or even death. To resist, to leave the situation, a woman must see her-
self as valuable and her goals, needs, and interests as worthwhile.
She must have, and use, her own standards for judging the partner's
behaviour. To escape a relationship of battering or domination, she
must be capable, and regard herself as capable, of understanding
what is going on around her and running her own life without con-
stant intervention from another.
Tessa Dahl's recent novel Working for Love provides a clear illustra-
tion of this syndrome.
"Why are you doing that Molly?"

"For fun Jack."
"No you're not, you're doing it to impress Paul."
"I'm not, darling."
"Yes, you are."
You have to tell me why and how and what my every move was for. And
the more I started to become independent, the more you'd sit me down and
tell me exactly what I was really doing and why, and even what I was going
to do next.23
In this case, the husband predicates a role in which he is the authority

on his wife's emotions and responses. In this superior role he has pre-
sumed that he knows better than she what she is doing and why. To
escape from him, the woman will have to assume this authority
herself. She cannot let him explain her to herself. To emerge from a
situation of domination or battering, a victim has to be able to value
herself and her needs and take for herself the power to define her
motivations and activities.
The need for self-trust can emerge from external events, from our
own feelings, or from what is said and done by others. We need self-
trust in order to lead authentic, autonomous lives. We do not in
general trust ourselves instead of trusting others, or trust others instead
of trusting ourselves. Rather, trust in others can support and enhance
trust in ourselves, and trust in ourselves can support and enhance
trust in others.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Reasons for Trust

and Distrust
In her recent book Falling Backwards, Doris Brothers lists four charac-
teristics for evaluating the "maturity" of grounds for trust. She says
that such criteria count as mature insofar as they are realistic,
abstract, complex, and differentiated. By realistic Brothers means that
the criteria for judging trust are not perfectionistic or "phantasmago-
rical." They recognize that a person who is trustworthy on the whole
is not necessarily perfect, infallible, all-knowing, or all-powerful.
Whether we are judging ourselves or other people for trustworthi-
ness, to be reasonable we have to acknowledge, realistically, that a
person can be basically trustworthy without being perfect or trust-
worthy in every minute respect. By the abstractness of trust criteria,
Brothers is referring to their incorporation of such morally salient
general characteristics such as truthfulness, integrity, or adherence to
valued principles. To judge trustworthiness on the basis of size,
attractiveness, or material possessions is to employ more "concrete"
or particularistic criteria, which are less mature than abstract ones
incorporating morally relevant aspects. In alluding to complexityas a
feature of trust criteria, Brothers wants the "multifaceted nature of
the human personality" to be recognized; when we judge trustwor-
thiness in a mature way, we recognize that the reliability of people
varies when circumstances vary, and we acknowledge that some-
times scepticism, doubt, and mistrust are appropriate. Bydifferentia-
tion she refers to the ability to discriminate between characteristics
and between people so as to avoid oversimplifications, such as
sweeping generalizations about the significance of minor traits or
the stereotyping of people on the basis of religious, racial, or ethnic
group.1
The interest of Brothers's discussion is enhanced by the fact that
her criteria emerge from clinical practice, and it provides a helpful
i2o Dilemmas of Trust
introduction to the question of grounds, or reasons, for trust and dis-

trust. Clearly, though, there is more to be said. Consider an example.
Mrs Olsen, a frail, elderly woman, is waiting for the bus. Suddenly
rain starts coming down in torrents. She moves into a shopping mall
to take shelter, where she encounters a middle-aged woman packing
up a few grocery purchases. Making conversation, Mrs Olsen remarks
that she is going to get soaked when she has to walk home from the
bus stop. The woman, who has a respectable and honest sort of ap-
pearance, expresses concern and offers to drive her home. Mrs Olsen
gratefully accepts the ride.
Should she have trusted this unknown person to drive her home?
One suggested answer is that Mrs Olsen took a chance, but not too
unreasonably, since middle-aged women are generally not of criminal
intent and there was nothing to suggest that the woman's offer of
help was anything but sincere.
Here is another case. Joe and Mary, a young couple who have been
happily married for two years, quit smoking three months ago. They
did it together because they hope to have children. They are enter-
taining another young couple, Don and Angela. Don works at the
same company as Mary. Halfway through the evening, he offers her a
cigarette. Joe is really surprised and says so; does Don not know that
Mary quit smoking three months ago? When he asks about it, she
seems embarrassed. On being pressed, she admits that she smokes
sometimes at the office, especially when there are tough deadlines to
meet. Joe thought she had quit completely - as they had both prom-
ised each other to do and as he has done, with considerable difficulty.
He acts hurt. Mary says, "Trust me, Joe, it's not much really." When
Joe hears "trust me," alarm bells start to ring in his head. Don tries to
stand up for Mary, saying how tense things are at the office some-
times and how nearly everybody there smokes at least once in a
while.
At that point, to Joe, Don and Mary seem too close. He begins to
wonder whether they are having an affair. Mary really let him down
on the smoking thing. Should Joe be more trusting of his wife? A
suggested answer is that he is entitled to feel let down and distrust-
ful of his wife with regard to the smoking in particular, but that to
suspect her of having an affair goes too far. That suspicion is not
warranted by the episode.
How much trust is "enough"? How much is too much? We could
be realistic, abstract, complex, and differentiated, and nevertheless
come out with several different responses to these stories. Friends and
critics who heard that I was studying trust and distrust wanted to
know what values I would appeal to, how I would explain when, why,
and to what extent trust or distrust was reasonable and right. To
Reasons for Trust and Distrust 121
respond to this query, I needed help. Working with an assistant, I

devised a series of mini-stories, including the two just considered. We
interviewed twenty people, asking them whether, why, in what
respects, and how much the person in a particular story should trust
or distrust the other. In compiling our results, we found a fair degree
of consistency. As a separate task, we worked out a more a priori set
of principles describing circumstances in which we thought complete,
moderate, or slight trust or distrust would be warranted. We checked
these abstract principles against the "considered judgments" com-
piled from the interviews. This process was the basis for a tentative
exploration of grounds for trust.2
Trust and distrust are contraries, not contradictories. To say that it is
not the case that one trusts another person is not always to say that
one distrusts him. We may neither trust nor distrust another, either
because we lack relevant knowledge or because the evidence and
feelings we have are mixed. Both trust and distrust are susceptible to
degrees: we may trust or distrust another slightly, moderately, or com-
pletely. Both attitudes are often relative to context: we might, without
hesitation, trust a person to deliver a parcel and yet feel ambivalent
about trusting him to repair a computer.
In reflecting on the reasons that a person, Alex, may have for trust-
ing or distrusting another individual, Brenda, we may consider:
1 Information: the sources of Alex's information about Brenda and

what she has done. How reliable is this information?
2 Actions and statements: the sorts of things that Brenda has done and
said. How relevant are particular actions and statements to Alex's
estimation of her trustworthiness or untrustworthiness?
3 Exceptions clause or "unless" clause: interpretation of actions, state-
ments, and information. Is there a significant likelihood that Alex or
his sources of information have misunderstood what Brenda was
doing or saying? What he thinks she did suggests trustworthiness
(or untrustworthiness) unless it means something other than what it
appears on the surface to mean.
4 Character: based on information, actions and statements, and a due
consideration of interpretations, what is Brenda like?
5 Circumstances: relevance of circumstances to vulnerability and
risks. In just what context does the question of whether Alex should
trust Brenda arise? What is at stake for him?
6 Judgment: decision by Alex as to how much he is warranted in
trusting Brenda, in the light of all these considerations.
By exploring these factors we can take a closer, more detailed look at

reasons for trust and distrust.
INFORMATION ABOUT TRUSTWORTHINESS
There are several relevantly different sources of information bearing

upon interpersonal trust:
a direct personal knowledge (personal experience, as in the case

where Alex encounters Brenda);
b indirect personal knowledge (personal experience wherein Alex
encounters Chris, who tells him about Brenda);
c book knowledge (Alex has read in books or journals, by Brenda or
others, about what she has said and done);
d knowledge acquired from the mass media (Alex has read in the
newspaper or heard on radio or television about Brenda); and
e knowledge based on social role (Alex knows, for instance, that
Brenda is a public health nurse, and he makes assumptions about
what she is like on this basis).
Information from these sources is interpreted and evaluated on the

basis of general social knowledge - a person's overall sense of how
society works and how people of various types (in various contexts
and social roles) are likely to act towards him or her.3 Knowledge
from personal experience and books should be self-explanatory, but
media-based knowledge and social role require some comment.
Through television, radio, and the daily press, we may have a sense
of whether and how much we would be inclined to trust or distrust
such public figures as Helmut Kohl, Bill Clinton, Jean Chretien, Boris
Yeltsin, or Mikhail Gorbachev. Our information and impressions of
such figures are nearly always gleaned from newspapers, radio, and
television. Certain unique organizational and presentational features
of the media, especially television, justify setting out a separate cate-
gory and distinguishing media-based knowledge from second-hand
knowledge.
A person's social role is often significant when we make decisions
as to whether, how much, and in what respects to trust him or her. We
have beliefs about how people come to occupy such social roles as
dentist, doctor, car mechanic, lifeguard, policeman, or professor; what
qualifications in terms of character and competence are required for
those roles; how people occupying them are likely to act. A person's
social role is one factor giving us reasons to trust or distrust him or
her, to judge whether he or she is likely to be trustworthy in various
respects.4 Information from all these sources is evaluated on the basis
of the individual's general social knowledge. For each person such
knowledge depends on personal experience as well as theoretical
knowledge and beliefs; thus general social knowledge varies from

one person to another, although there are substantial common ele-
ments within groups and cultures. Such knowledge, incorporating
both background information and personal experience, is clearly
involved in our own sense of what significance a particular social role
has for the trustworthiness or untrustworthiness of another person.
For instance, middle-class persons in most Western industrial coun-
tries tend to have fairly positive expectations about what the police
will do in an emergency and will, in many contexts, take the fact that
someone is in the role of policeman as evidence that he is likely to be
honest and helpful. Disadvantaged and minority groups, on the other
hand, are less likely to see the police role in this way. Gender, race,
and social position also affect a person's experience of the world and
hence his or her general social knowledge. We ultimately interpret
and evaluate information according to our own sense of how the
social world works.
Interesting distinctions and connections can be made between
these information sources. There are many relevantly different kinds
of direct personal encounters: a brief meeting in a crowd, a prolonged
tete-a-tete, a conversation over the telephone, an acquaintance re-
stricted entirely to the other's functioning in one particular social role
(doctor or teacher, for instance), or a prolonged intimate relationship.
Even short personal encounters over the telephone can provide a
basis of moderate trust, as, for example, in cases when troubled per-
sons confide in and accept advice from apparently concerned and
sympathetic persons at the end of the line in a crisis or suicide coun-
selling service. Tacit trust, in this kind of case, is based both on gen-
eral confidence in the social institutions that set up such a telephone
service and on a sense of the person at the other end of the phone line.
One tends to assume that anyone who would answer the phone at,
say, a drug or suicide counselling centre or office of the Good Samari-
tans is a helpful sympathetic person - in all likelihood a dedicated
and altruistic volunteer. However, the institutional and role basis in
such a context only serves to create a presumption of trustworthiness:
the telephone counsellor is likely to be trusted unless he or she does
something to upset that presumption. If, for instance, she sounds
angry or hostile or in some other way unsympathetic, or says the
"wrong thing," the trust required for the telephone encounter to serve
its purpose could easily be displaced by distrust. At that point, the
caller would probably just hang up.5
An encounter that is one-on-one but requires a translator blends
direct personal and indirect personal sources of information. If I were
to meet Helmut Kohl in person, I would have a new sense of what
sort of person he is, being able to see him, hear his voice, and observe
his gestures and responses to me, and this would be first-hand per-
sonal knowledge. Yet my understanding of what Kohl had to say
would depend entirely on the competence, reliability, and honesty of
his translator.
We sometimes feel as though we are personally acquainted with
those we have never met, as when we seem to encounter authors
whose work we are reading. Walter Kaufmann offered a beautiful de-
scription of this sort of experience: "We must learn to feel addressed
by a book, by the human being behind it, as if a person spoke directly
to us. A good book or essay or poem is not primarily an object to be
put to use, or an object of experience: it is the voice of you speaking
to me, requiring a response."6 We might think of Dickens or Kant
or Plato as persons behind the text and experience their words as
though they were personally speaking to us. No doubt, many read-
ing experiences would be enhanced were we to adopt this attitude.
But this is reading as though the person is behind the text; it is not a
real personal encounter, and it does not give us direct personal
knowledge of the author. We have no access to expression and body
language and, in reading alone, no opportunity for exchange.
The category of indirect personal knowledge also admits of many
relevant qualifications and distinctions. Someone may be known to
us as the close friend of a close friend, and in fact such connections
often provide the basis of considerable trust - enough for us to sleep
in the home of someone who is otherwise a virtual stranger. On
the other hand, letters of recommendation, also a source of indirect
personal knowledge, often come from those whom we know only
slightly^
The issue of media-based knowledge raises especially interesting
questions of secondary trust: a judgment about the trustworthiness
of someone we know through the media is predicated on a tacit judg-
ment of the trustworthiness of the media themselves. When Bill Clin-
ton appears on television or is quoted in a newspaper, journalists,
cameramen, and editors are involved in innumerable decisions that
affect how he appears to us. They have selected which events and
statements to portray and which aspects of those are represented.
Media-based knowledge, especially from television, should inspire
some scepticism because it is rather deceptive in its form. We see
facial expressions, body language, and sometimes style of respond-
ing to questions in apparently personal interchanges, a sense en-
hanced by the fact that interviewers and notable public figures often
seem to interact on a casual, first-name basis. We can easily neglect to
reflect that what seems to us to be our own visual and auditory expe-
rience is shaped by many others operating in complex institutional

contexts under various influences, many of which may work against
accuracy. Not only do the media themselves influence us, but we
may also sometimes suspect certain figures of influencing the media
in their own favour; media institutions provide them with an oppor-
tunity to give us the impression they want us to have.
These distinctions and subcategories within direct personal, indi-
rect personal, book-derived, and media-based knowledge are interest-
ing and important; however, to explore all the relevant distinctions
and ramifications would be unrealistic here. Instead, I propose two
generalizations about the reliability of information bearing on judg-
ments of trustworthiness and untrustworthiness. Other things being
equal, direct personal knowledge is preferable to the other sources.
And other things being equal, indirect personal knowledge and book
knowledge are preferable to media-based knowledge. I propose, then,
an ordering: direct personal knowledge, indirect personal knowledge,
book knowledge, media-based knowledge.
There are a number of reasons for the higher status of direct per-
sonal knowledge. It is based on multidimensional experience; we do
not just see a person's face or read or hear a description of him or her,
but instead have an impression of a whole person. We may be able to
make eye contact; we hear the voice and see and sense gestures, move-
ments, and responses. Body language is significant for trust: with
direct personal experience, we have an opportunity to see eye motion,
facial expression, posture, and other features of self and personal style
that indicate such key qualities as sincerity, ease, naturalness, commit-
ment, and concern. These aspects of our personal experience mean
that typically we gain a fuller impression of the person from an
encounter than from reading, testimony, or television. We have more
to tell us what sort of person this is. In addition, in many encounters
we can interact, providing further information and a sense of how the
other person responds to us.
Another factor that contributes to the general dominance of direct
personal knowledge is our sense that in general we have more confi-
dence in our own observation, interpretation, and common sense
than in those of others.8 Other things being equal, we tend to regard
our own observations as more reliable, our interpretations as more
sensitive, and our own judgments as more relevant to our situation
than those of other people. This is not to say that direct personal
knowledge is infallible. After meeting Joseph Stalin in person,
H.G. Wells said: "I have never met a man more candid, fair and hon-
est... No one is afraid of him and everybody trusts him." Stalin must
have been a brilliant dissimulator because an American ambassador,
Joseph E. Davis, reached a similar conclusion: "His brown eye is

exceedingly wise and gentle. A child would like to sit on his lap and
a dog would sidle up to him."9 In these cases, it seems certain that
reading speeches or historical records or studying testimony from
aides would have given more accurate ideas. Wells and Davis appar-
ently trusted themselves to be good judges of character, and in this
case they were wrong. Evidently Hitler was similarly capable of
making an excellent impression on foreign visitors.
To say that in issues of trust, indirect personal knowledge and
book knowledge are generally more reliable than media-based
knowledge is more controversial, but I think that this judgment can
be defended.10 Key reasons are the complexity of media-based insti-
tutions and the many pressures that adversely affect the accuracy or
balance of their representations and reports: time constraints and
economic constraints, for instance. In addition some powerful figures
- most notably politicians in power - may manipulate and control
the image they present, especially on television.
WHAT A C T I O N S I N D I C A T E
TRUSTWORTHINESS?
When we are deciding whether to trust or to distrust someone, we

want to know what sort of person that individual is. We try to deter-
mine this by reflecting on things that he or she has said and done.
Especially significant for trustworthiness are honesty (truth-telling,
respect for property); sincerity (as opposed to hypocrisy); promise-
keeping; keeping confidences and other forms of loyalty; reliability
(performing expected tasks, keeping appointments, promptness);
dependability (disposition to do what is needed in a situation); com
petence (as pertinent to context role); and concern for others (non-
manipulativeness, protectiveness, and a capacity for empathy and
sympathy). In addition to dishonesty, unreliability, and manipula-
tiveness, characteristics giving reasons for distrust include defensive-
ness, inability to admit to making a mistake, and evasiveness or
failure to accept responsibility.
In deciding whether to trust someone, we try to get an overall
sense of the person's character. In a particular context, we focus on
those aspects of character especially relevant to our well-being in the
circumstances at hand - those that may affect us, insofar as we are
vulnerable to the actions of the other person. A sense of the whole
person, derived from information about a limited range of actions
and statements, is then projected onto circumstances of concern to us.
Consider, for instance, the following example.
Juan is working for a cooperative supermarket. His sister is in hos-

pital in labour. When Juan left home to come to work, things were not
going well: the latest word from the hospital was that the birth was
difficult and there was a chance that the baby would die. Juan feels
awful about going to work in these circumstances, but his family
needs the money and there is not much he can do at the hospital. So
he is at work instead. His sister's husband is with her, and his mother
and brother are waiting together at home. Juan tells the manager at
the store that there is a critical medical situation in the family and it is
really important for him to be called if there are any telephone mes-
sages from the hospital. He works his shift. When he returns home,
he finds that the baby has died. His brother-in-law had tried to con-
tact him at work; he talked to the manager, who said she would give
Juan the message that something was wrong and he should call
home. But she failed to find him and he was not given the message.
Upset about the baby's death, Juan is angry and hurt to find that the
manager cares so little for him in such a situation. He feels exploited;
he is just a tool in their machine and they do not care about him at all.
Is Juan overreacting, or is his distrust well founded?
The prevailing judgment by people interviewed for their response
to this story was that his reaction to the manager in particular was
justified; most said that they would distrust this manager to a moder-
ate degree. However, they qualified their reaction, saying that they
would distrust only this specific manager, not the administration in
general.11
Here the manager is someone with whom Juan had previous con-
tact and knowledge; he did not have to form all his impressions of
her from this one occasion. But because the situation was so critical
and he felt so strongly about his sister and the baby, Juan based his
judgment of the manager mainly on what she did in these highly
significant circumstances. Her failure to call him for this kind of fam-
ily emergency has given him a picture of her in her managerial role:
he sees her as unreliable, callous, uncaring, untrustworthy. The bro-
ken promise, in this context, is the basis for a general picture of her as
a callous, uncaring, and unreliable woman. That picture of her char-
acter, in turn, is one that he has focused on her attitude towards him.
Actions that are exploitative, manipulative, or uncaring give
grounds for distrust. A person who would deceive, trick, or exploit us
- who would try to manipulate our actions and responses in order to
reach a goal of his own - indicates in doing so that he has little or no
concern for us as persons. He is ready to use us for his own ends. On
the other hand, if someone has an opportunity to manipulate, exploit,
or harm us and refrains from doing so, that is an important ground
ia8 Dilemmas of Trust
for trust because it suggests that he does consider us to be persons in

our own right and does not seek merely to use us for his own ends.
An especially blatant example of manipulativeness and distrust
can be found in recent Canadian political history. Provincial premiers
and much of the public enraged distrust felt when they discovered
that Brian Mulroney had deliberately put final decisions about a
proposed constitutional accord into a time-frame of extremely high
pressure (where provincial premiers participated in closed, intensive
meetings for a full week), thinking that, with a deadline facing them
and a threat of the province of Quebec leaving Confederation if its
demands were not met, the premiers would unanimously support
the accord. Discovering that the time-frame had been contrived in an
effort to induce agreement, the participating premiers and many
Canadian citizens felt manipulated and deceived. They lost all trust
in Mulroney, and polls in the following months indicated little recov-
ery. In this case, a perception of manipulation on a crucially impor-
tant matter led to a reaction of extreme distrust.
If we have information about many different actions of substantial
significance for trustworthiness, we have a broad base for judgment.
What counts, generally, are the number of actions and statements
known to us, the variety of such actions and statements, and the
degree to which they are significant for trust. How much is at stake
for affected persons, and how far did what was done deviate, posi-
tively or negatively, from what is normal or expected? If someone
cares for my child in a sudden emergency, that counts positively
towards my sense that she is a good and trustworthy person, one
who is well intentioned, helpful, and reliable. If she teaches a class
for me when I have to be out of town, that counts too. Both actions
give me grounds to trust this person, signifying as they seem to do
that she is concerned, dependable, and competent. But the first action
is more significant for trust than the second, since so much more is at
stake. The first case would warrant moderate trust and the second
slight trust, in the judgment of people interviewed about these cases.
Sometimes, rather than the actions and statements of another per-
son, we seem to use "intuition" or "insight" as a basis for judgment.
We see a person and, from his or her demeanour and facial expression
(eyes especially), somehow gain a sense of what sort of person this is.
We may feel that he or she is especially trustworthy, honest, and
reliable; that just how this person strikes us - as open, friendly, re-
spectable, caring. A slight encounter may give the basis for this kind
of intuitive judgment of character. Sometimes we have only to hear a
person's voice to gain such an impression: on the telephone, someone
we have never met may sound especially caring, honest, open, forth-
coming, and competent (or the reverse). Because these sorts of im-
pressions are hard to articulate or make precise and because they are
sometimes based on limited experience, we may think of them as
quite superficial and feel as though our judgments about the other
pop right out of nowhere. "I just knew it was going to be all right,"
we might say. Or, "I could tell right away there was something fishy
about that man." The term "intuition" is used at this point because
we do not, and perhaps even could not, articulate the tacit knowledge
that underlies the judgment. This is not to say that we have no
evidence, but only that we do not put our evidence into words. Such
judgments are based on evidence of demeanour, physiognomy, per-
sonal style, body and eye language, voice, and so on - cues we use as
a basis for overall character judgments. In the absence of reliable
information about specific relevant actions and statements, such cues
may provide all the evidence we have for judging trustworthiness.
EXCEPTIONS AND "UNLESS"
The matter of interpretation of what others say and do leads us to

the exceptions or "unless" clause; our information is that what he
is doing is such-and-such, and such-and-such is an indication of
untrustworthiness unless ... A person's behaviour may not indicate
what it appears to indicate; we may misunderstand because we do
not fully grasp the motive or the circumstances. What people say and
do is nearly always open to several different interpretations. The pos-
sibility is illustrated in the following example. Fred, a store employee,
sees a manager who has preached long and hard against dishonesty
and theft removing an expensive mountain bike from the store where
they both work. This manager is certainly a hypocrite! After all that
he has been saying to the staff, now Fred sees him stealing a bike him-
self. Fred concludes that the manager is dishonest, hypocritical, and
downright untrustworthy.
If the manager is really stealing the bike, distrust in him is war-
ranted. But is he stealing the bike? Fred has first-hand knowledge in
the sense that he sees the manager removing the bike, and he con-
cludes that the manager is stealing the bike. If so, he would have
grounds for distrust. But is the manager stealing the bike, or is he
removing it from the store for some other purpose? Strictly speaking,
stealing cannot be seen in such a case. Fred saw the manager removing
the bicycle from the store, but what he sees does not tell him that the
manager is stealing the bike, as opposed to taking it out for repair.
We may imagine Fred's reasoning as follows: what I see suggests

that he is stealing a bike, which certainly indicates that he is hypocrit-
ical and untrustworthy; that is, it suggests this unless I am misled by
what I see, unless something else is going on. The "unless" clause
allows for the possibility that the interpretations which we (in cases
of personal experience) or others (in indirect, book, or media-based
cases) have initially placed upon actions or statements is not correct.
We may have interpreted correctly or incorrectly, too charitably or too
uncharitably. There is a wide range of possibilities here. We may mis-
interpret what is said and done: our information may, on a corrected
interpretation, not be significant for trust and distrust; or it may be
significant in some way other than what we first assumed.
The "unless" clause plays the important role of reminding us that
in order to make reliable judgments about trustworthiness, we need
to consider the possibility that the person's actions and statements do
not mean what they seem to us initially, or prima facie, to mean.
Keeping ourselves alert to the possibility that there has been a misun-
derstanding is both a matter of being fair to other people - giving
them the benefit of the doubt at least some of the time - and protect-
ing ourselves from presumption. Perhaps we have misjudged the
other's actions and motivation. A supervisor who appears to be steal-
ing a bike may be removing it; a critic who seems to lashing out with
insults may be trying in his own brash way to motivate improve-
ments in a work. On the other hand, a stranger who appears to be
offering help may be trying to sell or steal something. What people
strike us as doing, how they seem to us to be motivated, is open to
correction. We have to reflect on our initial interpretations and ask
ourselves whether there are other possibilities that seem more apt.
Openness to alternative interpretations has to be balanced against
confidence in our own feelings, our own sense of what is going on. In
programs about sexual abuse, children are urged to trust their own
judgment and their own feelings. The kindly uncle who puts his hand
between a girl's legs to "see if she is wearing underwear" is not to be
believed. Children are taught in such programs to place their confi-
dence in their own sense that something wrong is done, that he is not
just "checking underwear" or being friendly, that in such cases their
personal space is being invaded by someone who is not what he pre-
tends to be and is not doing what he says he is doing.12 If it feels
wrong, it almost certainly is, and the adult who tries to make it out as
something else should not be believed.
In understanding what people do and say, we need to achieve a
balance between trusting ourselves in the interpretations we are nat-
urally inclined to make and being open to the possibility that we
have misunderstood what others are doing or trying to do. A chari-

table, well-intentioned person, one determined to preserve a relation-
ship, may go too far in attributing benevolent and caring motives to
another, whose behaviour will, to the dispassionate observer, seem
callous and uncaring. This attitude could lead to her being deceived
and exploited by one not worthy of her trust. That is too much trust.
A negatively oriented, suspicious person may reinterpret his experi-
ence in the opposite way, systematically explaining what is prima
facie positive behaviour as selfishly motivated and manipulative.
Such a priori bleakness amounts to too much distrust, and when
taken to extremes, to generalized cynicism. The resulting too bleak
picture of the social world can be a serious handicap in life.13Differ-
ences between those who tend to be extremely trusting and others
who are so distrusting as to be virtually paranoid greatly affect their
natural interpretation of what others do, its reinterpretation, and the
resulting picture of the social world.
CHARACTER AND MOTIVATION
When we think about whether to trust someone, we try to get a sense

of what sort of person he or she is, on the basis of partial information
about some actions and statements. There is always a gap - an inter-
pretive and inductive gap - between our information about the
other's behaviour and our overall sense of his or her motivation and
character. Not even with intimates do we have complete knowledge
of another person's actions, thoughts, motivations, and attitudes.
And seldom does someone's behaviour point in an unambiguous and
straightforward way to a single, categorical judgment of character.
Inconsistencies and ambiguities are bound to appear. No one is going
to be honest, sincere, and reliable all the time; nor is anyone likely to
be deceitful, manipulative, hypocritical, or incompetent in all circum-
stances. In an intimate relationship or deep friendship, our knowl-
edge of what another person has said and done is considerable,
including many encounters and events and countless conversations.
Some of what we know points one way, some another. In deciding
whether to trust or distrust, we try to synthesize this information to
reach a sense of what sort of person this is. We may decide that the
person is dishonest, lacking in integrity, or manipulative. Or we may
decide that he or she is honest, has integrity, and is well intentioned
towards people in general and us in particular. Inconsistencies in be-
haviour have to be blurred over or interpreted in order to reach such
overall judgments. We decide to take some things seriously while
discounting others, to see changes as indications of deterioration or
reform, to see inconsistencies between what is said and done as indic-

ative of bad luck or weakness of will, on the one hand, or hypocrisy,
on the other.
Is there an excuse for dishonest, harmful, or incompetent actions?
Is there a purely self-interested explanation for what appeared to be
benevolent actions? Is there a pattern to the way in which the per-
son's actions are changing over time? Does this person seem to be
becoming more honest and dependable or less so? What we know
about what a person has said and done gives us an indication - a par-
tial one, admittedly - of what that person has been. But what is he or
she becoming? To trust or distrust is to have expectations about how a
person is likely to behave in the future. Are some instances of behav-
iour insignificant or less significant now for our sense of who this
person is because they are too long past? Which actions are most
significant for our judgments of trustworthiness?
THE RELEVANCE OF C I R C U M S T A N C E S
Different circumstances require different degrees of trust and distrust.

There are several dimensions here. First of all, there is the matter of
our own vulnerability. To accept a man's help carrying packages
across a busy street, a woman needs to trust him, but slight trust will
be sufficient unless the packages contain valuable items. Slight trust
is enough in such a case because her vulnerability is relatively lim-
ited; the worst this man can do is to run off with the packages instead
of handing them back to her. On the other hand, for her to accept a
ride from a strange man with whom she will be alone in a car, espe-
cially at night, a great degree of trust is needed because she is vulner-
able to sexual attack or even murder.
In some cases we may feel we have a kind of duty to trust or to dis-
trust, a duty arising from special moral or epistemic considerations,
as is illustrated in the following example. Barb and Mike have been
married for six years and have long wanted children, but they do not
have any. Mike has been told that he has a low sperm count. Apart
from feeling sorry about not having children, they have a good and
happy relationship, and each feels secure with the other. Mike has
been off on a two-and-a-half-month research trip. When he returns,
Barb says that she might be pregnant. Mike is excited about this pros-
pect and wants to come along with her to the doctor, but Barb says
she would rather go alone since she feels a little shy about it. Mike
finds this rather odd because he has accompanied her to doctors for
some truly embarrassing and painful fertility tests. However, he does
not push the matter. Barb tells Mike that the doctor estimated that she
is about eleven weeks pregnant. As it happens, the baby arrives six
weeks early by this estimate, but in very good health. Mike's friend
Dave hints to him that the baby might not be his, and the thought has
crossed Mike's mind. Perhaps there should be a blood test. However,
Mike rejects the idea. Barb has always been a loyal wife, and they
want very much to love and care for this baby and each other.
Is Mike right to turn his mind away from such suspicious
thoughts? People interviewed found this case a tough one. They
tended to think that suspicions and in fact moderate distrust were
warranted by the evidence. However, in the context of Mike's basi-
cally good relationship with his wife, they were inclined to believe
that he should try to trust her, even in the face of adverse evidence.
Mike feels that he has a duty to trust his wife, but there is some
evidence that would seem to constitute reason for disbelieving her on
the details of the pregnancy. To continue to trust her his wife is some-
thing that he wants to do because he loves her, wants to be loyal, and
wants to continue in the marriage. And yet relevant information sug-
gests that Barb is deceiving him about her pregnancy; it suggests that
she has either been unfaithful or had artificial insemination. But Mike
puts such thoughts aside, trying to believe his wife. He wants to pre-
serve his sense of her as a loving wife because their relationship is
important to him.
It is not evidence or the epistemic reasonableness of trust that
should in all cases finally determine how much another person
"should" be trusted or distrusted. Considerations of love, loyalty,
and role can intersect with those of evidence. A therapist may feel
that deliberately placing her trust in a client will help him to develop;
thus the helping role in which she finds herself may seem to indicate
going one step further in trust than a straightforward assessment of
evidence would warrant.14 Trust can be recommended as a practical
and ethical approach to constructively influencing behaviour. Other
roles and circumstances may imply an obligation to distrust. Parents
seeking to protect their children from harm naturally feel that it is
their duty to take seriously even small hints of unreliability on the
part of a babysitter, teacher, or other person charged with the care of
their child. Yet they may feel that they should err on the side of trust
when it comes to the children themselves. Military planners may feel
that, in their roles as persons responsible for ensuring the defence of
a country, they have a duty to look sceptically at treaties indicating
friendly relations, assurances of benign intentions, or arms-control
arrangements. Their role is to plan as if the worst case were a signifi-
cant possibility.
In these ways, ethical or prudential considerations can be superim-
posed upon the information and interpretation made of another per-
son's character. It may be in a broad sense reasonable and right to
trust to a greater or lesser degree than evidence, information, and an

interpretation of actions and character would warrant, prima facie.
An issue that arises here is, of course, whether it ever makes sense
to require trust or distrust. It does not. Trust and distrust are complex
attitudes involving emotions, beliefs, behaviour, and dispositions,
and they cannot simply be created by acts of mental fiat. One cannot
simply trust another person on command. We cannot simply decide
to trust, or decide to distrust, and do so.
In this way, trust and distrust are like belief - which is not surpris-
ing, since when we trust or distrust someone, we have beliefs about
what he is likely or unlikely to do. We cannot simply decide to believe
something, or decide that we ought to believe something, and then
believe it, just like that. To believe something is to accept it as true
and that we do so because we have evidence or reason, because we
have in some way been led to believe this claim. In some contexts
where we have only slight evidence for believing a claim, there are
moral or practical reasons indicating that it would be useful, or in
some other sense good, to believe that claim anyhow. The most
famous case, of course, is belief that God exists. Some, like Pascal in
his famous Wager discussion, have argued that, although there is no
conclusive evidence for God's existence, it is so potentially advanta-
geous (in the afterlife we have an eternity of heaven as a possible
gain) to believe this that we should believe it. In such reasoning, non-
epistemic reasons, prudential ones, are given the status of reasons for
belief. According to Pascal, we should try to come to believe in God
even though we cannot simply will ourselves to do so. We cannot
believe by mental fiat, but we can deliberate, direct our attention, and
select our activities so as to favour one belief rather than another.15
Much the same may be said of trust. To say that we "should" trust,
because of a special position or role in which we find ourselves, is to
say that, so far as it is feasible, we should reflect and deliberate in
such as way as to cultivate trust rather than distrust. This may mean
trusting more, or less, than the evidence would warrant, depending
on the case.
OVERALL JUDGMENT
Eventually, we reach a kind of judgment, or estimation, of a person's

character and motivation, based on our interpreted information about
relevant statements and actions and on our own sense of how vulnera-
ble we are in the circumstances. How reliable is our information? What
does it suggest about trustworthiness? Could we have misunder-
stood? What is our overall sense of the person's character? What are
our circumstances? How vulnerable are we in these circumstances?

Obviously, whether and to what extent trust or distrust is warranted
will depend on whether what we know is on the whole positive (indi-
cating honesty, sincerity, integrity, dependability, competence, concern,
and sympathy) or negative (indicating dishonesty, lack of integrity, un-
reliability, incompetence, and manipulativeness). What degree of trust
or distrust is warranted will be based on how reliable our information
is, how many and how many sorts of actions and statements we know
about, the significance of those actions and statements for trustwor-
thiness, our overall assesssment of the other's character, and our own
vulnerability and feelings of loyalty or prudence in the circumstances.
Clearly, if attitudes of extreme distrust or complete trust are to be
warranted, a solid evidential base is needed. Such attitudes require
strongly negative or strongly positive pictures of what the other is
like. If we distrust someone extremely, we have the greatest suspicion
of that person's actions and intentions - in general and with regard to
us. We think he or she is more likely than not to be dishonest, manip-
ulative, or downright malevolent, and we are likely to interpret just
about anything that person says and does in the light of this basically
negative view of his or her character and motivation. If, on the other
hand, we trust someone completely, we are perfectly confident as to
what he or she will do; we feel no doubt at all that the person has
integrity, is concerned for us, and could be depended upon in virtu-
ally any circumstances.
Attitudes of extreme distrust or complete trust require well-
founded, unambiguous pictures of the other. For such attitudes to be
warranted, these pictures have to be founded on reliable information
about actions and statements that are consistent in their implications
about the other's character. There is little or no play of the "unless"
clause in such cases. If evidence points in inconsistent directions,
compelling reasons should exist for ignoring or downplaying the evi-
dence that counts against one's character picture. Either the amount
and variety of actions and statements known should be substantial,
or they should be highly significant for trust and distrust. With mod-
erate distrust or moderate trust, the information may be somewhat
less reliable and the amount, variety, or significance of the behaviour
less. The "unless" clause should be considered, where appropriate.
But after it is taken into account, interpretive judgments about what
the person said and did must be confident and relatively unqualified.
We should still have good information about some trust-relevant
actions and statements, know what these mean for our judgment of
the character of the person, and have reasonably good grounds for
our decision to trust or distrust him or her.
For slight distrust or slight trust, the information can be little

in quantity or of somewhat questionable reliability, or the actions and
statements can be few or very limited in their variety or significance.
If these conditions were combined though - a slight amount of ques-
tionably reliable information about a small number of relatively in-
significant actions - we would have only the most tenuous grounds
slight distrust or slight trust. There would be no reasonable grounds
for the attitudes. If we add to such paltriness of evidence the recogni-
tion of the "unless" clause, the case would be diminished further.
One can ask whether we need any evidence at all to be warranted
in having an attitude of slight trust. Some would say that, in the
absence of any specific grounds or reason to distrust, slight trust is
clearly the attitude to be adopted.16 If evidence is called for, then a
slight amount of it will provide whatever warrant is needed for slight
trust.
In most cases, it would not make sense to ask whether there are
grounds for neutrality. We might criticize neutrality as unwarranted
if there were good reason for some other attitude. For instance, it
could imply gullibility if a person were neutral towards someone
known to have committed exploitative, manipulative, or criminal acts
or thought to be a compulsive liar.
FURTHER REFLECTIONS
Interesting asymmetries appear when these matters are worked out.

For extreme distrust, indirect personal evidence or information from
books and media is acceptable as the only type of evidence. But for
complete trust, direct personal knowledge seems to be required. Some
people do place complete trust in others (charismatic political leaders
or television evangelists, for example) of whom they have only indi-
rect knowledge. But on reflection, it would seem that complete trust
in such circumstances is not warranted. There are too many ways in
which presentations and appearances could be manipulated to mis-
lead us, and we are too vulnerable if we trust completely. To be war-
ranted in completely trusting a person, we would need some first-
hand knowledge of him or her. On the other hand, if I feel extreme
distrust for Saddam Hussein on the basis of information gained from
books and television, that response does seem to be warranted. I have
read, in the New York Review of Books, documented statements to the
effect that Hussein arranged purges in which some members of his
cabinet were compelled to execute others; I have even seen a video-
tape of the meeting at which the disloyal ones were identified. I have
seen on national television pictures of Hussein pretending affection

for children of Western hostages; I have seen film footage of centres
where Kurdish Iraqis were interrogated, brutally tortured, and killed.
On the basis of all this - exclusively knowledge from books and
media - I have an attitude of extreme distrust towards this man.17
In many contexts, slight trust seems to require virtually no warrant
at all. Often the basis for such an attitude seems to be merely that
we have no particular reason to distrust the person in question. For
instance, if a stranger approaches me on the street asking for direc-
tions, and there is no evidence that he is trying to make a sexual
approach, sell something, lead me into a religious cult, or exploit me
in some way, I naturally take his query at face value and answer it
politely. Doing so can be regarded as indicating an attitude of slight
trust on my part, and it appears to need no special warrant.
This case raises the issue as to whether slight trust, slight distrust, or
neutrality is the most reasonable standing attitude, the one that would
be our natural basis for moving towards greater or lesser trust. If we
were to have no relevant information at all about another person,
would neutrality as regards trust and distrust be the most reasonable
attitude to adopt? Slight trust? Slight distrust? People, cultures, and
societies appear to differ in their approaches. In a fascinating study
of rural southern Italy in the 19505, Edward C. Banfield described
attitudes in the town of Montegrano as so suspicious and cynical as to
preclude even the simplest voluntary cooperative endeavour. The
standing attitude in this particular peasant society seems to have been
one of slight, or even moderate, distrust. There are strong arguments
for a standing attitude of slight trust, but how prudent and viable that
attitude is depends on background social circumstances.18
A recent account of moral legitimacy and power in the People's
Republic of China claims that ihe Chinese approach each other on a
basic assumption of distrust.
A further problem in a society in which self-interest must be masked and

people pretend to selflessness is that people never feel they know where
others really stand. Everybody knows of course that people have hidden in-
terests. There exists, therefore, considerable suspicion about hidden agendas
and real motives. From ordinary social relations to international politics,
inordinate attention is given to determining the real position of others. Are
they potentially friends or foes? Stratagems abound, but they have to be fol-
lowed with the greatest care because of the danger of causing the other party
to "lose face," which is the grievous pain people experience when their
masks are stripped away.19
Lucian Pye, who wrote this passage, adds that for Chinese leaders,
public and published statements are more reliable than first-hand
encounters since "They believe face-to-face meetings are where
hypocrisy prevails. That is where it is obligatory to tell others what
they want to hear." In this culture, Pye says, to discern where another
person stands, one reasons interpretively from his or her public state-
ments, attaching special importance to symbols and code words. This
difference, he argues, has not been understood by American public
leaders, leaving some personal American initiatives to China open to
serious misinterpretation. An impression of lack of openness and
suspicion in China consistent with that described by Pye is offered in
several other accounts of Chinese society.20
Trust and distrust work two ways. We can think of them, as I have
here, from the point of view of the one who trusts or of the one who
is to be trusted - from a subject or an object point of view. Looking at
trust from the other end of the relationship, we can learn a modest
lesson from these reflections on grounds for trust and distrust. If
we want to be worthy of trust, we must indicate in our actions,
statements, and body language that we are honest, sincere, reliable,
dependable, competent persons - persons genuinely concerned for
the welfare of others. To deserve trust, we must be, and seem to be,
persons of integrity.
CHAP1ER EIGHT
Distrust and Its Discomforts
In 1991 approximately 85,000 American women sought private detec-

tives to check out the dependability of men they were dating, accord-
ing to an article in the magazine New Woman.1 Ed Pankan, an
investigator quoted in the piece, reported that his firm did twenty pre-
marital investigations a week. Although most questions about boy-
friends and fiances were resolvable by background checks, matters of
sexual fidelity could be addressed only by surveillance. According to
Pankan, about one-third of the men he investigated were fully legiti-
mate: their business and sexual lives were as they had said. Another
third had been shading over some unpleasant facts. The remainder - a
full third of the men investigated - Pankan regarded as outright con
artists.
DISTRUST
We would like to think that our friends, relatives, and sexual partners
were trustworthy and dependable. Often we do so, and for good rea-
son. But distrust exists even among intimates. Even when the surface
of a relationship seems all right, we may feel inklings of suspicion -
doubts that we cannot set aside. We are conscious of our vulnerability.
We may be fearful - unable to be open, relaxed, and intimate. Seeking
a private detective to allay one's fears about a spouse, child, loved one,
or friend is relatively rare. But many people who could never resort to
such measures would understand the impetus behind them. Some-
times distrust is based on feelings or instincts, a kind of inchoate sense
that something is not right and things are not as they seem. Often we
have specific evidence, based on things that other people have said
and done, which seems to justify our distrust. A lover or friend may lie
to us outright or seem to lie. He may tell stories that are inconsistent,
seem implausible, or do not ring true. He may have misled us, appar-
ently deliberately, or may have failed to reveal crucial information
which we needed and which, we feel sure, he knew we needed.
A friend may have failed to live up to an agreement or broken a
promise without any valid reason for doing so. She may be manipu-
lating us, either by deceit or by playing on emotions and vulnerabili-
ties. We may come to think that she does not really care and is using
us in some way, enjoying not our company but our social connec-
tions, library, or summer cottage. If we sense that a friend or lover is
using us, we suspect lack of affection and insincerity. We begin to dis-
trust and are unable to take the other person at face value.
Thoughtless or apparently callous behaviour can make us think that
a friend or lover does not care for us anymore, that he is insensitive to
our feelings and concerns. Unreliability can signify lack of concern.
We expect a person whom we trust to care for us, to feel affection, to
appreciate us for what we are, and not to seek to deceive, manipulate,
or exploit us. Not only do we want to see our friends and family as
loving and caring for us, as acting well towards us, but we want to see
them as worthy and lovable people who find us worthy and lovable.
Even when they remain kind and loving to wards us, if we gain evi-
dence that our friends and relations are engaging in immoral behav-
iour, we find it hard to continue trusting them and begin to feel
uneasy in the relationship.
Well-established trust may continue even in the face of consider-
able negative evidence. If a person trusts her best friend and bases
this trust on years of experience, she is unlikely to conclude right
away that the friend has betrayed her, should she be told of wrongdo-
ing. She is more likely to regard the story as false. Should those acts
turn out to be real, she will tend to excuse them or understand them
as having only limited implications as to the friend's real character.
Only with clear-cut evidence is her trust likely to be shaken.
A poignant illustration of the persistance of trust may be found in
the film Music Box, which depicts a father-daughter relationship in th
context of war crimes. Ann's relationship with her father, Michael, is
warm and close. Her mother died when she was young; her father
worked in steel mills and raised Ann and her brother. When Michael
is charged by the American government with lying in order to gain
admission to the United States and committing brutal war crimes
during his youth in Hungary, Ann is absolutely convinced that he has
been misidentified. Michael admits that he lied about his occupation
in Hungary; he claimed to have been a farmer, but (he explains) he
had been on a farm only as a boy. During the war he was a policeman,
but (he says) he worked only as a clerk. Throughout his years in the
United States, Michael has been an outspoken anti-communist, and
Distrust and Its Discomforts 141
he tells Ann that he was charged because the government in Hungary

plots against people like him. Those communists do all sorts of terri-
ble things. Ann believes him. At first, she trusts her father so com-
pletely that she has trouble taking the case seriously.
Ann is a lawyer, and her father wants her to defend him in court.
She agrees and begins to go through stacks of documents proffering
evidence. Photographs show Michael Lazslo in 1954 and an accused
Special Section man in 1944. The pictures and signatures are similar.
Ann's assistant finds evidence of some months of unusually high bank
withdrawals, cheques to a Timor Zoltan, a Hungarian who later died
in a hit-and-run accident. The assistant thinks this information is sig-
nificant; perhaps Zoltan was blackmailing Michael. But Ann ignores
this evidence. During the trial, she energetically cross-examines Hun-
garian witnesses who describe terrible crimes and identify the photos
as depicting one of the perpetrators. A witness describes a cruel tor-
ture in which exhausted victims were made to do push-ups to hold
themselves above a dagger planted in the ground. (Ann's father liked
to do push-ups; they were a favourite form of exercise.) One witness is
a woman who describes being brutally tortured and raped at the age
of sixteen by "Mishka" and his cohort, who had a long scar on his face.
Ann cannot bring herself to cross-examine this woman. The trial is
taken to Hungary because a final witness is too ill to travel. Ann is able
to discredit this witness, who, it transpires, had previously identified
the wartime Mishka with several other people. The judge rejects the
testimony of the witness and declares that there is insufficient evi-
dence to convict Michael Laszlo. Against all odds, Ann has won her
case.
Then Ann visits Timor Zoltan's widow, who says that Zoltan was a
soldier during the war. She has only a few of his effects in a wallet
from New York, including a worn ticket from- a pawnshop, which she
gives to Ann. As Ann is leaving the flat, she sees pictures; Timor
Zoltan was the man with the long scar. Yes, his widow said, it had
taken many operations to have the scar removed. Ann leaves, dis-
turbed but still not quite convinced that her father was "Mishka," the
cohort of this legendary brute. Back in the United States, she takes the
ticket to the pawnshop and retrieves a music box. It contains photos
of Timor Zoltan and the young Michael Laszlo holding guns, stand-
ing proudly over their victims. Her father was guilty.
Ann's trust was deep, and it had led her to dismiss or reinterpret
evidence against her father and to accept dubious explanations. She at
first believed her father's explanation that he was charged because
communists were plotting against him; she accepted his somewhat
implausible claim that he had worked only as a clerk, when he was a
wartime policeman. She trusted him enough to question photographic
evidence and to doubt testimony from witnesses. Her father loved to

do push-ups, but she was able to ignore the link between this form of
exercise and the terrible stories of torture related by witnesses in court.
She dismissed evidence from her assistant which pointed to the possi-
bility that Timor Zoltan was blackmailing her father and might have
been killed as a result.
Ann was fighting as a good lawyer, and she won the legal fight.
But she was not just playing legal games; she was fighting to protect
a father she believed in. Her deep trust in her father led her to ques-
tion, reinterpret, or ignore considerable evidence and to accept his
own somewhat implausible claims about his past and the communist
plots against him. Especially after her visit to Zoltan's widow, Ann
had some doubts. But not until she saw the photos in the music box
did she acknowledge that her cherished and trusted father had com-
mitted grotesquely brutal crimes as a young man.
Confronted by Ann, Michael would not admit his guilt. He claimed
that the communists in Hungary must have done something to her
mind. The film ends with Ann breaking entirely with her father, turn-
ing the incriminating photos over to the prosecution, and abandoning
her New York life and career for the comparative safety and quiet of
the American midwest.
We may think of distrust as a matter of feeling and intuition, of
suspicion based on unarticulated worries and fears. Such ideas are
sometimes correct: distrust can be largely intuitive. Nevertheless, as
the story of Music Box so graphically indicates, there is such a thing
as evidence warranting distrust. If people do certain sorts of things,
we make certain inferences about their character, and to the extent
that we infer that they are unreliable or lack integrity, we will not
trust them.
Ann's attitudes shifted by degrees, until the end. But attitudes of
trust and distrust do not always shift gradually. Sometimes the
change may be sudden. A woman who finds her most trusted friend
in bed with her cherished husband is likely to reverse her attitudes to
both of them in an instant. The fact that trust was deep and complete
makes a harmful act all the more shocking, and we are especially hurt
and vulnerable if we are betrayed by someone we have trusted
deeply. A single aggregious act can result in a sudden shift from com-
plete trust to radical distrust, with nothing in between.
BETRAYAL
In the 19805 Vera Wollenberger was a peace activist in East Germany.

Deemed an enemy by the communist regime, she was under heavy
surveillance by no less than sixty agents of the Stasi, the East German
secret police. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subse-
quent reunification of Germany, Stasi files were opened. Vera Wollen-
berger saw her file in 1991. It was immediately clear that one agent,
"Daniel," could only have been Knud Wollenberger, her husband and
the father of her two sons. Details of her every headache, backache,
telephone call, and personal comment had been passed on to the
Stasi. Knud confessed to being Daniel and gave unrepentant inter-
views. Vera, now divorced, struggles to bring up her two sons, who
will have to contend with the fact that their father married their
mother in order to spy on her and fathered them in the process.
In a television interview, Vera Wollenberger said the files made it
clear that her marriage had been false right from the beginning.
Knud Wollenberger had married her under Stasi orders. It was as an
infiltrator that he had participated in the East German peace groups
where they met, and he married her to get material. Their courtship,
sexual love, and home were false to the core, based on a lie. Vera
found it unimaginable that a man could marry a woman in order to
spy on her, but still more incomprehensible that he would father chil-
dren in the process. The roles of enemy, friend, lover, and spy were
blended together in one person, who, in some bizarre way, was able
to fill all of them at once. Knud claimed that he had been trying to
improve the GDR by working for the Stasi. He spoke of "going
through a mirror and being in a totally different world" when he
went from home to work.2
It is estimated that 6 million East Germans out of a total population
of 17 million were under some form of surveillance by the Stasi.
Between 1953 and 1989 some 500,000 people had been recruited by
the Stasi as informers. East Germany was a country almost without
privacy: virtually all telephone conversations and many personal ex-
changes were overheard and recorded by agents of the secret police.
In a country where buildings bombed in 1945 had been left unre-
paired, the Stasi had a billion-dollar annual budget. Anyone not fully
supportive of the East German state was regarded as an enemy, any-
one over nine years of age as a potential enemy. By the fall of 1992,
600,000 citizens of the former East Germany had applied to see their
files. The process will take a long time: the Stasi archives were nearly
two hundred kilometres long. But even in this context of widespread
surveillance and betrayal, Vera Wollenberger's case was unusual in
the way it cut to the very core of her intimate life. Few Germans
found that their husbands or wives had betrayed them, although be-
trayal by friends, trusted pastors, counsellors, teachers, professors -
people in virtually every corner of society - was common.3
Betrayal is the violation of a deep trust and confidence. A person
betrayed is let down by another with whom he or she has experienced
a special closeness, intimacy, and history of emotional connection.

Such a relationship leads to strong expectations of loyalty and sup-
port. Betrayal is worse than unreliability or deception, worse than
many acts of harm. It is a special sort of violation, one that jolts
against the background of what seemed to be a relationship of deep
trust with particular strong expectations of loyalty and intimacy. It is
a disturbance of deep and crucial expectations. The trusting person
has revealed herself, opened herself, divulged her secrets to the other.
Because she has trusted and revealed, because of her deep confidence
in the caring and loyalty of the other, she is especially vulnerable. The
violation is a shock. Her intimacy has been exploited, her trust de-
stroyed. She feels absolutely vulnerable to the other to whom she has
revealed herself, horrified of the dangers to which she is exposed by
the betrayal.
In the literal sense, betrayal is a giving over to an enemy, as when
Judas betrayed Jesus and placed him in the hands of the Roman au-
thorities. Etymologically, betrayal comes from the Latintradere, whic
means handing over. This connotation fits the Wollenberger case:
Knud exploited Vera's love, exposed her most intimate feelings, con-
cerns, and secrets, and eventually handed her over to the totalitarian
state, which arrested and deported her.
There are many expectations in relationships of trust, and not every
failure to live up to expectations amounts to an act of betrayal. Friends
who fail to keep appointments or respond in a crisis disappoint us,
but they do not betray us. Betrayal is a special kind of disturbance of
trust, an act of disloyalty in which a basic expectation of alliance and
non-harm is violated. It is no mere peccadillo or omission; it violates a
profoundly important expectation, exposing a person to serious harm
in a context where he would have taken loyalty and protectiveness for
granted. Revealing an important secret or undermining a key aspect
of the other's life, such as sexual relationships or basic economic secu-
rity, counts as betrayal, as much as handing the other over to the
enemy. After betrayal, an intimate relationship is ruptured, often for-
ever.
THE HARMFUL EFFECTS OF DISTRUST
We cannot assume that distrust is always negative or argue in gen-

eral that trust is healthier and better than distrust. Some people really
are unreliable, even treacherous, and they deserve to be distrusted.
By distrusting them, we may protect ourselves from tension, incon-
venience, and sometimes serious harm. Whether we should trust or
distrust, and to what degree, depends on what evidence and feelings
we have and how vulnerable we are. But even allowing that distrust
is often warranted and sometimes protective, there are costs to dis-
trust when it affects personal relationships.
Felt distrust is usually accompanied by pretence, because in adult
life people as a matter of habit and etiquette play along with pro-
fessed roles and conventions. When we feel distrust, we seldom ex-
press it; it is somehow rude and confrontational to do so. People
present a certain face or image to others, conveying their own sense
of who they are, where they fit into the social world, and what they
are doing; and normally we help each other to preserve a pleasant
social face. We create an ordered social reality where we assist others
to seem to be what they purport to be. In social encounters, we nearly
always try to preserve our self-image and save face. When we dis-
trust someone, when we doubt that he is what he purports to be,
social convention almost requires that we disguise our own attitude,
hide our doubts, and pretend that all is well. We help each other save
face, even when we have good reason to think that something is
wrong.4 Distrust is reconciled with good manners only by pretence.
Inhibiting doubts and acting as though things are normal can be
stressful, making communication and the conduct of a relationship
unnatural. Openness and intimacy become impossible. Falseness, the
mutually contrived social life, is the result.
It was no an adult trained in social etiquette who said that the em-
peror had no clothes; it was an innocent and impolite child. Social
convention makes it difficult to express our distrust because that
amounts to challenging the other person's conception of himself or
herself. But when we feel suspicious and say nothing, we fall into
hypocrisy ourselves. Frauds can remain long undetected because
people do not directly confront or challenge what they suspect to be a
false front. Obviously, such pretence has its negative side. We may
sense and believe that another person is not what he seems, have lit-
tle understanding of him, and feel insecure and unsafe as a result. At
the least, such suspicion is stressful, and in some cases it may lead to
serious harm. In such relationships no real intimacy can exist, and
any attempts at cooperative actions are likely to be stressful at best.
Distrust is harmful to relationships. We feel uneasy and tense,
suspicious of the other, uncertain as to what he or she might do. We
are not relaxed; we have no way of simplifying our assumptions
about the other. If, on the contrary, we trust someone, we simply feel
confident that she will do what the situation requires. Trust is sim-
pler than distrust. Insofar as we can trust, we can rule out certain
possibilities and complexity is reduced. If we trust someone, we be-
lieve that he will do the appropriate thing, and there is a whole range
of inappropriate things that he might do which we need not con-

sider.5 To coordinate activities and manage even mundane matters
with people whom we do not trust is at best difficult, at worst impos-
sible. Distrust leaves virtually every possibility open, implying anxi-
ety, fear, lack of openness, and poor communication. Where distrust
is warranted by evidence and past behaviour, we cannot sensibly will
ourselves to trust in order to establish openness and simplify life.
Distrust is a barrier to many good possibilities between people. It
works to separate us from each other because we cannot act natu-
rally. Distrust prevents people from sharing pleasures and confi-
dences, exchanging help and advice, and working together towards
joint goals.
If distrust is so extreme that we need always consider the possibility
that the other is dissembling, pretending, and hiding things, there is
scarcely a relationship at all. When the other says something, what
does she mean? Probably not what she says. Perhaps - but only per-
haps - the direct opposite. Perhaps nothing at all. With so many possi-
bilities to be considered, there is little point in trying to communicate.
Given an attitude of distrust, communication is virtually impossible.
The utterances of the other can scarcely be interpreted as meaningful
statements and serve only to disorient and confuse. We might try to
guess or read his body language, but gestures can be inauthentic too.
Think for a moment of the phenomenon of partnership and the
trust that is required for a genuine partnership to work. A partner is
another person regarded as an equal, with whom one is working col-
laboratively on a common task. If a woman is working with a partner,
she has to be able to communicate with that person - tell him how
she feels, what she has experienced, what she thinks should be done,
how she would go about doing it. She has to feel confident that the
partner will listen, understand, and appreciate what is said, even if he
is not initially disposed to agree with it. Just to talk meaningfully
with someone in a relationship of partnership, she has to believe that
he will not wilfully distort what she says or use it to manipulate,
exploit, or betray her. In these ways she has to trust that person. And
that is just the beginning. When the partner is talking, she has to
credit him with competence, sincerity, honesty, and integrity, even
when there are differences. She cannot assume, believe, or even sus-
pect that he is trying to deceive, lie, or suppress relevant information:
she must think of him as open, sincere, and honest.
Communication between two partners requires trust when speak-
ing and trust when hearing. If they do not trust one another, these peo-
ple cannot communicate well enough to work together. Partners work
together: they communicate openly and effectively, share goals, coop-
erate, coordinate activities, rely on each other's promises and commit-

ments, and make dependable arrangements that do not presuppose
constant surveillance and supervision. Often they like each other;
intimate partners love each other. People cannot be partners without a
considerable degree of trust. If distrust between them interferes with
communication and collaboration, their partnership is doomed.
Distrust may be localized to specific contexts and situations, and as
such it need not destroy a relationship. But often it spreads from one
context to others, as illustrated in the case of Joe and Mary, described
in the last chapter. If Mary tells her husband, Joe, that she has quit
smoking and he then finds out from her male colleague that she has
continued to smoke at the office, he may begin to suspect that she has
been deceiving him about other things too. As a loyal husband who
wants to believe in his wife, he could reason that Mary failed once, but
will keep her commitment on smoking the next time she makes it.
That is to say, Joe can limit his distrust. But psychologically and emo-
tionally, distrust tends to spread - not only to further contexts of the
same type but to other contexts entirely. Thus Joe may begin to won-
der what else Mary could be deceiving him about, given that she has
deceived him about this matter, and what other promises she could
be breaking, given that she has broken this one. Despite the context
dependence of distrust, people very often infer from particular fail-
ings that a person lacks integrity and is likely to be unreliable in other
contexts.
She lied about quitting smoking.

So,
she is quite capable of lying about important matters.
Perhaps,
she is a liar and an unreliable person.
So,
perhaps she has not made the mortgage payment, even though she
said she would.
So,
I do not trust her any more.
Clear cases of lying are especially likely to inspire distrust. Mary

must know that she smokes at the office; this is not the kind of thing
she could make a mistake about. If she has told Joe that she does not
smoke at the office, she has told him something she knows to be false,
in order to lead him to believe it is true. In this case, her statement, a
simple factual claim, really is false. In lying, Mary has intentionally
misled her husband. She made claims that she knows to be false and
that are in fact false, and in doing so, she has deprived him of some-
thing that he needs to make sound decisions. If Mary wanted to have
children, and she and Joe were exploring this possibility, whether she
has stopped smoking or not could be an important factor in his
response.
Lying indicates a willingness to mislead and manipulate the other
person, and the one who is lied to has his autonomy diminished inso-
far as he has acquired inaccurate information about the world. Even a
case of lying in which the liar inadvertently makes a true claim (she
tells something that she believes to be false, but it just happens to be
true) provides a basis for distrust, because the person who lies has
indicated her willingness to manipulate the other person for her own
ends. If the claim that the lying person makes just happens to be true,
it nevertheless remains the case that she believed it false, wanted to
lead the other person to believe something false, and thus was willing
to mislead that person, diminishing his capacity for effective action
and increasing his manipulability.
From an isolated instance, distrust may spread, its baneful effects
extending and tending to become entrenched. One study of trust and
distrust in small working groups found that distrust had negative
effects on their efficiency. It inhibited the exchange of information,
adding to uncertainty and making it more likely that important prob-
lems would go unrecognized or unacknowledged. It increased the
likelihood of misinterpretation: people did not take remarks at face
value. Trying to determine what was "really meant," they often got
things wrong. Distrust within the group increased fear and defensive
behaviour and made it difficult for people to communicate openly
and cooperate effectively. Projects undertaken were less effective
than those of more trusting groups.6
DOWNWARD SPIRALS AND

SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECIES
There is a certain natural dynamic of distrust that often results in a

downward spiralling of attitudes: things go from bad to worse. Dis-
trust is communicated, results in hostility and alienation, and is con-
firmed and spreads, as illustrated in the following example. Peter
and Susan are colleagues who work at the same firm. They have been
acquaintances for several years. Peter already had a rather negative
impression of Susan when she started at the firm: he had heard that
she slept around and was once accused of embezzling funds. When
he first met her, she seemed to him nervous and shifty, and he imme-
diately thought her untrustworthy. For this reason, Peter never gave
Susan more information than he really had to, even when they were
working on projects together. When he was temporarily her supervi-
sor, he tried to control her activities by restricting admission to key
areas, making sure she punched the time clock, and having her
report frequently about her work. To Susan it is clear that Peter does
not trust her. She does not understand why, because she has been a
reliable and competent employee in this firm. He appears simply
to be prejudiced against her. (She suspects that he does not like work-
ing with women.) Peter's barely disguised distrust and attempts to
supervise and control her activities make Susan feel resentful and
alienated. She does not trust Peter either and feels that her lack of
trust in him has a clear justification in his behaviour.
In the beginning Peter felt some distrust for Susan, for no better
reason than hearsay and intuition. After several years of uneasy inter-
action, both Peter and Susan feel a distrust that is entrenched and
supported by evidence. Each distrusts the other, and each has some
warrant for the attitude; each has found confirmation for suspicions
about the other. These co-workers have met many times, and Susan
has been evasive and slightly hostile in these encounters. Because of
his distrust, Peter is controlling and unfriendly. Their relationship is
tense, difficult, and unsatisfying. Without some dramatic confronta-
tion, rupture, or specific effort to become reconciled, their relationship
is likely only to worsen. The pattern in such cases is clear. Distrust is
self-perpetuating; it grows on itself. Distrustful attitudes generally
elicit feelings of alienation, unreliable behaviour, and further distrust.
This usually happens to both (or all) parties in a relationship. Charac-
teristically, distrust builds on itself and spreads.
An important factor in the dynamic of increasing distrust is our
tendency to function so as to confirm the beliefs we already have. We
want to see other persons as stable, predictable creatures, so we tend
to construct a picture of them and regard it as definitive, as really in-
dicating what they are like. We may all too readily label and catego-
rize people on the basis of single actions, especially in cases where
these actions are negative. ("He told a lie, so he is a liar.") We take an
action and turn it into a fixed picture or stereotype.
Involved here are two styles of reasoning documented by social
psychologists. One is the correspondence bias: we assume that an
action corresponds to a fixed characterization of the person. The other
is the attribution fallacy: we falsely assign character attributes on the
basis of actions, discounting the possibility that an action may emerge
as natural in certain circumstances or because the agent is placed in a
particular social role. Such reasoning is deemed by social psycholo-
gists to be fallacious; they say that we are too ready to categorize a
person, forming a fixed and stable picture of character on too slim a

basis of evidence. From even a few inklings of information suggesting
that someone is a shady character, we may begin, far too hastily, to see
him or her through negative spectacles. It is like looking at the world
through green lenses and therefore seeing a green world. With sus-
pecting minds and eyes, we observe suspicious behaviour, and we too
readily construct a fixed and negative picture of the other.
Worse yet, the beliefs surrounding such a picture may become true
even in cases where they were initially unsupported, as happened in
the example of Peter and Susan. Peter's belief that Susan was not to
be trusted created evidence for itself. He then had confirmation that
his view of her was right; it seemed to be supported by his experi-
ence. In terms of her relationship with Peter, Susan seems, and has
been, rather untrustworthy. In part, her untrustworthiness is founded
in his perceptions; in part, in her own actions in response. His dis-
trust has become a self- fulfilling prophecy. And it will work in the
other direction: she has reason to distrust him and will do so.
Self-fulfilling prophecies are common in everyday interactions
between sexual partners, dates, friends, and colleagues. We tend
to discover what we expect to discover, select evidence that con-
firms our prior beliefs and stereotypes, and ignore exceptions and
counter-evidence. There is a general tendency for expectations to be
self-confirming. Distrust will inspire lack of trustworthiness.
The self-fulfilling prophecy phenomenon is supported by our ten-
dency to be biased in favour of our own beliefs. When we believe
something, even tentatively, we tend to "investigate" or check out
our belief by finding evidence in its favour, rather than by exploring
evidence both for and against it, as logic would require. Someone
who thinks that physicists are nerds will anticipate and attend to
nerdy qualities on the part of physicists. Anecdotes and incidents
about nerdy physicists will come to her attention, and she is likely to
remember them because they confirm her prejudice. From a logical
point of view, cases of non-nerdy physicists are equally relevant to
the merits of her belief. But she will tend to ignore them. This is the
confirmation bias: we selectively attend to matters that would con-
firm our beliefs and ignore those that would disconfirm them.
The confirmation bias is another explanation for the fact that trust
and distrust tend to build confirmation for themselves. Distrusting
Susan initially, Peter ignored evidence that she was a good worker
and found nothing to like about her as a person. But he did not ignore
evidence of shiftiness, evasiveness, unfriendliness, or unreliability.
Whatever happens, attention and memory tend to select in favour of
our own hypotheses.
We generally create our own social reality by influencing the be-

haviour we observe in others. But the problem is that we do not know
we have done this; because we do not know, we misinterpret the
actions and words of other people. Responses that we ourselves have
inspired we mistake to be fixed characteristics of other people.7 We
fail to understand that often, what we assume to be objective features
of other people are in part the effect of our own attitudes and actions.
The trustworthiness or untrustworthiness of others is not simply
an objective and independent feature of the world; we do not form
our beliefs about other people by consistently tallying up their behav-
iour. Instead, we tend to interpret and assess behaviour on the basis
of beliefs we antecedently hold - sometimes on good evidence, some-
times on poor. Unless we take special care, we are selective and cling
to our hypotheses and beliefs. When the behaviour of other people
fits our beliefs, we attend to it, take it seriously, and think it genuinely
reveals their character. When it fails to fit, we attribute it to situational
factors. Interpretation is selective; we pick and choose.8 Our attitudes
and expectations tend to evoke confirming responses in other people.
In this way, trust and distrust come to be entrenched attitudes, some-
what insensitive to evidence.
The effects of this human psychology can be quite destructive.
Applied to the subject of trust, the self-fulfilling prophecy theory
offers an important warning: distrust someone and he or she may
very well become more untrustworthy. Then we will distrust all the
more and find that we have good reason to do so. H.J.N. Horsburgh
described the moral hazards of downward spirals of distrust.9
Reflecting on distrust from the point of view of moral development,
he explained that a distrusted person is limited in moral opportuni-
ties because she is given no chance to develop into a morally respon-
sible human being. If a person's actions are controlled by others and
do not reflect her own judgment, they imply little about her, save that
she is capable of obeying orders, and they cannot really be to her
credit. Regarded by her parents as untrustworthy, a highly controlled
adolescent will be provided with little chance to show that she is
trustworthy. It is morally discouraging not to be trusted, and that fact
is highly significant in bringing up children, in education, and in
therapy. A distrusted person feels helpless to overcome the other's
attitude that she is untrustworthy and hence unworthy. Distrust
withdraws moral support and tends to perpetuate the other's bad
traits. It reinforces dishonesty. Why be honest when others will not
see one as honest anyway? A person needs trust in order to grow and
develop maturity. Moral development presupposes some degree of
trust, and distrust is inimical to it.
As Horsburgh argues, a major factor that can work for or against the
enlargement of moral capacity is the attitudes of other people. Their
actions and attitudes can help or hinder the development of morally
responsible behaviour. Because we live together in moral communi-
ties, our attitudes, beliefs, characters, and actions are interrelated. As
members of a moral community, we are responsible for each other's
moral character and development, and distrust limits that develop-
ment. On these grounds, Horsburgh argues that we have a duty to
trust each other at least to some degree, even in cases where past con-
duct provides some grounds for distrust and seems to indicate that
future trustworthiness is unlikely.
We can think of the adverse effects of distrust in various dimen-
sions. Distrust has costs in many areas: to each individual, to the rela-
tionship between them, to affected colleagues, friends, or family
members, and to society at large. When Peter distrusts Susan, there
are adverse effects for him, for her, for their relationship, and for their
colleagues. Their work too is almost certainly affected. The effects of
distrust - stress, lack of openness, flawed communication, limited
cooperation, and entrenching negative attitudes - are usually adverse
for all concerned.
When feasible, two people who distrust each other may simply
terminate their relationship. But often relationships cannot be sev-
ered in this way. People distrust each other, perhaps for good reason,
and yet they have to continue in a relationship and must somehow
function together. Distrusting, they cannot, in general, function com-
fortably and efficiently. So they perform badly, with resulting stress,
frustration, misunderstanding, conflict, hostility, inefficiency, and
even crime and violence. At this point, distrust has become a practical
problem that demands some response.
COPING WITH DISTRUST
If we are unwilling or unable to abandon a relationship and appar-

ently cannot establish trust within it, coping with or "managing"
distrust appears to be the only alternative. In such situations we have
many strategies. None is fully effective, but all are worth examining.
Seeking Reassurance
In intimate relationships a common approach to distrust is to seek as-

surances from the other. Such an approach is natural for one in a posi-
tion of lesser power and greater vulnerability. "Do you love me, really
love me?" a wife may say to her husband. From the way he acts, she
cannot feel sure that he cares about her. Sexually, she is not satisfied;
her husband pays little heed to whether she has an orgasm. He is
often preoccupied and forgets dates and appointments. She does not
feel confident with him, does not know what to make of his gestures
and assurances, and suspects that he is not committed to her or to
their relationship. She needs more. Both emotionally and sexually, she
feels insecure in the relationship. To alleviate this insecurity, and be-
cause she does not trust him enough to take his care and affection for
granted, she tries to elicit signs. She asks for assurance because she is
insecure.
But there is something self-defeating, even slightly paradoxical, in
her quest. The problem is that in distrusting her husband, the wife
will be unable to take seriously any reassurance he gives. She does
not really trust him to say what he means and suspects that he may
be using her. Whatever he says or does in response, it is unlikely to
satisfy her needs. Under pressure, the husband may say, "I love you.
Yes, I want us to stay together." But his wife will suspect that he does
not really mean it. He may paint the bedroom, buy flowers, or plan a
joint trip; but distrusting him, she will not take these actions as evi-
dence of a firm commitment to their relationship. These, she will sus-
pect, are merely tokens intended to influence her. He is doing these
things, she will think, in order to get her to play along with him, to
retain for himself a relationship with someone he does not really love,
but a relationship that is convenient for him. Or they are ploys of
some other sort. Paradoxically, the very distrust that makes this wife
need her husband's reassurance makes her unable to believe him.
A recent Australian film offers a vivid illustration of this dynamic.
Proofdepicts Martin, a young blind man living alone in a city apart-
ment. Bitter about being blind, Martin feels hostile towards the world
and other people. He has always been extremely distrustful; he dis-
trusts most other people and has done so since his childhood, when he
distrusted even his mother. As a child, Martin would hear noises out-
side and ask her what was there. When she replied, he suspected that
she was trying to trick him. Even when his mother died, he doubted
that her death was genuine, suspecting that it was part of an elaborate
hoax she had contrived so that she could get away from him. At her
burial he tapped the casket and thought it sounded hollow.
Martin sought assurance from other people, but he was unable to
believe what they told him. When they did offer assurance, it did not
really help. Not seeing, he would ask others what they saw. Not
believing, he would put his questions again, requesting several de-
scriptions of the same scene. Martin acquired a camera and began to
photograph scenes of special interest to him. It was an attempt at a
technological solution, but technology could not do the job alone. He

depended not only on technology but on other people. And because
he did not trust those other people, he could not gain reassurance
from them.
As a boy, Martin had distrusted his mother when she said that a
gardener was raking leaves, so he had once photographed the gar-
den. After her death, he was dependent on his housekeeper, Celia,
whom he suspected of trying to deceive him. Celia resented Martin
deeply because she was in love with him and he would not respond
to her. She did, indeed, play tricks on him. When Martin went to the
park, his seeing-eye dog would sometimes fail to respond to calls,
apparently disappearing for short intervals. He suspected Celia of
luring the dog away and took photos which he asked his new friend
Andy to interpret.
Yet this convoluted search for reassurance did little to resolve
Martin's generalized distrust, for the simple reason that he was not
willing or able to believe what other people told him. Although some
people did try to help him and Andy offered accurate descriptions of
his photographs, Martin was too bitter, resentful, and suspicious to
be reassured. He tried to manage his generalized distrust by testing
others, listening for sincerity, asking trick questions, and comparing
the descriptions offered by different people. But radically suspicious,
he took nothing as proof; his distrust could not be overcome.
After a crisis with Andy and Celia, Martin opened up to Andy, who
told him that he had lied to him several times and was not abolutely
trustworthy. Andy had made love to Celia and knew the secret of her
love for Martin and her cruel tricks on him, but he did not tell Martin
these things. He tried to explain to Martin that people can care and be
basically trustworthy even though they lapse once or twice, espe-
cially under the pressure of a crisis. (In Doris Brothers's terms, we can
say here that Andy tried to give Martin more realistic criteria for trust-
worthiness.) Finally Martin gained a more qualified and reasonable
view of what is involved in trusting other people and was able to
accept what Andy said. He went to find his mother's tombstone and
became convinced that she had really died. He had Andy look at the
old photo of the garden, which he took as a child, and realized that
his mother had not lied. Martin came to trust Andy and for that rea-
son was able to trust his mother. Painfully, he learned that it is futile
to demand absolute proof all the time.
Although Proofdepicts an extreme case, some aspects of Martin's
dilemma are quite general. The paradox of assurance, so vividly and
poignantly portrayed, applies to the situation of many people, who,
vulnerable and insecure, seek reassurance that they are loved and
cared about. The trouble is that in just those cases where we most
want assurance, we are least likely to be able to accept it. For this rea-
son, as a strategy for coping with distrust, seeking assurance tends
not to be helpful. Firm "proof" of loyalty and dependability will be
impossible. Because there is always a need for trust at some level, the
person who is suspicious and uneasy can always find a basis for
distrust. No partner or friend can prove beyond a doubt that he or
she is absolutely caring, faithful, honest, dependable, and trustworthy
for the indefinite future. If we feel insecure in our relationships with
lovers and friends, if we distrust their commitment and feelings for
us, our appeals for reassurance are likely only to make us seem more
vulnerable and pathetic. We need a grounds for confidence, but those
grounds cannot come from the person we distrust because we will be
suspicious of what he or she provides.
Rules
Another response to distrust in a relationship is to try to manage some

aspects of the relationship by appealing to rules. The relationship be-
tween trust and rules is an awkward one. The greater our trust, the
less we need rules. The lesser our trust, the more we are inclined to
appeal to rules - but the less useful those rules are likely to be. Trying
to cope with distrust by imposing rules is unpromising because of the
open-ended nature of trust. When we trust another person, we trust
him or her to do what is appropriate in the circumstances, whatever
those circumstances are and whatever the appropriate action may be.
Circumstances are always changing, so trust, if we can maintain it, is
more flexible and realistic than relying on rules.
In relationships between people who are roughly equal in status
and power, neither is in a position to impose rules on the other. Thus,
if two basically equal parties seek to use them to resolve problems in
the relationship, they must reach an agreement as to what these rules
are going to be. For agreement to be viable, both partners must per-
ceive a need for rules or guidelines, agree on them, and abide by
them. Undertaken jointly in this way, a search for rules in response to
problems would clearly make sense in some circumstances. But just
as clearly, this sort of recourse to rules will not overcome problems of
distrust.
The reason is obvious: The problem is that negotiating, agreeing
on, and complying with rules presupposes trust. People have to trust
each other enough to communicate meaningfully and accurately
about what those rules are going to be, and they must each feel some
confidence that the other will comply with the rules. To the extent
that people are able to agree on rules, they trust each other and can
work together. To the extent that they do not trust each other and are
unable to work together, they are unlikely to be able to agree on rules
or follow them to their mutual satisfaction.
We employ rules; they do not run by themselves, and it is people
who must make them work.10 And one of the tricky things about
rules is that they do not cover every eventuality. No rule can state
within itself just how it is to be applied. Reality is richer than words, a
fact that implies significant problems when we apply our verbalized
rules to specific situations, as the following example illustrates.
John and Linda found that they quarrelled a lot about housework.
Eventually they constructed the rule "If one of us has to attend a
meeting in the evening, then the other should do the dishes." They
quarrelled about who would do the dishes, so they agreed upon a rule
- to avoid the need for quarrelling. This approach seems clear and
sensible enough. But suppose that John and Linda both stay home;
who is to do the dishes then? Their rule is incomplete; it does not
cover this case. If they are in the mood for an argument, John and
Linda can always contest the interpretation of their rule. They might,
for instance, launch into a dispute about what counts as evening and
what constitutes a meeting. If Linda has a meeting from 5 to 7 PM, is
that an evening meeting? What about John's meeting that starts at
4 and lasts until 8? If he meets with just one friend, is it a meeting?
Having a rule may be useful as a guide to discussion, but it will not
solve everything. To make their rule on dishwashing work for them,
John and Linda must understand each other and count on each other
to interpret and apply the rule fairly, true to its original spirit. Their
rule will work only if they can trust each other to understand and fol-
low it, and they want it to work.
Rules do not resolve problems of distrust because their serviceabil-
ity presupposes that trust exists. The dilemma with trust and rules
can be stated in a few words. To the extent that we trust each other,
we do not need rules. To the extent that we do not trust each other,
we cannot work flexibly with rules. In all likelihood, few would be
interested in personal relationships that have to be conducted accord-
ing to rules. A workable rule, established by agreement, can be help-
ful in some practical contexts if a relationship is basically running
smoothly. But rules are no definitive solution for problems of dis-
trust. Circumstances change, and rules need interpretation and appli-
cation; therefore they do not avoid the need for trust. In relationships
between equals, rules cannot work unless there is cooperation and
agreement - which is just to say that there must be some degree of
trust.
It is often tempting to resort to rules in relationships with children.

They, especially young children, are not our equal partners, and we
are in a position to impose rules upon them - or so we may think. W
are trying to bring them up; we have limits as to what they can do
and not do; we make rules for them and try to have them follow these
rules. Some elements of this process are nearly always necessary in
child-rearing; though when things go smoothly, the rules may be tacit
and not seem to be what they are. Children may learn that certain
things are expected and simply do them, without any fuss or diffi-
culty, without our having to state or appeal to a rule. We are more
likely to articulate rules for children when an issue or problem arises
and things are not going as they should. As more powerful beings,
responsible for our children's welfare, we may be tempted by the
approach. "No dessert until your vegetables are finished"; "do your
piano practising and homework before you go out to play with
your friends"; "brush and floss your teeth or you can't watch The
Simpsons"; and so on. These are low-level rules that can help families
function, and with children younger than teenagers, we can often
make them work.
But this is routine family life, not territory where there is serious
distrust. With rebellious teenagers, who really need guidelines, rules
have their perils. Leslie Mahaffey, an Ontario teenager, was given a
curfew that she missed. She returned home from a party at 2 AM to
find the house locked. Unwilling, apparently, to ring a bell and incur
the wrath of her parents, whose rule she had broken, she called a
friend for help and then returned to her backyard. From there she was
abducted by Paul Bernardo, who brutally raped, tortured, and even-
tually murdered her. Perhaps for good reason, Leslie's parents did not
trust her to use her own judgment about her comings and goings.
They imposed a rule that they could not trust her to keep; she broke it
and was fearful of the consequences. The results were catastrophic.
Although this tragic case is extreme, it illustrates a more general
problem. If we cannot trust our growing children, we are unlikely to
be able to trust them to follow rules that we have imposed, and we are
going to have to think what we will do when they do not follow the
rules. How will we avoid having things get worse? When they are
going wrong, wanting to set rules is a natural reaction. And yet
imposed rules are a strikingly unpromising solution to problems of
trust. If we try to involve our children in arriving at rules and policies,
we are more likely to have commitment from them. But that takes us
back to the situation of rules between equals, and there, as we have
seen, rules can be useful only if there is enough trust to make them
workable. Again, we can see that rules are no substitute for trust.
When we trust another person, we can assume that he or she will

act as required in a new situation and be flexible and reasonable in
working to solve unanticipated problems. When we distrust, we
cannot. Distrusting, we will feel the need for some guarantee that the
other will do what is required when a problem arises. And no such
guarantee can be contained in rules themselves. For rules to work, we
need confidence in the other's good judgment and goodwill. When
we have this, it is not really rules that we rely on.
Contracts
Much the same may be said of explicit bargains or contracts. Though

helpful on occasion, they do not eliminate the need for trust. Con-
sider, for example, the case of an engaged couple who agree that it is
desirable for husband and wife each to do his or her equal share of
caring for children after marriage. She is determined not to have to
abandon her career if they have children, and she does not want
to work the notorious double shift either. So the two sign a marriage
contract stipulating that work caring for any children they may have
is to be divided equally between them. Obviously, that contract does
not eliminate the need for trust and confidence in each other; each
must believe in the other's commitment to stay in the marriage and
abide by the contract. To anyone who has been married and had chil-
dren and has dealt with the pressures of children's needs and two
careers, the fact that these two people have felt the need for such a
contract will probably make them seem less, not more, likely to suc-
ceed in their goal of an egalitarian two-career marriage. To make a
contract work, they will need flexibility, give and take, and a consid-
erable degree of realism. One suspects that if this couple had these,
they would not have written the contract in the first place.
The give and take that is necessary in marriage or any other close
partnership will seem all right only if we trust the other and think
that inequality and inequities are minor and insignificant in the long
run. To do so, we must see our partner as one who cares, as a person
committed to our well-being and to basic principles of fairness, who
will not try to exploit us. Implementing bargains and contracts in an
ongoing relationship requires commitment and goodwill. By them-
selves, bargains and contracts cannot replace trust and are at best a
partial strategy for managing distrust.
Control
Another common response to distrust is to attempt to control the other

party. This is a tempting response for parents or others who are in a
position to exercise power. Distrusting, we cannot relax and let the

other person follow her own instincts and her own judgment. We can-
not count on her to do what is right and what is safe. So we try to
restrict her, to bind her in.
Attempts to control are especially common in situations of unequal
power - relationships between employer and employees, women
and children, teacher and student, adults and adolescents, and men
and women. When the other has any aspiration for autonomy,
attempts at control are unpromising.11 Efforts to control imply lack of
trust or confidence. That distrust breeds untrustworthiness and more
distrust, and eventually control leads to resentment and rebellion.
Eventually, a woman restricted by her over-jealous husband is likely
to resent his domination. His efforts to control her will do little to
keep his distrust within bound and, far from contributing to their
relationship, are likely to sour it. Even where some degree of control
is effective and necessary, as in the case of rather small children, it
provides little opportunity for maturation and growth.
An obvious problem about control is that there are practical limits
as to how far we can go. Even in the case of our own children, we can-
not be with them every minute: sometimes they are in the company
of friends, teachers, or other adults; sometimes they are alone. We
must rely on them to act sensibly and do what is right when we are
not looking over their shoulders and telling them what to do, and
that means trusting them. If we do not trust them, we cannot solve
the problem of distrust by resorting to control. As noted already, con-
trol means that no opportunity is provided for them to become more
trustworthy. And furthermore, the moment will inevitably come
when we cannot control them and have to trust again. If children
have been too strictly controlled, they are likely to strike out in rebel-
lion the moment they can gain their freedom.
When people in a relationship of distrust are equals or near equals,
control is even less promising as a response to situations of distrust.
In such cases, our potential for exercising control is quite limited,
and if we do not understand this, we are apt only to make the dis-
trust even worse and at the same time undermine ourselves.
A case in point is that of Brenda, an elementary school principal,
who moved to a new school where she was determined to imple-
ment a pedagogical approach involving "multi-aging" and "cooper-
ative learning." Brenda believed that as the school principal she held
a position of authority and power to change the school's direction.12
She was well read and in touch with all the most recent literature
about teaching and determined to impose up-to-date pedagogical
policies and practices. Brenda brought in "experts" to describe the
methods she favoured, distributed supportive literature to teachers
and parents, and began to implement changes. She banned spelling

tests, forbidding the teachers to give them.
Parents were concerned, and undercurrents of gossip and discon-
tent began to circulate in the school. Most parents and teachers had
liked the school the way it was before Brenda's arrival. Her authori-
tarian decrees and attempts to control parents and staff led them to
believe that she had no trust in their competence to evaluate and
choose the teaching methods that would work best for the children.
Brenda began to fear opposition to her plans to run the most up-to-
date elementary school in the city. She tried to use control to solve her
problems. Attempting to restrict thought and discussion, she forbade
parents to discuss the issues with teachers, insisting that they come to
her with their questions and concerns. She contacted parents who
raised awkward questions at assemblies, asking them not to speak so
much because they were worrying and disturbing other parents and
telling them they were "depressing." In short, Brenda made every
effort to control discussion in the school. She wanted no expression of
dissent or dissatisfaction. She neglected the fact that parents and
teachers were capable adult citizens who could and would freely as-
sociate and communicate their feelings and ideas outside the school
environment, whatever she tried to do about it.
Idealistic and committed to her theories, Brenda nevertheless did
not trust herself and her ideas enough to expose those theories to
anything like a free debate or to acknowledge responsible criticism.
She was adament and dogmatic, unable to respond to criticisms.
Brenda was fearful and suspicious of the parents and teachers who
might upset her plans. She did not trust them to make reasonable
judgments about educational issues and did not trust herself or her
views enough to expose those views to criticism. In her quest for con-
trol, Brenda went to amazing lengths. If she overheard parents dis-
cussing issues of pedagogy and school organization with teachers or
among themselves, she telephoned them later, reminding them not to
speak to each other and stating firmly that all enquiries about the
new teaching methods should be addressed to her personally.
Not surprisingly, this approach was ineffective; in fact, it was
counter-productive. Parents and teachers knew each other in out-of-
school contexts, and parent volunteers were independent adults who
could not be kept from talking with one another outside the school.
Brenda's controlling style produced massive suspicion, alienation,
and resentment. She appeared manipulative and domineering. Teach-
ers and parents alike were well aware that, principal or not, she
had no right to try to control their conversations. Brenda exercised
less control over teachers and parents than she had supposed, and her
attempts to stifle them only inspired resistance. Her bid for control
did nothing to lessen distrust in the relationship between her and the
parents; rather, it vastly increased it.
We could, perhaps, attempt to control people by battering them
into submission or keeping them locked up. One newspaper showed
a picture of a smiling woman carrying shackles that she had pur-
chased to use with her teenaged daughters. She wanted to prevent
them from staying out late at night drinking and sleeping with sail-
ors. Presumably, the purchase was a joke - albeit one in questionable
taste. But there are parents who try such desperate things. In Western
societes, if they are discovered, they are criminally charged. Few of
us will find such pathological approaches tempting. Only rarely can
we control other people, and even when this is possible, it does noth-
ing to lessen distrust or cultivate trustworthiness. It undermines the
autonomy of others and it alienates us from them. The effort to con-
trol is an expression of distrust and not a solution to problems of dis-
trust.
Surveillance
Surveillance is, in effect, an attempt to extend control (or the potential

for it) to occasions when one is not present.13 An extreme measure, it
is nearly always symptomatic of a breakdown in the relationship. It is
an expression of grave distrust and virtual desperation and will be
seen as such by the partner. Surveillance is a violation of privacy that
will not be taken lightly. What is sought in surveillance is knowledge
of the other's private and free activities - knowledge by which one
seeks to control or punish the other. By knowing these activities,
one hopes to prove or disprove the other's loyalty and dependability.
Presumably that is the hope of the women who hire private detec-
tives to check out their fiances or boyfriends. If they discover that
their man is dishonest, disloyal, or unfaithful, they will decide to end
the relationship, perhaps hoping to use the information gained to
some advantage in negotiating details of the termination.
The circumstances in which surveillance might serve to resolve
issues of distrust are few. If the person watched turns out to be loyal
and honest after all (as was the case, apparently, for about one-third
of the men checked out by the American detective Ed Pankan); if
he never discovers that he has been watched; if the person who
arranged the surveillance trusts those watching him and believes
their reports - then surveillance might work to overcome distrust.
But such a combination of circumstances is surely very rare, and sur-
veillance remains a desperate measure. For most people, such obser-
vation of a spouse, former spouse, lover, family member, or friend
would seem impractical, too expensive, and fundamentally immoral.
The Law
Other approaches to distrust are scarcely feasible within the context of

relationships between family members, intimate friends, colleagues,
or partners. Consider, for instance, recourse to the law.14 If one person
does another an injury, and it can be shown that he has been negligent
or has broken the law in doing so, the injured party can sue for dam-
ages. In the case of harm resulting from seriously immoral actions,
such as the sexual assault of a child, a person can take recourse to the
criminal law and work to have the other charged, convicted, and pun-
ished. Such actions may be appropriate and helpful in giving some
relief to victims and in preventing further negligence or crime. But
obviously they do not resolve problems of distrust. In fact, it is ex-
tremely likely that distrust between the involved parties will be wors-
ened by their appearing in an adversarially defined legal context.15
The relationship between law and behaviour can be seen from
another angle when we consider the social context in which relation-
ships are conducted. Given the existence of the criminal law specify-
ing minimal norms for decent behaviour between persons, we expect
conformity to those norms. The fact that laws prohibit these harmful
actions gives us means to seek redress should the actions occur. We
can sue for damages or endeavour to have the other party punished.
Legal norms are, for the most part, more relevant to social trust than
to personal trust. They establish expectations and confidence that
most behaviour will conform to basic moral norms. Laws can effect
compliance, and compliance - though less so than integrity and
trustworthiness - remains important.
The fact that laws do not by themselves change attitudes is criti-
cally important in personal relationships. We need to trust our family
and friends, and we want more from these relationships than compli-
ance out of fear or respect for the law. We want compliance to emerge
from the integrity of the other person and his concern for us. We
want and expect to be loved and cherished by our partners, family,
and close friends. To think that these intimate others would refrain
from robbing or assaulting us only from fear of legal repercussions
would be devastating. If their relationship has broken down, a hus-
band may be deterred by a court order from bashing down the door
of his wife's house, beating her up, and raping her. In such debased
circumstances, the fact that it would be illegal for him to come to her
home is highly significant. If there is any chance of its serving this
function, such a court order is worth obtaining.
Though it is possibly of fundamental importantance in such cases,
the legal system obviously does not rectify problems of distrust. A
woman will not trust her husband or former husband more because
she has succeeded in getting a court order against him; rather, the
need for such an order is an expression of just how extreme her dis-
trust has become. She may or may not, depending on the enforceabil-
ity of the order, be less fearful of his behaviour in this case. But even
if she is so, it is not because she trusts him more; it is because she has
confidence in the law and its enforcement. The law, in such cases,
may be an factor in motivating restraint and safety, and it may pre-
vent people from physically terrorizing each other. But legal proceed-
ings and injunctions in themselves do little or nothing to address
problems of distrust. On the contrary, recourse to the legal system
is an expression of distrust and sometimes a cause of distrust, not an
effective method of handling it.
Insurance
Similar comments can be made about insurance. A man about to fly

to India at a time of political instability cannot eliminate his fears or
dispel his lack of trust in foreign political institutions by taking out
insurance. But were he to die on the trip, an insurance settlement
would help his family financially. This case illustrates the function of
insurance: it reduces vulnerability by providing extra resources. Insur-
ance is a device for managing distrust that works by reducing vulner-
ability and thereby reducing the need for trust. All this, of course,
presupposes trust at another level: we have to trust the insurance
companies and their agents.
But these themes are not easily applied to personal relationships.
We can hardly imagine seeking insurance against the disloyalty of a
lover or friend or against divorce. Should we seek contracts with our
partners before marriage and then try to insure ourselves against any
violation? If a husband turns out to be a physical or psychological
abuser, or if he does not do his share of the housework or help care
for the children, could his wife obtain get a divorce and then seek
compensation from the insurance company? The scenario is more
plausible as a satire than an actual sequence of events. Insurance
companies would surely be loath to offer such policies. Given the
divorce rate, they might well fear that taking on such cases would be
tantamount to bankruptcy. Personal relationships are unpredictable
in their course; marriages in particular have a failure rate that would
make insurance financially untenable. When such relationships go
wrong, the "damages" are hard to measure, and it typically makes
little sense to think of compensating for them with monetary awards.
In any event, insuring ourselves against damaged interpersonal re-
lationships would be largely futile. In personal contexts, insurance
could not perform its usual function of reducing the need to trust.
Within personal relationships, we need to trust because of what those

relationships are. Distrust in our personal relationships is going to be
uncomfortable because it affects intimacy, communication, and coop-
eration. That is why it is problematic, and that fact cannot be reme-
died or diminished by insurance. It may provide for financial or
material emergencies, but it can give no protection against emotional
damage. In personal relationships, emotional vulnerability is the
most important factor.
Of the many strategies for managing distrust, some are partially
effective, but none are entirely successful. None overcome the stress,
discomfort, and flawed communication that are inevitable in relation-
ships characterized by distrust. In fact, the problems that arise only
illustrate again how important and central trust is in human relation-
ships. Instead of trying to manage distrust, we might do better to
attempt to overcome it. Difficulties in managing distrust suggest the
importance of exploring ways to restore trust.
CHAPTER NINE
Restoring Trust
It is a truism that it is easier to destroy trust than to restore it. In many

contexts, we indeed try to restore trust, and it is important to do so.
Various approaches have been recommended, and it is useful to con-
sider them. But there is no magic recipe.
"TRUST M E "
One who is distrusted in an intimate relationship and wishes to
restore the relationship may appeal for trust, asking the other to be-
lieve in her loyalty and dependability. She may ask for his trust back,
saying in effect, "trust me." In such a case the expression "trust me,"
though imperative in form, does not express an order. It is more plau-
sibly understood as a request, uttered with undertones of pleading.1
The request is a strange one because the very fact that it is needed
suggests its limitations. If a relationship is affected by distrust, there
are some grounds for that distrust. A mere appeal to "trust me" does
nothing to overcome those grounds and may even inspire resistance.
After all, anyone who could resume trusting on the basis of a mere
appeal would not have been very distrustful in the first place.
Grounds for distrust will not be dispelled by words, however fer-
vently they might be uttered.
If a man has reason to distrust his wife and she wants to gain back
his trust, she needs to offer him some reassurance that she will not
let him down in the future, that she will be faithful and loyal, is com-
mitted to their relationship, and will keep her promises. The problem
with the appeal to "trust me" is that it offers no reinterpretation of
the past, no apology, and no specific reassurance regarding the
future. And yet it requests a change in attitude. Too little is offered,
too much asked. Not reassured, not given so much as a promise, the
partner is nonetheless asked to trust. Perhaps for these reasons, the
words "trust me" often have a slightly cynical tone. Ironically, the ap-
peal simply to trust is manipulative and risks contributing to distrust.
John Updike wrote a story called "Trust Me," about a family in
which people tended to appeal for trust to lure others into doing dan-
gerous and unreasonable things.2 Persuading others to take risks,
these people frequently urged, "Trust me, everything will be all right."
It hardly ever was. The initial episode in the story features the narra-
tor 's near death by drowning at the age of four. His father talked him
into jumping into a swimming pool, promising to catch him and hold-
ing out his arms. ("Trust me. It'll be all right. Jump right into my
hands.") Then, apparently deliberately, he failed to catch the boy,
allowing him to sink deep into the chlorinated water. The terrified
child nearly drowned and never forgot it.
The request to "trust me" often seems manipulative, as it was in
this case. It seeks to exploit the other person's loyalty, innocence, and
goodwill, urging him, for no good reason, to ignore fears and doubts
that may very well have a reasonable foundation. When urged to
"trust me," we are often made to feel unloving or guilty if we do not
trust. As used, the expression often implies "you should trust me (and
if you do not, there is something wrong with you)." This is the manip-
ulative element: if we do not trust, we are implicitly accused of hav-
ing inappropriate attitudes.
A man "should" trust his wife: are they not lovers, life partners, the
closest of companions? A woman "should" trust her daughter: does
she not think her a worthy person? ("Trust me, Mum, it'll be all
right.") We "should" trust our spouse, lover, friend, colleague, or
business partner. A kind of tacit trust is the standing norm of any
human relationship; when we distrust, it is abnormal and uncomfort-
able; we are likely to feel uneasy. One who does not trust is likely
to sense that trust should be a part of this relationship. The request to
"trust me" seeks to exploit this sense and the attendant uneasiness.
("A son should be able to trust his father. Right?" "Trust me. If you
don't trust me, you should." "Trust me. Just jump right into my arms.
You'll be all right.") When others ask us to trust them, we are likely to
suspect an attempt at manipulation and feel uneasy, as if we are
about to be led somewhere where we do not want to go. Given that
trust characterizes good relationships, we are likely to sense that
ideally we should trust, that things would be better if there were
more trust in this relationship, and that we are being asked to fix the
situation ourselves by trusting the other. This makes us feel that we
Restoring Trust 167
"should" trust; yet there are grounds for distrust, which is what we
really feel.
Although these tensions are especially wrenching in close personal
relationships, they may also appear in contexts of work and social
institutions. Brenda, the school principal who tried so hard to control
debate about pedagogy, appealed for trust when she was questioned
by Doreen and Phil, parents who were both university professors.
She was convinced that routine testing in spelling and arithmetic is
harmful to students because it is competitive; she believed that chil-
dren should work in groups, talk together as they wished during
class, and move freely around the classroom. Doreen and Phil had
reasons to feel uneasy about this approach. Their son, Alan, seemed
to make little progress under this new program. His classroom
was noisy and disordered whenever they visited, and there was no
drill in math or spelling or practice in handwriting. In addition,
the accounts of the new pedagogy that Brenda had provided to
them struck them as vague and even incoherent. Insistent that the
new approach was valid and the school among the best in town, she
responded to their questions by appealing for trust. "Trust us," she
said. "We're professionals. Some of us have seven years of univer-
sity. In my former school, where lots of parents were professors, we
never had these problems. Those people were willing to trust us."3 In
other words, "You should trust us as other people similar to you have
been willing to do. If you do not trust us, then there must be some-
thing wrong with you."
Brenda's appeal was, in effect, a manipulative attempt to tell
Doreen and Phil how they should feel and think. Instead of presenting
them with evidence and arguments that the new pedagogy would
work, she simply appealed for trust and sought to manipulate
them by referring to "years of university" and the other parents who
had been willing to trust. Predictably, her appeal for trust was self-
defeating. Frustrated that they could get no substantive answers to
their legitimate critical questions, Doreen and Phil felt that Brenda
was trying to manipulate them, blaming them and their lack of trust
for the problems that Alan was experiencing, and failing to accept
responsibility for the workings of this pedagogy that she so favoured.
Appeals for trust may be effective over the short run. They can
work sometimes because people can be led to think that they should
feel trust, especially in intimate relationships. But their effect is at best
short term if nothing is done to affect the causes or grounds for dis-
trust. If the situation does not change, then, because of their manipu-
lative character, these appeals are likely only to increase distrust.
TALKING THINGS OVER
Another approach is to discuss issues of trust directly. There is, again,

something rather strange about the attempt. Typically, we take trust
for granted and do not like to discuss it. But when we do not trust, we
are frequently too insecure to talk about such sensitive matters as dis-
trust. Only in a relationship that is basically good can we hope to
raise problematic issues directly. Because it is so difficult to relate
to others on a basis of acknowledged distrust, we tend to pretend to a
trust that we do not feel, in the interests of etiquette and saving face.
To raise an issue of distrust directly and openly, we must break
through this convention. This approach is most likely to work when
the distrust is contextually quite specific. In a basically good friend-
ship, we may be able to tell the other about our lack of confidence
with regard to some particular matter. Consider, for instance, the case
of Joan and Beverly, friends who have long been close and who then
embark on a political collaboration. Joan finds her old friend Beverly
surprisingly unreliable in the new context. Because they are close and
have trusted each other for many years, she may be able to raise the
matter directly. Good friends or intimate partners may resolve prob-
lems of distrust by talking them over - discussing past experiences
and working to understand each other's expectations and needs.
But this case is too straightforward to be typical. When distrust is
broader in scope, the chances of settling issues by talk and discussion
are less. The problem is that distrust in a relationship tends to spread
from one context to another. If someone is not reliable about commit-
ments in one area, we begin to fear that she will not be reliable in
another. In the worst cases, distrust has become so generalized that
we feel that the other person has ceased to care about us at all or to re-
tain any commitment to the relationship. At this point, effective com-
munication about anything - much less the distrust itself - becomes
difficult. Communication is possible only if we can assume that the
other is basically sincere and is trying to say what he or she means,
and thus meaningful communication presupposes some trust. In seri-
ous cases, spreading distrust is unlikely to be resolved by talk alone,
because those involved will not be prepared to believe each other.
ACTIVE LISTENING
Strategies for active listening, taught in many conflict-resolution and

mediation programs, are intended in part to establish trust.4 The idea
here is that we listen attentively to another person, making it clear that
we are doing so. We attend closely, maintain eye contact, frequently
Restoring Trust 169
"affirm" the other, and often "play back" what she has said. Here is a
sample dialogue that illustrates the strategy:
SHARON: I'm just overwhelmed since she died. I can't get used to her being
not around - we used to take her so many places and phone her every day.
And it was so sudden. It was just terrible.
JUNE : Yes, that's awful.
SHARON: I know she was getting old, but we really didn't expect it right then.
I mean, she had apparently had a mild heart attack before, but she didn't
even know it had happened until the doctor did a test. And she was away on
a trip just two weeks before she died, and seemed just fine. It's so hard to get
used to it! I just don't know how we're going to cope.
JUNE : So you were really shocked? And you don't know how you're going to
cope?
SHARON: Right. We're so upset too. And it's really hard with my daughter
right now. She's so depressed, she doesn't want to do anything, and it makes
her depressing to be with. When she isn't short-tempered, that is.
JUNE : That must be hard.
SHARON: It sure is. And there's so much extra work with the estate, it's driv-
ing us crazy.
The idea behind active listening is to let a person tell her story and to
demonstrate our interest and genuine concern by attending closely
and expressing our understanding and empathy. Some training pro-
grams in conflict resolution give "homework": listen to someone for
five straight minutes without interrupting in any way except to rein-
force what she is saying. People are instructed not to change the sub-
ject or to talk about themselves. For many, such an assignment is
difficult.5 We tend to listen with partial attention, waiting with barely
concealed impatience to chime in with news of ourselves and our own
projects. As a deviation from this careless norm, active listening will
often inspire appreciation and gratitude from the speaker.
This approach serves important purposes. If June shows sustained
concern for Sharon and "hears her out," Sharon is likely to feel that
June cares about her and wants to be helpful; June is conveying empa-
thy, which will make Sharon feel secure and support her self-trust.
Thus active listening tends to elicit trust. Ideally, it will be practised by
both parties, who can share their feelings and concerns and how the
other views a problem or situation. In cases of distrust or a conflict,
active listening can help restore trust. It creates empathy and mutual
understanding. Active listening is an indirect appeal for trust; we ex-
press in our behaviour and speech a concern and respect for the other.
We try hard to understand her feelings, beliefs, needs, and interests,
and we show, through our words and attitude, that we are doing so.
Not only is this a more subtle approach than saying "trust me," but it
is apt to be more convincing. We actually do something (listen and
pay attention) to indicate that we care and are trustworthy.6
THERAPEUTIC TRUST
H.J.N. Horsburgh defined a notion of therapeutic trust. We rely on a

person known to be untrustworthy in certain regards, making our
reliance explicit ("I'm really counting on you") in an attempt to affect
the other's conduct.7 Therapeutic trust tries to increase the trustwor-
thiness of the person in whom it is placed. The underlying idea is that
we can stir his conscience and inspire him to live up to our belief in
him. If such trust is effective, he will become more trustworthy. Ther-
apeutic trust is Gandhian, making an explicit appeal to the potential
of a person as a reliable moral agent. Gandhi believed that a basically
positive attitude towards human nature was a fundamental moral
requirement. We should always look at another human being as po-
tentially good, whatever his role, whatever his past behaviour. A
Gandhian axiom, apparently spiritual in origin, is that every human
being has the capacity to respond to a moral appeal, whatever his or
her actions, social role, or apparent character. This is the basis on
which we should generally approach other people, even those whom
we are inclined to distrust.
Gandhi addressed the problem of trust from the point of view of
an activist for Indian independence who had on many occasions in-
teracted with officials charged with upholding the imperial British
power in India. He insisted that we respond to other people as human
beings and not merely as the occupants of various social roles or func-
tions. For Indian activists, an official in the British colonial regime
occupied a highly objectionable position. But it would be an ethical
and political mistake to identify the person with his role: such an offi-
cial is still a human being with feelings, interests, and goals of his own,
and as such, he merits respect and concern. Every person, whatever
his or her history, role, or station in life, is a individual who deserves
respect, sympathy, and consideration. As a human being, a colonial
official or any other "opponent" merits exactly the degree of concern
and respect owing to any other human being - no more, no less. Gan-
dhi made considerable headway by treating colonial officials and
other identified "opponents" as human beings.8 He assumed that
they were moral beings capable of a moral response to a moral appeal.
If treated as a morally responsible being, a person is capable of
responding as such. If so trusted, he or she may become trustworthy.
Restoring Trust 171
In therapeutic trust, we convey to another person our conviction that

he or she will be a person of integrity. Gandhi said: "As long as I see
the slightest reason for trusting people, I will certainly trust them. It
is foolish to continue trusting after one has had definite grounds for
not trusting. But to distrust a person on mere suspicion is arrogance
and betrays a lack of faith in God."9 Therapeutic trust is based on
conveying to the other person our conviction that he is, or can be-
come, a person of integrity - to encourage him to merit the trust
placed in him. Explicitly trusting, we hope to inspire trustworthiness.
The approach is often effective, because people are strongly influ-
enced by the conception that other people have of them and are
profoundly discouraged when others openly imply that they are un-
trustworthy.
Horsburgh's interest in therapeutic trust arose from his under-
standing that distrust tends to be durable, contagious, and reductive
of moral opportunities. When a person is honest, someone who dis-
trusts him gives "an invitation to accept a dishonest role, and invet-
erate distrust is such a pressing invitation that many find it difficult
to refuse." "When we distrust a dishonest man, we simply reinforce
his dishonesty. Such a man usually develops a debased concept of
human nature; for cynicism is a conventional means of combining
dishonesty with peace of mind. Other's distrust of him and his own
dishonest dealings with them are alike in being self-interested; and
therefore is he not on the same moral footing as his partners in the
distrustful relationships into which he enters?"10 The idea behind
therapeutic trust is that the previously untrustworthy person will be
led by the trust of the other to perceive the moral inequality between
himself and the other person, and will thereby be motivated to make
moral progress. Every moral agent has a capacity for honourable
dealings, and other moral agents can help him to develop or enlarge
it by making appropriate moral appeals and challenges. "Trust is one
of the most important ways in which one individual can give moral
support to another," Horsburgh says.
Having a relationship we need to preserve, we seek to inspire an
untrustworthy partner to a state of responsibility. We pointedly put a
valued good in his hands, counting on him, allowing ourselves to be
vulnerable to his actions, and placing on him the responsibility for
our well-being in some matter. This explicit action of placing our trust
in another is supposed to evoke trustworthiness. The other (we expect
and hope) will feel moved and inspired to live up to our overtly posi-
tive expectations. Therapeutic trust assumes a response of some in-
debtedness or affection towards the other person. A person explicitly
trusted in this way will not want to harm us when we have pointedly
made ourselves vulnerable. The story of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables

arises from an instance of therapeutic trust. A kind bishop gives a
thief and fugitive, Jean Valjean, some silver that he was about to steal,
telling him to use it to go off to build himself an honest life. This
single act of trust and generosity inspires heroic honesty and good
works by Jean Valjean for the remainder of his life.
But is the strategy of therapeutic trust generally effective? And
what are the moral assumptions underlying it? Horsburgh's con-
ception of therapeutic trust can borrow some credibility from psycho-
logical studies of self-fulfilling prophecies: people treated as, and
assumed to be, trustworthy will tend to become trustworthy. As for
Horsburgh and Gandhi, their beliefs about human responses to trust
were based on practical experience, which in Gandhi's case was ex-
tensive. "I trust you" is likely to be a more promising approach to rec-
tifying a relationship than "trust me." It does not request but gives -
in patient anticipation of moral reciprocity.11
This being said, we can nevertheless feel certain moral doubts
about the idea of therapeutic trust. One area of concern is that of sin-
cerity. Ironically, there is a sense in which therapeutic trust seems to
involve pretence and manipulation. When we trust another person,
we believe that he will do the right thing because he is competent and
appropriately motivated to do so. The beliefs that support trust cannot
be put on and taken off like jackets, and the same may be said of the
relevant attitudes and dispositions. We cannot simply decide, just like
that, to believe that someone is trustworthy in the sense of being well
motivated and competent. That is to say, we cannot trust at will. So
how do we inspire trust by "trusting" someone who has not been
trustworthy? At this point, therapeutic trust begins to seem paradoxi-
cal. If the person who "therapeutically trusts" is merely acting as if she
trusts, or simulating or trying to trust, then is therapeutic trust based
on pretence? If so, is it not insincere? How, then, could it establish a
basis for trust? We tell the other, "I trust you, I'm counting on you,"
hoping to inspire him to live up to the image we are projecting and
deserve our trust. But in knowing that he needs to live up to this posi-
tive image, we at the same time know that he does not deserve it now
- not just as we see him now, when we reflect on what he has done
and the ways in which he has been untrustworthy.
The solution to this dilemma is to think of therapeutic trust, not as
an ongoing attitude, but as a single entrusting act in which someone
is given a specific responsibility, a responsibility that would normally
be assigned on the presumption that she is trustworthy. In acting as
though we trust an untrustworthy person, we seem to be trying to
influence her, to inspire her to become trustworthy. This is manipula-
Restoring Trust 173
tion in a sense, but only in the limited sense that we hope by many of
our actions and attitudes to have a positive effect on others. "I'm
trusting you to look after him" and "I'm counting on you to take in
the cheque" do not express ongoing attitudes of trust, but rather,
accompany acts of entrusting. Giving a cheque to an employee, say-
ing, "I'm counting on you to deposit it before four o'clock," one
entrusts him with this task and with these funds. Giving the silver to
Jean Valjean, the bishop entrusted him with wealth as a resource for a
new life. We can entrust someone with the care of a particular item or
the performance of a particular task, even though we may doubt his
trustworthiness overall.
To recommend therapeutic trust is to suggest that a single act of
entrusting be inserted into what may be primarily a relationship of
distrust, with the goal of inspiring trustworthy behaviour. There are
obviously limitations. In some contexts, therapeutic trust would inap-
propriate because the risks imposed on third parties would be simply
too great. A probation officer should not allow a serial rapist out for a
weekend leave saying, "Now I'm trusting you to behave yourself and
be back here by Sunday at nine." Risks to third parties in such a case
would be intolerable.
Therapeutic trust is based on the assumption that people who are
explicitly entrusted with certain tasks or goods will feel an obligation
to live up to the expectations of others, and guilt if they do not do so.12
It is based on the human desire to reciprocate goodness and to live up
to what others expect. Understood as an act of entrusting, therapeutic
trust is unobjectionable when we consider cases where people are
developing or reforming (children, ex-criminals, petty offenders, laps-
ing partners, students, employees learning new tasks) - unobjection-
able, that is, provided we assume that the expectations they are
encouraged to live up to are reasonable and right, and the risks to
third parties are kept at an acceptable level. Telling a ten-year-old that
she is being trusted with the care of an infant for an afternoon may in-
spire trustworthy behaviour. But far from qualifying as "therapeutic,"
such trust is dangerous and sets the scene for exploitation. These
expectations are not reasonable ones; the girl is given a responsibility
too heavy for her years. As Horsburgh acknowledges, therapeutic
trust is not a "sovereign remedy." It is not feasible or appropriate in
all circumstances, and it is to some extent manipulative.
In her book Caring, Nel Noddings offers an account similar in
important ways to that of Horsburgh. In describing how someone
who is caring for another may nurture him and seek to guide his de-
velopment, she describes the importance of conveying a positive idea
of what the other is and can become. Noddings believes that people
who take on caring roles (parents, teachers, and counsellors being

prime examples) should convey in their words and actions a commit-
ment to the positive potentialities of the person cared for. This com-
mitment emerges not only in such specific acts as pointedly relying
on him or saying, "I'm trusting you," "I'm counting on you," and so
on, but also in dispositions to interpret positively the actions and
motives of the one cared for. Noddings emphasizes the importance of
conveying a positive image of the other person and in interpreting
what he says and does in a positive light.
Nothing is more important in nurturing the ethical ideal than attribution and
explication of the best possible motive. The one-caring holds out to the child
a vision of this lovely self actualized or nearly actualized. Thus the child is
led to explore his ethical self with wonder and appreciation. He does not
have to reject and castigate himself but is encouraged to move towards an
ideal that is, in an important sense, already real in the eyes of a significant
other. It is vital that the one caring not create a fantasy. She must see things -
acts, words, consequences - as they are; she must not be a fool. But seeing all
this, she reaches out with the assurance that this - this-which-was-a-mistake
- might still have occurred with a decent motive. "I can see what you were
trying to do," she says, "or what you were feeling, or how this could have
happened." The caring person's function is always to raise the appraisal,
never to lower it. Thus, the caring person both accepts and confirms the
cruld.x3
By regarding the other as a worthy and potentially trustworthy

being, by approaching him in this light and responding to mistakes
with a forgiving attitude, we can encourage him to develop in posi-
tive directions. In these ways, placing our trust in another person can
help to overcome distrust.
CONSISTENT TRUSTWORTHINESS
The problem of distrust in relationships is explored by Roger Fisher

and Scott Brown, of the Harvard Negotiation Project, in their recent
book Getting Together. They use personal, international, and labour-
management conflicts in their examples. A central assumption in
their account of relationships is that the same practical devices for
managing and resolving conflict can apply at the interpersonal, small
group, larger group, and international levels.
Fisher and Brown note that there are many contexts in which
we have to interact with individuals and groups of whose conduct we
disapprove and whom we may distrust. Although such relationships
Restoring Trust 175
necessarily include two or more parties, it may take only one party to
change their quality. In such cases, Fisher and Brown recommend
what they call unconditionally constructive attitudes and actions -
attitudes and actions that will be beneficial whatever the actions of the
other party. These include trying to understand the other side's inter-
ests, attitudes, and beliefs, adopting an attitude of acceptance towards
the other side, working to establish good communication, being me-
ticulously reliable, and using persuasion rather than coercion.
Like Gandhi and Horsburgh, Fisher and Brown recommend that we
try to adopt a positive attitude towards other people, even those of
whose conduct we disapprove. They urge that we have a far better
chance of understanding others if we assume that they understand
themselves favourably rather than as "bad people pursuing immoral
ends through illegitimate means." Yet Fisher and Brown do not rec-
ommend trust in general. Instead, they advise unconditional complete
trustworthiness. Their reasoning is as follows: in a relationship we do
not merely want trust; we want well-founded trust. By and large, we
want to place our trust in those whose behaviour and attitudes show
that they deserve it. But where there are grounds for distrust, we can-
not establish trust unless we do something to alter the situation. We
cannot control the other party's actions and attitudes, but we can con-
trol our own. Attempts at controlling the other party are more likely to
increase distrust than to diminish it. The practical problem of distrust
becomes the question of how to act so that a relationship will improve
and the other party will become more trustworthy.
What we can most easily modify is our own conduct. According to
Fisher and Brown, we should not fully trust, but we should be com-
pletely trustworthy. We should be as predictable as possible, speak
carefully, especially when making commitments, treat promises seri-
ously, and never be deceptive. They urge a sort of golden mean in
trusting others, advising that trust can be overloaded (as when one
trusts a ten-year-old girl to care for an infant for several hours) or too
stingy (as when one will not trust a ten-year-old to cross a quiet street
alone.) They echo Horsburgh's concern that too little trust in another
can cause her to become resentful and less trustworthy.14
Fisher and Brown suggest that in conflict situations people tend to
be too distrustful. Far too readily, we assume that those with whom
we experience conflict disagree with us because they are against us or
are in some other sense "bad." We have a bias in favour of ourselves,
tending to overestimate our own moral uprightness and underesti-
mate that of others. And we are too often facile in lumping all trust
issues into one pot - failing to distinguish between lies and disagree-
ment about the facts or between unreliability and cultural difference,
for instance. In addition, we often fail to appreciate pressures of social

structures that can discourage trustworthy behaviour. What people
do may reflect the roles and situations they are in, more than their
human and personal characteristics. We can make progress by appeal-
ing to them as individuals, trying to get through to the person behind
the role.
The Fisher-Brown approach is quite different from the tit-for-tat
strategy recommended by some students of game theory for Pris-
oner's Dilemma situations. In the Prisoner's Dilemma, two prisoners
have been arrested and are unable to communicate with each other.
The district attorney is quite certain that they are guilty, but he does
not have adequate evidence to convict them at a trial. He advises each
prisoner that he can choose whether to confess or not. If neither con-
fesses, the district attorney can book them on a minor charge and both
will get a light punishment. If both confess, they will both be prose-
cuted and convicted, but will get less than the most severe sentence.
But if one confesses whereas the other does not, the one who con-
fesses will be treated lightly, and the other will incur a heavy penalty.
In this scenario, cooperating with the other party is defined as not tell-
ing; defecting is defined as telling. The prisoners stand to gain or lose
together. If they cooperate with each other and neither confesses, they
get a short term. Pursuing their self-interest independently, they do
worse than they would if they cooperated. If both defect, both will
confess and get a longer sentence. Not trusting the other to cooperate,
fearing a harsh sentence if he cooperates and the other defects, each
prisoner confesses (defects). In such a situation, the solitary pursuit of
one's own self-interest works against that self-interest.
For formalized games involving repeated Prisoner's Dilemmas, tit
for tat (if you cooperate, I'll cooperate; if you defect, I'll defect) turns
out to be a good strategy.15 One begins by acting cooperatively and
then responds in kind to what the other person does. Since Prisoner's
Dilemma games are highly intriguing and seem to mirror features of
many real-life situations, the fact that tit for tat has been shown effec-
tive for them has made the strategy seem plausible elsewhere.
But for personal relationships, tit for tat is rarely sensible. Imagine
the wife who suspects that her husband might be having an affair and
does not believe his denials. Suppose he has been late for supper
every night for a week and has become too distracted and tired to be
interested in making love. On the tit-for-tat theory, his wife should
adopt a strategy of "defection," being late for a few appointments
herself and expressing no sexual interest in her husband. Whatever
the results of this response, improving their relationship and lessen-
ing the distrust between them would not likely be among them. If the
Restoring Trust 177
wife begins to act as though she does not care about her husband,
that might make him stop and think, but an equally likely effect is
that her inattention will worsen their relationship. Responding recip-
rocally to a lack of concern is a poor way of maintaining a relation-
ship or restoring trust.
Tit for tat is not appropriate for personal relationships for many
good reasons, prominent among these being the fact that these rela-
tionships lack key features of the Prisoner's Dilemma. Unlike the pris-
oners in the dilemma, people in relationships can communicate. And
unlike the situation faced by those prisoners, what counts as coopera-
tion, as defection, and as pay-off is unclear. In a Prisoner's Dilemma,
if one prisoner cooperates while the other defects, the cooperating
party has lost out. But cooperative practices do not always, or even
typically, have these consequences in relationships. If one partner co-
operates when another defects (say, for example, one carefully prac-
tises active listening while the other virtually ignores what his partner
is saying), the cooperative partner has not lost anything as a result.
She may very well have gained; in the case of active listening, for
example, she will have acquired knowledge and understanding that
could be valuable.
Fisher and Brown argue directly against expectations and responses
of close, episode-to-episode reciprocity in relationships. They advise
that people who expect close reciprocity in their relationships are
almost certain to be disappointed. One problem is our powerful ten-
dency to see our own behaviour through rose-coloured glasses. We
tend to evaluate our own behaviour more favourably than someone
else's. In a relationship each party is likely to see his or her own be-
haviour more favourably than that of the other person. Each will tend
to exaggerate his or her own generosity and morality while underesti-
mating those of the other. For this reason, expectations of close reci-
procity are likely to lead to a downward spiralling in the relationship.
What Fisher and Brown urge is consistently trustworthy and re-
sponsible action on the part of the one who is working to lessen the
distrust in a relationship. As with therapeutic trust, we anticipate some
degree of reciprocity. We hope that by being prompt, reliable, honest,
kind, generous, friendly, and concerned, we will inspire that sort of
behaviour in our partner. If the desired responses are not forthcoming,
we do not immediately give up, walk out of the relationship, or resort
to dishonesty and unreliability ourselves. We persist in our efforts
to be, and be seen as, completely trustworthy partners. In all of this,
emotion is to be balanced with reason in a quest for understanding,
acceptance, communication, and reliability. We can implement this
strategy ourselves by unfailingly displaying trustworthy behaviour
towards the other person. And, Fisher and Brown submit, this strategy
for restoring trust can be pursued without risk. Not only is there no
Prisoner's Dilemma; there is no dilemma at all.
This approach has much to recommend it. Indeed, trustworthy be-
haviour is good in any event, because it is morally correct behaviour,
expressive of conscientiousness and integrity. But is the strategy of
consistent trustworthiness truly without risk? One problem is that
there is a danger of the trustworthy partner becoming a dupe of the
other, open to exploitation because of his honourable and upright
behaviour. The less honourable partner may learn to take for granted
the cooperative behaviour of the other and simply continue to be un-
reliable, while counting on the unfailingly good and reliable behav-
iour of his trustworthy partner. He may be encouraged to continue
his unreasonable demands, having learned that the trustworthy part-
ner is easily exploited. To adopt this approach is to anticipate that
consistent trustworthiness will inspire more positive behaviour. In
other words, it is to anticipate reciprocation. Do we have already to
trust in others to respond well, in order to use this strategy for restor-
ing trust?
Those who are unfailingly trustworthy and virtuous can be sorely
exploited by others who feel little need to respond accordingly. Far
from making others more trustworthy, the person whose behaviour is
consistently kind and generous can, in effect, collude in her own
exploitation. Consider the case of a couple who have been married
for twenty years. Though the husband may not be aware of it, he has
been exploiting and manipulating his wife for much of this time. He
benefits hugely, both personally and in terms of his career, from her
conscientious assumption of most household and family responsibi-
lites and her loyalty to him and their children. Eventually his wife
begins to feel resentful. She takes an initiative to try to change the
relationship; they see a counsellor. She no longer believes her hus-
band when he says that he loves and cares about her because he has
for years exploited her. She feels as though she is just a baby maker,
runner of errands, and all-purpose housewife. If he values her at all,
she has come to feel, it is only for her usefulness. She now distrusts
her husband's assurances that everything is all right between them;
she feels that she cannot count on him to do his share in making their
relationship work.
In this case, the wife's trustworthy behaviour in the home is the
problem, not the solution. It is her very trustworthiness that has set
her up to be exploited, and her awareness of that fact is a major rea-
son for her unhappiness. Trustworthiness can and should evoke trust,
but it can also faciliatate exploitation. People who are unfailingly
Restoring Trust 179
trustworthy and virtuous can be sorely exploited by others, who may

feel little need to respond accordingly.
In advising general trustworthiness for all relationships, Fisher and
Brown have at some level assumed a kind of reciprocity. In effect, the
assumption is that if a person is trustworthy in her relationship with
another, then that other will be, or gradually become, trustworthy
in his relationship with her. Often that approach does work: the
assumption of reciprocity is grounded both in common experience
and in social psychology.16 People tend to feel under an obligation to
respond in kind, and they may be uneasy when they have not dis-
charged such an obligation and have no opportunity to discharge it.
For instance, if a street person asks for money, it is, for many people,
relatively easy to say no. If, on the other hand, a street person gives
them a newspaper and then asks for money in return, it is more diffi-
cult to refuse. Given that most people want to reciprocate, behaving
in a consistently trustworthy way is often a way of appealing for
trustworthy behaviour in the partner. But as with other approaches to
distrust, the strategy is not infallible. There are people who feel little
or no need to reciprocate. And even those who want to reciprocate in
some contexts may not do so in the intimate relationships where they
have learned over many years to take trustworthiness for granted.
SELF-REFLECTION
We may seek to overcome distrust by a kind of self-questioning. We

can begin by reflecting on our own reasons for distrust, attempting,
in a kind of self-examination, to determine whether it is warranted
and how we ourselves might have contributed to the flawed nature
of the relationship. To see an outline of the self-questioning strategy,
consider the following case of two parties whom we will call Susan
and Elizabeth, whose friendship has become unstable. Suppose that
Susan begins to reflect on their relationship and the distrust that has
come to characterize it. She may ask herself:
1 What is my idea of Elizabeth? (How do I see her; what sort of per-

son do I think she is?)
2 How did I come to have this conception of Elizabeth? On which of
her actions and statements am I basing this conception?
3 To what extent do I distrust Elizabeth? Why?
4 What is the basis (ground or warrant) for my distrusting her?
What has she said and done to make me distrustful?
5 Do I have good reasons for distrusting her? Is my distrust based
on relevant evidence? Does it warrant the degree of distrust I feel?
i8o Dilemmas of Trust
6 What has been the history of our relationship? Have the actions
that trouble me been typical, or are they exceptional?
7 Could I be misinterpreting or misunderstanding what Elizabeth is
doing? Are there plausible alternative interpretations that would
put her in a better light?
8 How does Elizabeth see me? Have I given her any reason to dis-
trust me? Have I encouraged her untrustworthy behaviour by ex-
pecting the worst or by conveying an attitude of suspicion and
hostility?
9 Should this relationship continue? Could I avoid Elizabeth most of
the time? Do I want to?
10 If my relationship with Elizabeth is to continue, how can I improve
it?
We need this sort of self-questioning because of the selective way

we seek and react to evidence, because of our tendency to attend to
evidence that confirms what we already believe and ignore or dis-
count evidence that would count against our beliefs.17 We will express
our beliefs in what we do and what we say; thus we convey our be-
liefs to other people, who will tend to respond to us as we respond to
them. To add to the effect, we generally turn actions into attributes,
labelling someone who lies once a liar rather than treating her as a
basically honest person who may lapse occasionally. Self-reflection
is an attempt to forestall our harmful psychological drifts in these
areas.18 The assumption underlying it is that we can pause, reflect,
and revise our attitudes in the light of evidence, reasons, and self-
knowledge, and that we can use these intellectual processes to amend
our own attitudes and improve a relationship.
Suppose that Susan has come to feel uneasy about her old friend
Elizabeth and has lost her confidence that Elizabeth really cares for
her. She may find on reflection that until the last few months Eliza-
beth always seemed affectionate and enthusiastic about what they
did together. She used to be a terrific listener, but things seem to have
changed. Asking herself why she now feels uneasy and insecure with
this friend, Susan realizes that it is mostly the result of her feelings
about two occasions when she discovered that Elizabeth was lying to
her. Once she said that she could not go out for lunch because she
had house guests, and it turned out that there were none. On another
occasion, she said that she was not especially interested in a new man
in her life; then she wound up living with him only two weeks later.
Thinking about it, Susan realizes that she is feeling quite hostile
and suspicious of Elizabeth these days. She does not want to call
her, but senses that without some initiative, their relationship could
Restoring Trust 181
lapse. Do the two lies provide good grounds for this attitude, against
the background of their previously enjoyable relationship? To call
what Elizabeth did "lying" puts it in strong terms. In the case of the
house guests, perhaps what she said was a mistake and not a lie; per-
haps she was honestly expecting them and then they failed to arrive.
As to the new man, perhaps Elizabeth did not realize just how
serious her feelings were. On reflection, Susan may decide that her
feelings of alienation towards Elizabeth are out of all proportion to
her evidence and that she has misinterpreted her friend. Asking her-
self about her own role in the deterioration of their relationship and
how Elizabeth may see that, Susan may come to understand that she
has communicated this discomfort to her friend. If Elizabeth has not
called lately, it could be because she has sensed Susan's suspicion
and discomfort. Thinking about the relationship, Susan realizes that
she wants their friendship to continue. She is fond of Elizabeth. They
have shared many good times together, and they have supported
each other through troubles and crises in the past. With a new man in
her life, Elizabeth will probably have less time for Susan and other
women friends, and the relationship may change. But Susan cares
about Elizabeth and their friendship, which she does not want to
lose. It would be worthwhile to try to work things out.
Ideally, in such a case we could approach the other person with the
results of our self-questioning and discuss the issues threatening our
relationship. Though there are some pitfalls when we attempt openly
to discuss issues of distrust, having reflected seriously on our own
attitudes and beliefs should make it easier to initiate talk with the
other person. We may be able to acknowledge our own responsibility,
which will put us in a good position to begin the discussion. If Susan
can express her own doubts and worries and assume some responsi-
bility for what is going wrong, Elizabeth will more easily explore her
own actions, attitudes, and feelings. Rethinking how both partners
have contributed to the joys and pains of a relationship is a promis-
ing basis for re-establishing it and overcoming distrust. The partners
can sort things out together, see the extent to which their growing
distrust has been based on exaggeration and misunderstanding,
renew their commitment to their relationship, and develop strategies
for improving it.
Is such an approach too rational and thus inappropriate for sen-
sitive issues in intimate relationships? Does it demand too much self-
scrutiny and self-awareness, too much intellectual talk? When we
consider the importance of lovers, family, friends, and colleagues for
our personal happiness in life and compare this approach with other
strategies that we sometimes adopt to improve our lives (years of
expensive therapy, for instance), its demands seem modest. Interper-

sonal relationships are a key element of life and are worth thinking
about. People are capable of considering them seriously, and many
do it. To apply thought and reflection to relationships does not re-
quire that we be rational calculators instead of affectionate friends
and partners. It does not demand that we be intellectualizers who
ignore our instincts and feelings. On the contrary: part of what is
involved is the examination, precisely, of our own intuitions and feel-
ings to try to determine the basis for them. Emotions are crucial in
intimate relationships, and they have an important role in trust and
distrust. Fear and anxiety are constitutive elements of distrust; anger
and resentment often accompany it.
Emotions, though, are not just there, permanently, regardless of
how we think about them. Far from it: emotion and belief are closely
interrelated. In fact, emotions are typically based on beliefs. Re-
examining our beliefs is one way of appraising and (if appropriate)
amending our emotions. If Elizabeth, angry because Susan lied to her,
comes to believe that her friend did not lie after all, she will cease to
be angry, will be less angry, or will come to realize that she is actually
angry about something else. Thus self-reflection can provide a basis
for the restoration of trust. When the rift in a relationship has been
severe, leading to alienation and distrust, more than self-reflection
may be necessary, however. In a case where one has really wronged
another, reconciliation may depend on forgiveness and the acknowl-
edgement of wrongdoing.
CHAPTER TEN
Forgiveness and Reconciliation
When one person has wronged another, that wrong may result in
powerful emotions of resentment, including anger, sorrow, and even
hatred at having been harmed. When the two have been friends or
intimate partners, such resentment undermines or destroys their pre-
vious relationship: affection and warmth, confidence and trust, may
cease to exist. Such a situation is the background to the dynamic of
forgiveness. A wronged person may forgive the other his offence,
overcome feelings of resentment, and restore the relationship. If he in-
dicates to the other person, in gestures, actions, or words, that he has
relinquished his feelings of bitterness, he forgives the wrongdoer and
accepts him. In this way forgiveness can be a route to reconciliation
and the restoration of trust. To forgive is to overcome the resentment
that is an obstacle to equal moral relations among persons.
Consider this case: Ned borrowed Juan's car without asking his
permission because he wanted to go a to party at the other side of
town. While driving the car, he got into a serious accident in which it
was damaged beyond repair. Juan had to buy a new car, which meant
borrowing a considerable sum of money because the insurance was
not enough to cover the replacement value. Although Ned has apolo-
gized and admits that he was in the wrong, Juan is going to be seri-
ously inconvenienced, even if Ned helps him to pay for the new car.
He feels hurt and mad. No one should borrow someone else's car
without asking. Why, Juan asks himself, did Ned have to do such a
stupid thing? Surely he could have taken a taxi or gotten a ride from
a friend. For that matter, Juan cannot understand why Ned had to go
to the party in the first place.
After this episode, things are tense between these men, who had
been friends for many years before this happened. Juan is angry, and
Ned feels terrible and does not know how to make amends. Juan is
going to find it hard to trust Ned again; their relationship is in trouble.

If he were to forgive Ned, they could be reconciled and resume their
friendship as before. If Ned apologizes and vows never to take the car
again, Juan may forgive him and come to trust him once more, as he
did before the accident. If he were to forgive Ned, he would accept his
apology and overcome his feelings of anger and resentment about the
car. This does not mean mean that Juan will forget that the misfortune
ever happened. Forgiving, he will remember it, but will cease to bear
a grudge. He may say to Ned, "I forgive you" or "It's all right." But
saying these words does not suffice for forgiveness; it requires a
change of attitude. To forgive, Juan has to relinquish or overcome his
resentment and anger towards Ned. It was wrong to take the car. But
if he forgives him, he goes forward with their friendship instead of
dwelling on this wrong.
In a classic case of forgiveness, one person has been wronged by
another, the wrongdoer acknowledges that he did something wrong,
and the victim accepts the wrongdoer's apology, believing that he is
sincere and intends not to do it again. Both people understand what
happened in the same moral framework, as illustrated in the case of
Juan and Ned. That agreement is presupposed by the bilateral frame-
work of apology and forgiveness: the parties agree about what was
wrong; the one who did wrong acknowledges that it was wrong and
that the other was hurt as a result.1 On such a basis, two parties may
be reconciled. The one who has been wronged forgives the wrong-
doer, and their relationship can move ahead with a restoration of
trust.
A person who forgives ceases to resent the person who harmed
him. Although he knows and remembers that he has been harmed
and has been the victim of wrongdoing, he changes his attitude
towards the offender and does not dwell on the fact or harbour a
grudge against the wrongdoer. In forgiving, he accepts the wrong-
doer as a person capable of repentance and change, as a free human
being capable of responsible behaviour in the future, seeing him as
a moral equal and not merely as a wrongdoer. In this way, forgive-
ness is a route to reconciliation in relationships and thereby to the
restoration of trust.2 When we forgive each other, we can overcome
the wrongs of the past so that our relationship can move ahead on
the basis of a renewed trust and commitment.
Forgiveness is related to trust in interesting ways. Most significant
here is its link with reconciliation, which involves the restoration of
trust after something has gone wrong. But that route is not simple.
A highly significant complicating factor is that forgiveness itself
requires a degree of trust. In the case of Juan and Ned, Juan forgives
Forgiveness and Reconciliation 185
Ned partly because his friend apologized, was sorry for what he did,
and vowed not to do it again. When Juan forgives Ned, he thinks that
Ned is sincere in apologizing; he believes that he really meant it
when he said he was sorry. Juan also believes Ned to be committed to
his promise not to take the car again without permission. In regard-
ing Ned as sincerely apologizing and committed not to do wrong
again, Juan is, in effect, trusting him. It is only because he trusts in the
sincerity of the apology and Ned's commitment not to take the car
again that he is able forgive and be reconciled with him and go ahead
with the relationship. Forgiveness can help to rebuild trust, but at
the same time it presupposes trust. A foundation of forgiveness is the
belief that the wrongdoer not only accepts that what he did was
wrong but sincerely regrets it and is committed not to do it again.
Forgiving a wrong is not the same thing as excusing it.3 If Juan for-
gives Ned, that does not mean that he ceases to believe that Ned was
wrong to take the car without permission and had no good reason to
do so. For Juan to forgive does not imply that he ceases to believe that
what Ned did was careless and self-indulgent and that he should
not have done it. To forgive is not to excuse, not to conclude that
what was done was not wrong after all. Ned might be excused if he
had borrowed the car without permission because of a medical emer-
gency, but this is not the circumstance here; he only wanted to go to a
party. For Juan to forgive Ned for taking the car is not for him to to
think that taking the car was all right under the circumstances. To for
give something, then, does not mean coming to believe that what was
done was excusable or not really wrong. It is not to excuse; nor is it to
condone. Nor is forgiving the same thing as pardoning or offering
amnesty. Those are official acts that cannot be performed by ordinary
people who occupy no special office. When someone is pardoned or
given amnesty, he is permitted to escape punishment for an offence.
Only state or church authorities can pardon or offer amnesty in the
wake of an offence, thereby releasing a person from the normal pun-
ishment.
Forgiving a wrong does not imply a denial that real and serious
harm was done. To forgive is not to diminish the seriousness of what
happened. In forgiving, we overcome our feelings of resentment and
anger; we do not revise our conviction that an offence was wrong. If a
woman has been abused and forgives her abuser, she does not thereby
deny or forget that she was ever abused or rationalize or excuse the
abuse in the way she thinks about it. Forgiving, she takes a different
attitude to the abuser, to herself, and to these deeds, but that does not
mean she ceases to remember them. The common expression "forgive
and forget" is rather misleading in this respect. Forgiving does not
necessarily, or even typically, involve forgetting. An action may be

forgiven and yet remembered; what changes is the way in which
that action is remembered, the attitude towards the wrongdoer that
accompanies that memory.4
If Juan forgives Ned, he will remember what happened to the car,
but with a different emotional tone, without resentment, anger, and
hatred, and without allowing this event to mark the end of his
friendship with Ned. He may still regret the loss of his car, and he
still believes that Ned was wrong to take it without permission. But
his recognition of that fact will be accompanied by a sense that the
person who did this harmful thing is still one who will continue to be
a friend, still a person capable of acting well and likely to act well in
the future. The car was taken; the accident occurred; the car was
damaged beyond repair; there were costs and inconvenience; and it
was Ned's wrong action that led to all this. These things Juan knows.
These are facts that are not obliterated because he has forgiven Ned,
reconstituted their relationship, become reconciled with him, and
begun to trust him again. What is changed after forgiveness is not
the facts or the memory of the facts, but the emotional tone of
the memory, which no longer arouses anger, hatred, resentment, or a
desire for revenge.
What has happened has happened; the past is there and it is
remembered. What changes with forgiveness is neither the past nor
the fact that we remember that past, but rather the emotional quality
of our memories and our attitude towards those who wronged us.
After forgiveness, the past and its injuries remain, but we do not
feel about them in the same way; we are no longer angry and resent-
ful and have lost any inclination to cultivate hatred or seek out
revenge. When we forgive, we feel differently about the person who
did wrong and about ourselves, and we are ready to reconstitute a
relationship.
SMALL MATTERS
If we never forgave each other, life would be difficult and intimate

relationships impossible.5 There are so many ways we can hurt and
offend each other, and we so often do. Ned did something that was
clearly wrong, and Juan forgave him, accepting Ned's apology and
making him feel better. He stopped carrying a grudge and let their
friendship continue. But many of the hurts and disappointments of
relationships are not so clear-cut as in this straightforward example.
It is easy to feel wronged when slight things have happened, things
that are not clearly wrong or not even wrong at all. A friend fails to
return telephone messages or is repeatedly late for lunch apoint-

ments. Are these "wrongs" that need to be forgiven?
An example of a small wrong may be found in the case of Alison
and Judy. Alison was the girlfriend of Judy's son Don and the mother
of her small granddaughter Katie. Alison, Don, and Katie had moved
recently and lived about one hundred miles from Judy. Judy, who
had not seen Katie and Alison for four months, made a date to visit
them and rearranged some of her own work so that she could do so.
She was busy and the arrangements were not entirely convenient,
but she wanted to see Katie and Alison. As Judy was preparing to
leave, Don called to say that Alison suddenly had to go out of town;
she and Katie would not be around for Judy's visit. Judy was crushed
and felt really hurt. Alison had cancelled several previously planned
visits, and Judy was beginning to feel that it was abnormally difficult
to arrange to see Katie. She began to feel annoyed and suspicious:
perhaps Alison just did not like her very much. Was she trying to
avoid her, to keep her away from the baby? What was going on?
To speak of Judy forgiving Alison in such a case seems ponderous
and not quite correct. The terminology is altogether too heavy.
Though she felt hurt, Judy was not exactly a "victim" of "wrongdo-
ing." Nor was Alison an "offender" who needed to "repent." What,
after all, had she done wrong that she might need to be forgiven? She
had broken appointments, but always with a warning in advance,
never simply by failing to show up. By breaking appointments and
seeking rearrangements, she had caused some disappointment and
inconvenience for Judy, a highly organized woman who built her life
around careful planning and kept close track of her time. There was
always a reason when Alison cancelled. In this case she was to leave
to be with her sister, who was alone awaiting the imminent arrival of
her first child.
Alison and Judy may never discuss the matter of broken appoint-
ments, and even if they do, Alison may not actually apologize,
because she may feel that she did nothing wrong. After all, promises
can be broken and appointments rearranged; she had good reasons
in every case. In her family, people are relaxed about the way they
use their time and do not take appointments as seriously as Judy
does. Judy should try to see the matter in a positive light. But even if
she does consider Alison to have wronged her, she should take a flex-
ible and understanding attitude and not resent what happened.
One might say that this is a kind of forgiveness, but forgiveness in
the classic sense is not involved because there was no clear wrongdo-
ing and no apology.6 As long as Alison stays with Don - and perhaps
forever, since Alison is the mother of her granddaughter - Judy will
to have some kind of relationship with her. If she can be relaxed and
"forgiving" about small matters, her relationship with Alison will go
more smoothly than it otherwise would. Finding wrongs in small
matters and continuing to resent them, carrying grudges, and dwell-
ing on small "insults" will be unhelpful.
Most of the time, broken dates are small matters. In long-term
friendships, even such things as a borrowed and smashed car may be
relatively small affairs. Problems, wrongs, and perceived wrongs are
features of any relationship. Forgiveness in the full-blown sense may
not be an issue in such cases, but a certain non-resentment of per-
ceived small wrongs, an attitude bordering on forgiveness, certainly
is. We often feel wronged in cases where others do not think that they
have wronged us. Our tendency to see our own interests as para-
mount and our own values and beliefs as best can easily lead us to
believe that we have been wronged by others. We often, and easily,
feel hurt and offended where others see no offence.
Alison does not think that she has done anything wrong, and it
would be inappropriate to call her a "wrongdoer." Nor can we really
say that Judy has been the "victim" of an "offence." Alison has been a
little careless and negligent, and Judy is hurt and inconvenienced as
a result. Yet it makes sense to think of a kind of forgiveness, in such a
case. Judy may experience a shift in attitude similar to that involved
in forgiveness if she is able to overcome the slight anger and resent-
ment that she feels towards Alison. Such maturity and emotional
adaptability are necessary and important if we are to ride over the
bumps and hollows on the road of relationships. About such things,
we have choices to make. We can cling to our feelings of resentment,
hurt, and anger or we can relinquish them; we can "carry a grudge"
or not. We and our relationships will surely fare better if we adopt
a flexible and non-resentful attitude and refrain from dwelling on
what we see as wrongs. If we do not in this sense forgive our col-
leagues, friends, and lovers, we are likely to find ourselves in a contin-
ual state of resentment and suspicion. Where small matters are
concerned, relationships need flexibility and a "forgiving" attitude on
both sides.
IN FAVOUR OF F O R G I V E N E S S
For the wrongdoer, to be forgiven is to be acknowledged as a moral

being worthy of respect and capable of reform. Yes, he did some-
thing wrong, something he should not have done, but he is not only
or merely a wrongdoer. He should not be reduced in status to one
who is solely "the offender" or "that person who did wrong." As
one who is forgiven, he is regarded as a human being sincere in

his repentance and commitment not to do the same thing again, a
moral being capable of reform and trusting relationships. Forgiven,
the wrongdoer is accepted back into his relationship with the victim.
Their friendship or partnership is restored, they are reconciled, and
he is given a chance to be a loyal partner, friend, or colleague again.
In significant respects, forgiveness can also benefit the victim: it is
good for her mental health.7 She relinquishes her feelings of anger,
resentment, and hatred towards the offender, accepting that a wrong
occured, not diminishing that wrong, but being willing to move for-
ward instead of dwelling on the past. In doing so she frees herself
from a preoccupation with the past and the negative emotions that
accompany her sense that she is a hurt and wounded person. She can
move forward in life as a happier, more cheerful, and more compe-
tent human being. She can understand what happened to her and
how it affected her, and without forgetting the wrong, she can go
ahead to be a non-victim in a constructive life.
In many cases where forgiveness is an issue, the two people had
a relationship of considerable importance. Forgiveness presents an
opportunity for recommencing that relationship on a basis of renewed
trust and concern. Often such a restoration benefits people other than
the two original parties because relationships have an effect on more
than two people. If Judy becomes alienated from Alison because of
broken dates and her difficulty in seeing the baby, her husband and
son, her granddaughter, and possibly the whole family will be ad-
versely affected; whereas if the two have a good relationship, family
life will run more smoothly.
The past is what it is and cannot be altered. We can study and
reflect on the past, and it is useful to do so. We cannot change the past
as such, although we can change our interpretation of it, our sense of
what it means to us, and our feelings towards it.8 There is little point
in dwelling on the negative aspects of the past if that means concen-
trating on how we were wronged and unfairly treated, feeling anger
and resentment, sensing ourselves as victims, and cultivating senti-
ments of vindictiveness and revenge. In leading our lives, we cannot
literally go backward; there is no option save to go forward. For this
reason, in a fundamental sense, the future is more important than the
past. It is in the future that we live our freedom and in the future that
we will act and feel and form new relationships.9 What has happened
in the past affects who we are and what we believe; it cannot be
ignored. But we distort our thinking and restrict our possibilities for
action if we dwell on the past without reflecting on how we are going
to move forward from that past. To concentrate on past wrongs and
cultivate our feelings of resentment is to distract ourselves from the

choices we must make with regard to the future and to ignore the
prospects for positive change. Forgiving, we shed our negative emo-
tions and free ourselves for positive relationships and constructive
action.
Another consideration in favour of forgiveness stems from the fact
of our own fallibility. We all make mistakes, and for some of those
mistakes we need to be forgiven. One argument in favour of forgive-
ness starts from the fact that we are fallible creatures. Others do
wrong, make mistakes, or are careless, and they may hurt us, some-
times deeply. But to put this in perspective, we recall that we our-
selves are not perfect and we have wronged and hurt other people.
When we have done something wrong, we typically feel grateful
if people whom we wronged have forgiven us. If we feel this grati-
tude, we may conclude that we too should forgive those who have
wronged us. Being forgiven has preserved our moral dignity and
self-respect and our sense that we are free moral beings who can do
right as well as wrong. In addition, it has helped to preserve the rela-
tionships we need to lead our lives.
The Christian ethic urges us to forgive others because we want
them, and ultimately God himself, to forgive us should we commit a
sin. "Lord, forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who have
trespassed against us." A fundamental assumption behind this Chris-
tian ethic of forgiveness would appear to be that of original sin and
the universal need for salvation. Everyone does wrong sometimes;
we are born to do so; thus we will all need God's forgiveness. As
creatures whose nature it is to do wrong occasionally, who will our-
selves have to plead for God's forgiveness, we should be humble
enough to forgive other people who have done wrong. To be unfor-
giving is, on this view, to blame another as though we ourselves are
in a position to pass judgment. "Let him who is without sin cast the
first stone." No one is without sin; hence no one is entitled to blame
harshly and cast the stone. From our general tendency to sin comes
an argument for forgiveness.10
This Christian ethic is valuable in reminding us of our own moral
fallibility and warning against harsh judgment. But it is likely to per-
plex the sceptical secular mind for various reasons, not the least being
its grounding in egalitarian sinfulness. In the Christian position, it
seems that all wrongs, or "sins," are rendered morally equivalent. We
are all sinners. Some sin by having lustful thoughts, others by resent-
ing God's power, others by telling minor lies and having sex outside
marriage, others by committing tortures and rapes, and still others by
commanding troops to commit genocidal acts. Because someone is a
"sinner" who may tell minor lies and feel rebellious against God on
some occasions, it is argued that she "should" forgive another who
has committed heinous crimes against her. Jeffrie Murphy contends
that this view makes an "overly ambitious use of the important
insight that each one of us is morally flawed," pointing out that a per-
son who is not entirely without flaws may nevertheless be relevantly
different, in a moral sense, from a brutal rapist.11
The Christian commendation of forgiveness can, however, be
supported by quite different arguments which do not depend on the
premise that we are all (apparently in some divinely equivalent sense)
sinners who will need forgiveness. There are secular arguments for
forgiveness based on the interests and intrinsic human worth of the
offender; there are also secular arguments for forgiveness based on
the interests of the victim. In fact, even in a case in which a wrongdoer
does not apologize and is unwilling to acknowledge that what he has
done is wrong, there are considerations that point in favour of for-
giveness from the victim's point of view. Forgiving a wrongdoer, even
one who is dead or who never apologized, can benefit the victim by
enabling her to overcome her negative emotions, cease to see herself
as a victim, and move forward constructively into the future. Such are
the benefits for the victim that one might even argue that repentance
is not strictly necessary for forgiveness. Clearly, if a wrongdoer or
supposed wrongdoer is dead, he need not repent to be forgiven.
People speak of forgiving their parents, often after their parents are
dead. There is no notion of apology or repentance and no direct sense
of reconciliation in such cases, because the parent is gone. Yet people
who have forgiven their parents report that it is a tremendous relief
and a great step forward towards a new life as a creative and autono-
mous person.12
As a mother, I always feel a little nervous when people speak of for-
giving their parents. I begin to wonder what their parents did to
them, or what they think their parents did, that they need to be for-
given. And I wonder what I have done or am doing myself as a
mother, for which my children will someday blame me and later
forgive me. On a wintry day, I told my son that he had to walk home
from school because I was unwilling to cut off my writing in mid-
afternoon to come and pick him up. Besides, I argued, he needed the
exercise. Will he some day feel a need to forgive me for this? Do I
need to be forgiven? The notion of forgiving your parents should be
an unsettling one for those actively involved in being parents them-
selves. Most people who discuss the theme seem, even in middle age,
to think of themselves as children rather than as parents. Have our
parents wronged us? Did we have fathers who were too strict, who
spanked us when they should not have, who worked too hard outside
the home and had little time for their children? Who were grumpy
about bathroom stops on holidays? These are small matters, and as
adults we should be mature enough to understand that fact.
But there are larger issues about forgiving parents. Some people
were neglected, humiliated, insulted, beaten, or sexually abused by
their parents. These are not small matters. What about forgiveness,
trust, and restored relationships in such cases? If the parent is dead,
trust is no longer an issue, not least because reconciliation is not
in question. What is important is somehow understanding the past,
acknowledging that it was the way it was, and using one's under-
standing and response to the past in order to go on with life. The case
is different when abusive parents are still alive and there are real
issues about whether and how to conduct relationships with them.
Forgiveness in such cases is difficult, but perhaps more than ever nec-
essary because we cannot build positive adult lives on the feelings of
victimhood and resentment that remain from a tragic past.
PROBLEMS AND PITFALLS
In some compelling cases, the moral framework of forgiveness is

not clear because the victim and the wrongdoer do not agree on
what happened. Both may regard themselves as victims; neither may
accept the role of wrongdoer. A "victim" may feel wronged while a
"wrongdoer" feels that he has done nothing at all to deserve blame.
If a "victim" were to "forgive" or restore relations with a wrongdoer
in such a case, he or she would appear to be compromising in accept-
ing an alien moral viewpoint, one that refuses acknowledgment that
she or he was ever wronged.
A poignant political example is that of victims of Stasi (secret
police) spying in the former East Germany. As we have seen, when
the two Germanics were united, Stasi files were opened up, and it be-
came obvious that many people had been spied upon by their friends
and colleagues. Every German citizen is entitled to inspect his or her
file and may find out the identities of those who were spying on him
or her. The result of the opening of files was initially a crisis of per-
sonal and social trust in the former East Germany. It was in this
context that Rolf Michael Turek, a pastor in the Lutheran church in
Leipzig, established a group for reconciliation.13 His intent was to use
frank talk and exchange as a route to understanding and forgiveness
among those whom the old system had rendered enemies: victims of
Stasi spying, informal agents and employees of the Stasi, and mem-
bers of the official media. Turek hoped that these people could come
together to discuss the past and understand what had happened; his
goal was initially one of reconciliation and the restoration of trust
between former spies and former victims. In 1990 some forty-five
people came to his group in Leipzig. Turek and other members of
opposition groups and victims of Stasi activities expected former Stasi
agents to feel guilty and sorry for what they had done. They antici-
pated expressions of responsibility and regret and apologies, and on
this basis, they were prepared to forgive and be reconciled.
But there was no possibility of a dynamic of forgiveness in this case
because there was no admission of wrongdoing by former Stasi
employees and agents. Those who had been spied on thought that
they had been grievously wronged; in the changed situation of the
new Germany, they sought reconciliation and were willing to forgive
those who had hurt them. However, the former Stasi agents refused
to acknowledge that they had ever done anything wrong. They had
many rationalizations: they had been coerced into spying; they were
trying to change the regime from within; they were mere cogs in a
system, and what they did was harmless; they were trying to protect
possible victims; they were merely doing their jobs ... Their work
was compartmentalized, and each person was able to see his own
part as a small isolated thing that brought no harm to anyone.14 Natu-
rally, the victims in the group were angry and frustrated with these
responses. They had tried to reach out for dialogue and, by joining
the group, had indicated their desire for understanding, reconcilia-
tion, and the restoration of some kind of trust. Instead, they came to
feel that by talking with these former spies, they were only helping
them to rationalize their activities and providing a platform for self-
justification.
To forgive seemed inappropriate or impossible in this context be-
cause there was no common moral frame of reference for what had
happened between those who spied and those who were spied upon.
There was no acknowledgment by informers and Stasi employees that
they had been wrong and thus, in this context, no possible dynamic of
forgiveness. There was no agreement on the status of victim and
wrongdoer and hence no consensus that the moral framework of for-
giveness applied to the case at all. Within months of starting his
group, Turek came to regard as unobtainable his original goal of for-
giveness, reconciliation, and the restoration of trust. He began to think
of the group in other terms, as one that could provide a setting in
which people would articulate their feelings and beliefs and reflect on
what they had been doing. By the winter of 1994, the original group of
forty-five had only twelve members remaining, and Turek felt little
confidence that even his secondary goal was reachable. It seemed as
though few people shared his aim of seeking an understanding of

the oppressive East German regime and the human tendencies and
practices that had made it possible. Some (victims) came to the
group in order to express their feelings; others (Stasi) came to justify
themselves. Stories became more elaborate, with some former Stasi
employees insisting that they had all along been hidden friends of the
opponents of the regime, a fact that they had not previously under-
stood because they did not really grasp what the opposition groups
were trying to do. Some victims abandoned the discussions, feeling
that their participation was only helping former Stasi members to jus-
tify their actions to themselves and others.
Similar patterns surfaced elsewhere in the former East Germany.
At Checkpoint Charlie, which had been a border point between the
eastern and western sectors of Berlin, discussion sessions were orga-
nized in 1991 and 1992. These were media events, public in a way
that Turek's sessions were not. There was a moderator, and people
spoke at a podium. Former victims of Stasi spying confronted former
agents.15 Here public discussion and understanding, rather than rec-
onciliation, were the initial goals. It was at first expected that former
Stasi employees and agents would speak openly of what they had
done and would publicly and openly atone for it. But here too
the former Stasi members were so firm in their insistence on self-
justification that victims came to feel that they were providing a plat-
form for rationalizations and excuses. There were many elaborate
rationalizations and attempted justifications. Some former agents
claimed that they had been attempting to influence and reform the
regime. Others alleged that they had done opposition groups a favour
when they infiltrated them, because they had on occasion prevented
them from undertaking especially risky and provocative actions that
would have brought harm to their members. Some agents claimed to
have been coerced into collaboration; others insisted that they were
merely protecting their families and jobs; still others argued that what
they had done was insignificant and harmless. Though the Stasi had
been a huge system instrumental in maintaining an oppressive re-
gime, though many lives had been ruined as a result of its activities,
no one would acknowledge having chosen to do something that was
wrong and had harmed another.16 Those controlling the agents had
told them that they were not betraying their friends, but helping
them. Apparently, many agents continued to believe this, even after
German reunification.
Gestures and actions of forgiveness can serve as a route to reconcil-
iation and the re-establishment of trust between parties who will have
contact again only if the one who is to be forgiven acknowledges that
he has done something wrong. If there is no acknowledgment of

wrongdoing, a victim may decide to forgive for other reasons, relin-
quishing feelings of resentment and anger for her own benefit, to
improve her own mental health and go ahead with the rest of her life.
But reconciliation and the ending of distrust, the restoration of rela-
tionships based on forgiveness, cannot be achieved in such a case.17
In Music Box, Ann was wronged by Michael's deception and
manipulation decades after the war. He wronged her by deceiving
her through her childhood and early adulthood and during the trial
itself. He exploited her love for him and her faith in him. He
deceived her and then urged her to defend him against charges
of appalling crimes - tortures, killings, and rapes. He manipulated
her. Even when confronted with clear evidence, Michael refused to
acknowledge that he had committed those crimes or that he had
wronged her in his deception and his exploitation of her skills and
her love for him. When she found out what he had done, Ann did not
forgive him and did not seek to be reconciled or rebuild her trust in
him. Rather, she moved far away from Michael, broke off all contact,
and supplied the prosecuting attorney with the evidence that would
convict Michael of war crimes.
Ann was left with a sense of a whole childhood based on false-
hood, of a father she had loved who had a secret past as a cruel rapist,
torturer, and murderer. If Michael never acknowledged the wrongs
he had committed, Ann could be not reconciled with him. She might,
for her own mental health, some day achieve a kind of unilateral for-
giveness in which she would overcome her anger and resentment of
her father and what he had done. But a genuine reconciliation and the
restoration of their relationship would (if possible at all) surely have
required acknowledgment by Michael of the enormity of his crimes
during the war and repentance for what he had done to her as his
daughter. To be reconciled with his daughter, he would have had to
admit and renounce his past and become a new being, something that
he was not prepared to do.
THE UNFORGIVABLE
What Michael did was appalling; it was, as we say, "unforgivable."

When we speak of things being unforgivable, we suggest they cannot
or should not be forgiven. War crimes, terrible rapes and murders,
crimes of incest and sexual battery, tortures, the robbing of child-
hood - these are among the horrible crimes that human beings inflict
on one another. What do we mean when we say, as people often do,
that such things are unforgivable? It may be a metaphorical way of
indicating that the crimes are appalling and terrible. Or does it mean
that they cannot (psychologically) be forgiven? That they should not
(morally) be forgiven? Amazingly, it is psychologically possible to
forgive people who have done appalling wrongs. Mediator Dave
Gustafson described a case in which a woman who was a victim of
incest forgave and was reconciled with her father. As the one who (at
the daughter's request) had mediated between them and helped to
facilitate their reconciliation, Gustafson had initially been extremely
uncomfortable with the case. He had agreed to intervene only after
the daughter insisted that she wanted to resume a relationship with
her father, who was her only living relative. Unlike some abusers,
this man did acknowledge that he had seriously wronged his daugh-
ter, and his acknowledgment was a fundamental aspect of the basis
for forgiveness and reconciliation.18
Those who commit appalling crimes are sometimes capable of
reform and rehabilitation. Sometimes they do change, repent of their
past, and seek to make amends, and reconciliation with victims or
families of victims can be part of this process. Thus, from a psycholog-
ical perspective, even some who have committed deeds that we deem
"unforgivable" may turn out not to be literally impossible to forgive.
Some such persons - in fact, many of them - have been forgiven. A
recent book, Forgiving the Unforgivable, is based on interviews with
hundreds of people who have forgiven brutal assaults and deep
betrayals, mostly by family members.19 But what about the moral
perspective? Are some deeds are so appalling, so horrendous, that it
would be morally wrong ever to forgive the people who committed
them? It is people whom we forgive or do not forgive; yet we speak of
deeds as being unforgivable. To say that they are unforgivable is a
way of indicating that they are appalling and atrocious, of pointing to
the horrific nature of the offence. But this does not quite say that the
persons who committed such deeds should themselves never be for-
given, because there is a distinction between the action and the agent,
as expressed in the Christian saying that we should love the sinner
but not the sin.
Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka abducted, sexually molested
and tortured, and then killed two teenage girls, Kristin French and
Leslie Mahaffey. They made video tapes of the brutal rapes of these
girls, with soundtracks of their pain and agony. Homolka was sen-
tenced to twelve years in jail. Bernardo, who confessed to additional
rapes, was locked away permanently as a danger to the public. The
parents of Kristin French and Leslie Mahaffey live on, with agonizing
images of their daughters' humiliation and torture fixed in their
minds, probably forever. Should these parents forgive Bernardo and
Homolka? Should they even try to forgive them, even if these offend-
ers should some day appear, repentant and reformed, and apparently
ready to make a contribution to society? Debbie Mahaffey, Leslie's
mother, stated to the press that she does not believe in capital punish-
ment and thinks Homolka may be capable of rehabilitation and of
making a contribution to society some day.
One reason it might be morally wrong to forgive those who have
committed appalling acts is that to do so would somehow imply
that those acts are not so horrendous after all, that they have been
excused or condoned, or that in some other way the moral seriousness
of the defence has been diminished. A related idea is that forgiving
appalling deads would be wrong because it would be disloyal and
disrespectful to the memory of the primary victims. If Bernardo and
Homolka were some day to be rehabilitated, accepted into main-
stream society, and forgiven by the Frenches and the Mahaffeys, they
would be rehabilitated people who might lead constructive and
meaningful lives. But after living through agonizing and brutal sexual
tortures, Kristen and Leslie died miserably. They can never be brought
back to life. A powerful emotional reason against forgiveness in such
horrendous cases is that it seems to diminish, or not fully acknowl-
edge and respect, the suffering of the victims.
Traditional Jewish theology maintained that forgiveness was oblig-
atory, provided that a wrongdoer had repented of his action. But
this position was amended for Holocaust crimes, which are deemed
unforgivable. No matter how many years go by, no matter how much
the perpetrators repent of their wrongdoing, no matter how much
they reform themselves as persons or how many good deeds they do,
those responsible for genocide during the Second World War remain
guilty of appalling crimes against humanity and against the Jewish
people. According to Jewish theology, there is no obligation to forgive
war criminals, and there is, on the contrary, an obligation not to do so.
Why? These deeds were unforgivable; they were appalling horrors
against a people, a religion, and a culture. To forgive the wrongdoers
would itself be wrong because it would implicitly diminish the signif-
icance of these crimes and would be disloyal or disrespectful to the
victims.20
While one can understand and respect such arguments, they are
open to question. Forgiving does not mean excusing, condoning, ceas-
ing to blame, losing respect for the victims, or forgetting that wrong-
doing occurred. What happens in forgiving is that we relinquish our
feeling of hatred and resentment and accept that the wrongdoer has
repented and reformed. To imagine being a Holocaust survivor, the
child of a survivor, or a parent of Kristin French or Leslie Mahaffey is
to feel unforgivability. How could anyone forgive another who com-

mitted appalling atrocities? Yet, unbelievably, some have forgiven in
comparable cases. They have sought to comprehend the wrong, to un-
derstand the world and their place in it after the wrong, and to move
forward in life without concentrating their thoughts and feelings on
hatred and revenge. Forgiveness in such a case might be something
that a devastated person could attempt some day to do for herself,
to build for herself the strength to continue living. Or it might be
a necessary basis for the reconstitution of a political community in
which victims and criminals somehow have to live together.
FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS
A secular argument in favour of forgiveness, stated by the philoso-

pher R.S. Downie, is that all persons merit respect because they are
moral beings who should be valued as such, and forgiveness is a
manifestation of respect because it recognizes the possibility of moral
reform.21 As Downie understands the matter, our most general moral
obligation is to have a loving concern for the dignity of other persons.
Persons are ends in themselves and must be valued as such. To refuse
ever to forgive another person who has committed an appalling crime
is to say, in effect, that he or she can never again become a morally
upright human being and can never resume a place in the human
moral community. According to Downie, to refuse forgiveness is mor-
ally wrong because it closes off a human being from any possibility of
rehabilitation and it fails to recognize his dignity and freedom.
Downie argues that we should always try to forgive if there is repen-
tance. To take a permanently unforgiving stance against wrongdoing,
even decades after its commission, is ignore the possibility that the
offender has become a different person.
H.J.N. Horsburgh takes a similar stance, arguing that we should
always try to forgive others who have wronged us because we should
strive to maintain an attitude of goodwill towards all other moral
agents.22 The requirement to forgive wrongdoers does not mean that
they should not be blamed or punished; nor does it mean that their
wrongdoing should be excused, pardoned, condoned, or forgotten.
Rather, it expresses a recognition of the desirability of their eventual
acceptance into the moral community. Under appropriate circum-
stances, we have an obligation to try to overcome feelings of anger
and resentment that stand in the way of such acceptance, even for
those who have committed gross and brutal wrongs. In a case of
brutal and appalling offence, it may be psychologically impossible
for a victim to forgive a wrongdoer. But according to Horsburgh, we
should always try. He argues that, whatever the offence, ultimately

forgiveness is best. It respects the moral personhood of the wrong-
doer, and it will keep the victim from dwelling on the past in an
unhealthy way. Thus, Horsburgh argues, forgiveness also benefits
the one who was harmed. The unforgiving person's inner world, he
says, is "a private museum of wrongs" in which every item will
taunt until "destroyed by some act of vengeance." Thus, according
to Horsburgh, we should make an effort to forgive wrongdoers,
seeking reconciliation and a renewed relationship.
But it would seem to require moral heroism to apply such prin-
ciples to the Holocaust or the Bernardo case. Indeed, the idea that
we "should" try to forgive even those who have committed awful
offences seems to many to be contrary to common sense and common
morality. Alice Miller is one example of a thinker who has criticized a
generalized recommendation of forgiveness. She believes that it is too
focused on the needs and prospects of the offender and too insensi-
tive to those of the victim. In her influential book The Drama of the
Gifted Child, Miller describes how people are easily damaged by
mistreatment or abuse in childhood. Many parents, she maintains,
knowingly or unintentionally damage their children by ignoring their
feelings and their dignity and manipulating them into conformity
with the expectations of an adult world and the needs of their par-
ents. People damaged by their parents in this way lose touch with
their own emotions and needs, and as a result they are likely to suffer
depression and unhappiness in adult life. In the context of such child-
hood suffering, Miller argues against forgiveness, saying that the last
thing that people damaged by mistreatment in childhood should do
is try to forgive their parents. She denies that victims should feel any
obligation to forgive those who have hurt them.
Miller may be reacting here against the Christian recommendation
of generalized forgiveness, which, as we have seen, is premised on
egalitarian and generalized sinfulness. She claims that when dam-
aged people are urged to "forgive," they are further harmed because
they are put under pressure to suppress or amend their anger. Those
who urge forgiveness wrongly put the emphasis on the offender
rather than the victim. Victims of childhood mistreatment need to
focus attention on themselves, find and feel their own emotions, and
build their own strength. When they have been seriously harmed,
they need to be encouraged to express and recognize the real feelings
that they have so long had to suppress. They need to feel their anger
and sadness; in this process, they should not be encouraged to
concern themselves with the condition of the people who wronged
them. Victims may have a tendency to blame themselves, and that
2oo Dilemmas of Trust
harmful tendency will only be aggravated if they are made to feel

guilty because they have not succeeded in forgiving those who
wronged them. If victims are made to feel that in some sense they
should forgive, they will fail to acknowledge their repressed anger,
blame themselves, lessen their concern for themselves, and reduce
their chances of building autonomous personalities. Concentrating
on forgiveness will divert the victims' energy from what Miller sees
as the real problem, their inability to feel their own emotions.
Miller's account is useful in forcefully reminding us of the basic
sense in which victims have a moral first place. Fundamentally, it
is victims who have been wronged and it is victims who need to
recover. They should not feel guilt or inadequacy because of what
has happened to them, and they should build a strong and positive
self before concerning themselves with the state of the offender.
Miller argues that a sense that forgiveness is obligatory puts the pres-
sure in the wrong place and can be harmful to victims. But in urging
the priority of the victim's position, she seems strangely insensitive
to the benefits that forgiveness can bring to a victim. To be sure, thos
who have been victims should find and feel their own emotions
before trying to relinquish them; to be sure, as victims we should
rebuild ourselves, respect and trust ourselves, and be confident of
our own autonomy.23 But forgiveness is compatible with these goals
if the timing is right. In fact, it may contribute to them.
TRUST, R I S K S , AND RECONCILIATION
In the play Keeley and Du, Keeley, a young woman who had sought
an abortion has been kidnapped by radical anti-abortion activists
and is being held captive in a basement room, where an older
woman, Du, guards her.24 After some weeks Keeley and Du develop
a kind of friendship. Keeley explains that she was raped by her
ex-husband, with whom she had agreed to one last meeting in order
to finalize things. This man, who had been a drinker and abusive,
held her down brutally, raped her, and bit her when she fought
against him, and it is as a result of this attack that she finds herself
pregnant. Keeley and Du are visited from time to time by the reli-
gious leader of the radical group, who seeks to convert Keeley to his
understanding of abortion and the value of family life. Eventually,
the leader brings Keeley's ex-husband to visit her. Clad in a respect-
able-looking suit, he comes to beg her forgiveness and plead for a
reconciliation. Keeley has no choice but to listen to him because she
is literally a prisoner, guarded by Du and handcuffed to a bed. Her
husband says that he is sorry for the terrible things he did to her, and
he wants them to get together and live as a family. He appeals to the

fact that she is carrying his baby and will be the mother of his child.
Keeley looks away, unrelenting. She does not forgive her husband.
She spits in his face. Furious, he falls upon her in a vicious attack
from which she is saved only because the others pull him off.
Keeley did not forgive, and the sympathies of the audience were
certainly with her. She could sense that her ex-husband was not
sincere and was being used by the religious leader for propaganda
purposes of his own. The violent attack after Keeley refused him
showed that she was right not to forgive. Her husband had not fun-
damentally changed, and she would have been gravely at risk had
she gone back to him.25
In addition to its comments on the abortion issue, which was its
central topic, the play Keeley and Du illustrates an important fact about
forgiveness. When it leads to reconciliation, forgiveness can be risky
precisely because it heals old wounds and enables us to go forward
again. Implicit in this healing is our trust that the one we forgive is
genuinely sorry for what he has done and genuinely committed not to
do it again. When we forgive and become reconciled with someone
living, with whom we continue to have contact, we resume a relation-
ship that requires and will be based on some degree of trust. That is
risky when we are vulnerable - as Keeley certainly would have been
had she gone back to her husband and lived with him as the mother
of their child.
Keeley did not trust her husband. Despite his superficial respect-
ability when he came to visit in the company of the religious leader,
despite the apparent fervour of his appeal, she believed that he was
insincere in his apology and not committed to reforming himself.
Not trusting him, she did not forgive him and did not become recon-
ciled with him. His brutal attack showed that she was right. He had
not been committed to change, and she would have been gravely at
risk had she gone back to him. The play illustrates the fact that
reconciliation with someone who has been brutal and abusive is
dangerous. The trust that is required for forgiveness may be unwar-
ranted, and if it is, we are at great risk. To forgive and be reconciled
is to trust again. But sometimes we should not begin to trust again,
and we do so only with grave risk to ourselves. Many women not so
cautious as Keeley have come to terrible harm as a result.
What Keeley saved herself from was an appalling pattern in cases
of abuse. With apparent sincerity, the abusive partner says that he
is sorry and will never do it again. His partner, loving him or think-
ing that she ought to love him, feels that she should believe him
or try to believe him. ("Trust me; after all, I'm your husband; if you
2O2 Dilemmas of Trust
don't trust me, there is something wrong with you.") She tells herself
that he will reform; this time it is a real commitment. She tries to
believe, tries to have faith in him, feeling perhaps that she should be-
lieve him because he is her husband and the father of her children.
Perhaps she genuinely believes him; perhaps she partially believes
him, partially deceives herself. What if she takes him back and con-
tinues to live with him in the same home, and he does not change?
He beats her again. Notoriously, women in such situations are vul-
nerable to the point where their lives are at stake.
Does this mean that women should never forgive partners who
have beaten them? Are women in relationships simply too vulner-
able to forgive and be reconciled? To say that would be going too far.
But clearly there are terrible risks in such cases. When there is poten-
tial for great harm in the resumption of a relationship, we should for-
give and become reconciled only with great caution. We should
never do it only because someone tells that we "should" because
we "should" love or trust or care for the one who has hurt us. Is this
person sincerely and genuinely sorry for what he has done? Does he
mean it when he says that he will change? Even if committed, is
he capable of change? Likely to change? Because the risks are so
serious, people in such circumstances have to consider these ques-
tions carefully. When the wife and husband in a battering relation-
ship are reconciled, the original context for the battering has not
disappeared, and there is real potential for future tragedy. Keeley did
not forgive, and Keeley was right.
Writing about forgiveness, Joanna North said: "It is not easy to
forgive another ... We are required to accept back into our heart a
person who is responsible for having hurt and damaged us. If I am to
forgive, I must risk extending my trust and affection, with no guarantee
they will not be flung back in my face, or forfeited in the future. One
might even say that forgiveness is an unconditional response to the
wrongdoer, for there is something unforgiving in the demand for
guarantees."26 North suggests that, if we demand guarantees, there is
"something unforgiving." And to be sure, a demand for guarantees
would imply a doubt, a sense that the other may not really be re-
formed and may lapse. Apparently, North thinks that in contexts of
forgiveness, we should trust the one we are about to forgive. If we
cannot trust him, we are not yet ready to forgive him. To be unwilling
to take risks, to seek guarantees, is to imply that the other is not yet
ready to come back into the relationship as a moral equal. All this is
simply to say that forgiving with a demand for "guarantees" would
be too distrustful to count as real forgiveness.
One can admire the generous moral tone of these remarks. But
there is a fundamental problem with North's approach: it ignores
risk and such things as the notorious battered woman syndrome.
People may be exposed to terrible risks in some contexts where they
feel they "should" trust and forgive; they may feel compelled to try
to be reconciled in contexts where they remain vulnerable to harm
from the very people they trust and forgive. What North says cannot
be wise advice for Keeley or any other person contemplating recon-
ciliation with an abusive partner. Nor, indeed, would it be wise
counsel for anyone considering forgiveness and reconciliation in a
relationship that had been grossly harmful, provided that circum-
stances with the potential for serious damage continued to exist.27 In
such contexts, the ethical and personal factors that would support
forgiveness have to be considered along with strategies for realistic
self-protection.
There are profound moral complexities in forgiveness and recon-
ciliation. Prominent among them is a dilemma of trust. Like various
other strategies for restoring trust in human relationships, forgive-
ness turns out to presuppose some basis for trust. Without that trust
there can be constructive emotional shifts, but not the forgiveness
that can support reconciliation and the restoration of relationships.
This dilemma of forgiveness points again to the ineradicable central-
ity of trust in human relationships.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Dilemmas of Trust
Without trust, personal and social life would be impossible. With

the dubious exception of hermits, holding back from trust is not an
option for human beings. We must trust; yet we are vulnerable in
doing so. Trust is risky. The primary dilemma of trust is that to have
a meaningful personal and social life, we have to trust; yet we take
risks when we do. The second dilemma is that trust, an essential ele-
ment in all satisfying relationships, is a fragile thing, easier to break
than to build. Although trust is crucial to relationships, it is often easy
to undermine and difficult to restore. Trust that has developed gradu-
ally can be destroyed with a single lie or act of betrayal. It is an enor-
mous advantage in relationships. Trusting, we can relax. We need not
be suspicious and fearful; we can be open and express our true feel-
ings and beliefs. We are not insecure and defensive, and we can
communicate and cooperate. In a relationship flawed by distrust, we
are uncomfortable and unproductive.
It would be presumptuous and absurd to claim to "solve" the basic
dilemmas of trust. These dilemmas and the issues that flow from
them constitute central problems in living which confront human be-
ings. Accepting, refusing, risking, fearing, judging, deciding whether
to trust or distrust - these are inevitable when we live together as
human beings. We trust in some respects, distrust in others. As free
agents, we must acknowledge that other people are also free agents
who shape their own characters and may not always do what we
want or expect. In relationships, we have to judge when, whether,
and how much to trust another. We can expect no guidebook telling
us how to do this, no formula or magic rule offering infallible advice
as to whether to trust the stranger at the doorstep, undertake an
ambitious project with a new friend, or be reconciled with an abusive
husband.
Dilemmas of Trust 205
Our responses to those situations - and, in fact, the situations

themselves - are greatly affected by our underlying attitudes and
approach to the world. Basic attitudes structure our general approach
to people and situations; some are helpful, others less so. A person
who has an unforgiving attitude will tend to remain angry and re-
sentful over time. One with a charitable attitude will downplay faults
and wrongs, tending to see the best in others. One with an unduly
charitable attitude will too readily discount and excuse wrongful
actions and overestimate the trustworthiness of others. A pessimistic
person will expect the worst and may undermine her own abilities;
an optimist is likely to open up opportunities for herself and attract
others to work along with her.1 Also fundamental in responding to
issues of interpersonal trust is our own self-trust. If we trust our-
selves, we can more easily be flexible and responsive to new people
and new situations and make our own decisions. With confidence in
our own feelings and judgments, we can remain open-minded and
hopeful for the future, sensitive to the new opportunities and possi-
bilities that it may hold. We need not be rigid and rejecting or fixed in
our assumptions and attitudes. Optimists generally see what is posi-
tive in people and situations, and they maintain positive expectations
about the future. To the extent that we are optimists, we will have
confidence in our own ability to respond to events, and we will usu-
ally expect good from ourselves, from others, and from the turn of
events. An optimistic attitude is helpful in many respects, although it
should not be taken so far that we become blind to difficulties and
limitations.
Related to optimism is another helpful attitude, that of underlying
hopefulness. When we hope, we see an open future with positive
possibilities. That future holds the prospect of new events, new
situations, and new relationships. With an attitude of hope we can
preserve our sense that there are promising possibilities ahead, that
unexpected things will happen, and that some of these unexpected
things we will find good. When we hope, we see the future as hold-
ing desired possibilities and our own actions as ways in which those
possibilities can become real. In addition to specific hopes, there is an
underlying general attitude of hopefulness about ourselves and our
lives, that of latent hope, a foundation of positive expectation and flex-
ibility that gives us the energy and strength to begin again after we
have been disappointed. This underlying attitude permits us to go
on hoping again, even when we have been disappointed in specific
hopes.
Consider, for example, the case of a woman who spent four years
writing an ambitious play and was then unable to have it published
or produced. She hoped for a strong production, publicity for her

ideas, and personal success. But she could not arranged for the play
to be produced at all. Bitterly disappointed, this woman was initially
unable to start any new work; she just did not know where to go. But
after several months of depression, she began to look at new possibil-
ities and develop ideas for new projects, believing that with these,
success would be attainable. What made this possible was an under-
lying sense of hope - latent hope - and a trust in herself, a sense that
she was capable of commitment and good work. If "hope springs
eternal in the human heart," it is latent hope that, despite our many
disappointments, allows it to do so. We rally our energies, recognize
that the future holds many possibilities, and move on to other things.
Latent hope allows us respond positively to disappointments and
move on to new activities and projects in which we place our hopes.
It gives us the sense that the present disappointment is not the end of
our story and also the will to keep going.2
Hope and hopefulness are not the same as optimism. Optimists
expect that good will come, whereas hopeful people believe that it
could come: it is possible; there will be opportunities in the future,
and the product of our efforts could be something good. Hope re-
quires trust in ourselves and in others. To despair is to see the future
as closed off, as having only negative outcomes. Hope is the opposite
of despair, the belief that the future could hold good, and we could
do something to bring it about.
Attitudes of self-trust, autonomy, optimism, and hope will help us
to make better decisions about trust. They will enhance our flexibility
and competence, and support a conviction that we can do something
about ourselves and our situation. A victim outlook, on the other
hand, is decidedly unhelpful. It makes us see ourselves as helpless
and hard-done-by, beleagered by hostile forces that we cannot control,
powerless to respond to new situations or effect change. It leads to
generalized suspicion, even paranoia. A victim outlook on the world
will render us less competent and active than we could be. Such an
attitude is often accompanied by a generalized attitude of resentment,
a sense that we have been unfairly harmed and others are responsible.
Feeling we are victims, we are often angry and tend to carry a grudge.
These attitudes are generally counter-productive and unhelpful, sup-
porting negative feelings and encouraging us to blame others and see
the worst in them and regard ourselves as powerless objects of injus-
tice rather than active subjects seeking positive change.
Pessimism and cynicism are also negative attitudes to be combat-
ted. Pessimists believe the worst is to come; then they respond to the
world in a way that tends to confirm their own beliefs. Pessimism is

discouraging and disempowering; it lets us believe that things usu-
ally go wrong and there is little we can do to prevent that outcome.
Cynicism is still worse, going so far as to reinterpret even positive
events and actions as self-interested and greedy underneath. A pessi-
mistic or cynical outlook on the world works against us personally
and socially.
N E E D I N G TO TRUST
It is absolutely necessary for us as human beings to trust some other

human beings, and when we do so, we allow ourselves to be vulner-
able to them. We have some autonomy; we are not completely depen-
dent on others; we have our own feelings and beliefs and can make
our own judgments. But we have to trust and to accept that we can-
not control other people. Our situation and sometimes our very lives
depend on others as well as ourselves. The need for trust in relation-
ships explains why we should select lovers and friends carefully. If
we cannot trust a lover or friend, the relationship will be seriously
flawed; whereas if we can trust that person, things are likely to go
well. To conduct a smooth and happy life, we need to select reliable
and trustworthy friends and partners, and establish and maintain
trusting relationships with them.
Unless circumstances are especially bleak, we do best to approach
the world with an initial attitude of slight trust. That means assuming
that people are basically well intentioned and unthreatening unless
we have a special reason to think otherwise. We should not begin with
an attitude of fear and suspicion; we should be open to new people,
new ideas, and new experiences. Otherwise we close ourselves off
and deny ourselves much of the world. But such openness should be
tempered with caution. It should be an alert, attentive openness, not a
naive acceptance. We can be open and interested, non-rejecting, with-
out being gullible. When we meet someone new, it is usually best t
begin with the assumption that that person is a decent human being, a
potential acquaintance, friend, or colleague. But if we notice small
signs of unreliability, dishonesty, or falseness, we have grounds for
slight suspicion. We should respect these feelings in ourselves and
reflect on them. What do they mean? How vulnerable are we? Is there
something a little bit odd or wrong about this person? Self-trust enters
the picture at this point: we have to respect our own instincts, our
own reasoning and reflection about what is going on, and our own
judgment. Beginning with trust is good and right, but responding,
ao8 Dilemmas of Trust
without jumping to conclusions, to signs that something is not quite

right is critically important too. That suspiciousness may protect us; it
may even save our lives.
We begin by trusting the world and other people, but when we feel
specific doubts, we trust our own feelings enough to explore them
further. Specific doubt in a particular situation is quite different from
a generalized distrust or cynicism, which paints for us a bleak picture
of people and the social world. Generalized distrust is a negative,
unwise, and counter-productive attitude, but specifically grounded
doubts are quite another thing. Being open and beginning from an
attitude of alert trust, a trust still sensitive to grounds for distrust, we
avoid the mistake of seeing the worst, negatively interpreting our
world, and responding to it accordingly. A suspicious outlook will
restrict our opportunities, limit our relationships, and diminish the
world itself. When we look for the worst, we are all too likely to find
it; even more seriously, we sometimes help to create it.
A key factor in avoiding the facile rejection of other people is
to refrain from stereotyping and labelling. Everyone has his or her
own combination of qualities. No one is "just" a white man, just a
young punk, just a floozie, cute guy, little old lady, Jew, pre-teen,
housewife, or member of a motorcycle gang. Thousands of years ago,
Heraclitus, the philosopher of change, advised his fellow Greeks to
"expect the unexpected." In the context of relations with other people,
this advice means being open to possibilities that we had not consid-
ered before. Heraclitus counselled flexible and open thinking as a
road to hopefulness. Stereotyping and labelling are the very opposite
of flexibility and openness. When we stereotype, we assume that a
person fits a pattern and will act as "people of that type" do. She
is "just a housewife" or "an accountant" or "a churchy type." We
assume that the label exhausts her and gives us a recipe for relating to
her. To stereotype people in these ways is to try to pin them down like
biological specimens. Such categorization is hasty from a logical point
of view and questionable from an ethical one; it works against good
thinking and good relationships.
Being rigid, suspicious, negative, and pessimistic will be damag-
ing to our mental health, our relationships, and our social world.
Although we are vulnerable beings, we can still be open to other
people, approaching them and the world with an initial attitude of
trust. But when there are signs of unreliability and we are faced with
difficult decisions about whether to trust another person, we have to
think carefully and assess our own vulnerability. What is it that sug-
gests untrustworthiness? Could we have mistaken information, or
have we misunderstood? If we go on to trust this person on the basis
of mistakes, what are the risks we face? What is the worst that could
happen, and how likely is it? What, if anything, could we do to
avoid it? We have seen and felt these grounds for distrust in our
lives, and we have found them in some of the narratives in this
book: unreliability, deceptiveness, lying, cheating, manipulativeness,
exploitativeness, insincerity, hypocrisy, immorality, disloyalty, be-
trayal ... When such things are present, we should not feel guilty or
blame ourselves when we do not trust.
Although trust is, in general, a good thing, distrust on occasion is
also a good thing, and our failure to trust is not always a fault in us.
We should never feel that we have to trust someone who tries to
manipulate our attitudes or expects us to discount harmful actions. If
we distrust someone we know and have dealt with, there is probably
a reason for our attitude. A person who presses us to trust, who tries
to persuade us that we "should" trust and to make us feel guilty for
not trusting provides grounds for distrust; he is trying to manipulate
us into trusting him when we do not. Overcoming distrust in rela-
tionships is desirable, but it has to be done properly - by talking,
reflecting, cooperating, forgiving, becoming reconciled, not by trying
to suppress our feelings and instincts and telling ourselves that
things must be all right because this is someone whom we really
"should" trust and it is not "nice" to be suspicious. Distrust is some-
times warranted and necessary for our own protection, and that fact
deserves to be remembered.
We begin with an initial attitude of trust which we maintain unless
there is evidence that something is not quite right. Then we have to
think about it. When deciding whether to trust, we start to rely on
ourselves and our trust in ourselves. We know ourselves and the risks
we are taking; we try to know the other person. If there are grounds
for distrust, we hold back, and we do not feel guilty about it.
TRUST AND T R U S T W O R T H I N E S S
The first thing step towards trustworthiness is to trust ourselves and

be careful in what we say and do. With a firm sense of ourselves
and confidence in our own judgment, we will feel secure enough to
hold back from indulging our own interests and biases at the expense
of others. Trusting ourselves, we can move outward to be concerned
with other people. We need not put up a false front; we need not be
self-preoccupied and self-absorbed; we know who we are and what
we are. Feeling and showing a genuine concern for others, we are
likely to strike them as a fundamentally trustworthy person. When
people need to trust us, they want some sign that we care about them
aio Dilemmas of Trust
as people and are not prepared to harm, exploit, or manipulate them.

The best way to seem trustworthy is to appear to be caring and mor-
ally responsible persons - and the best way to do that is really to be
such persons. With an awareness of the importance of trust and a
firm sense of ourselves, we can seem and be trustworthy.
From a basis of trust in ourselves, we can acknowledge that we
might be wrong and sometimes are. We will seem more trustworthy
if we are open to criticism and able to admit that we make mistakes.
When something we say or do turns out to be wrong, we do not try
to cover up or rationalize it; nor do we try to defend ourselves. We
pay attention to criticisms, acknowledge them if they are correct, and
try to offer a reasonable response. We listen to others and try to
understand and appreciate what they have to say, even if it is critical
of us. We make every effort to understand and come to terms with
what other people say to us, even when their views differ from our
own. With a conviction that we are basically competent and sensible
people, acknowledging that even competent and sensible people can
make mistakes some of the time, we are able to be frank and honest
about ourselves and what we have done. The fact that we are open
and do not try to cover up makes us seem more trustworthy.
Being trustworthy means being reliable out of a sense of concern
and commitment. To be regarded as trustworthy, we must seem de-
pendable; and to seem dependable, we must be dependable. Break-
ing promises and not living up to commitments is not something
that we can keep secret. In relation to trustworthiness, dependability
has many dimensions. Central are honesty, non-deceptiveness, non-
manipulativeness, keeping promises and other commitments, and re-
specting basic moral norms so as not to harm others. If we frequently
tell small lies or deceive our friends and colleagues about our activi-
ties, if we overcommit ourselves and make promises that we cannot
keep, we will begin to seem undependable and untrustworthy.
A key to trustworthiness is a firm sense that other people matter,
a basic moral conviction that their needs and interests count from a
moral point of view and must be significant in our lives. With such
a conviction, we will not use other people as instruments for our pur-
poses. We will recognize that they are human beings in their own
right, not creatures for us to exploit or manipulate. If we want other
people to help us with our projects, we must explain what we are
doing and ask for their cooperation. Since those others are free
agents, we must be willing to take no for an answer; we should not
apply pressure to persuade them to do as we wish. If we want them
to agree with us, we should honestly and accurately explain what we
think, give them our reasons, and seek their consent on the basis of
conversation and rational argument. Expecting them to listen to us,

we must be willing to listen to them. As people who trust ourselves,
we have learned to value our own autonomy. Our lovers, family
members, friends, and colleagues may be expected to value their
autonomy as much as we value our own. They appreciate our respect
for their free and informed consent. The short advice as to how to be
trusted by others is to be a trustworthy person. That means being
open, honest, and reliable and showing respect for the autonomy of
others.
But that is far from the last word on the dilemmas of trust.
Notes
CHAPTER ONE
1 Several important works have emerged since I did the bulk of my

research. These include Putnam, Making Democracy Work; Fukuyama,
Trust; Shapin, A Social History of Truth; and Brothers, Falling Backwards.
Only the last puts its primary emphasis on personal and interpersonal
trust, which is the subject of this book. The first three concentrate prima-
rily on issues of social trust. I make some comments on Brothers's work in
chapters 5 and 6.
2 These matters are discussed further in chapter 7.
3 Morgan, "On Trusting."
4 For a discussion of the risks and costs of distrust, see chapter 8. Useful
accounts of trust may be found in Baier, "Trust and Antitrust"; Hors-
burgh, "The Ethics of Trust"; and Luhmann, Trust and Power. I have also
been influenced by Bok, Lying and A Strategy for Peace, and Code,
Epistemic Responsibility.However, the account here is essentially my own.
5 Hardin, in "Trustworthiness," argues that trust is valueless without trust-
worthiness.
6 This story is based on a real case described to me by a reliable friend.
Several details have been altered to protect the identities of the people
involved.
7 The point is argued by L. Thomas, in "Trust, Affirmation, and Moral
Character," and also in Govier, Social Trust and Human Communities.
8 As noted by Hardin in "Trustworthiness." He thinks that the "moraliza-
tion" of trust is a mistake because in order for trust to be good, the trusted
people or institutions must be trustworthy. I agree with Hardin's view
that the moralization of trust is a mistake and that trust is generally
not good if the people trusted are not trustworthy. However, I do not
think that he has described all the reasons why trust may fail to be good.
214 Notes to pages 13-16
Even in some cases in which the trusted party is trustworthy from the
point of view of the one who trusts him or her, their relationship may be
centred around criminal activity or set (as in the case of Auschwitz) in an
appallingly flawed context; in these cases, we would want to say, I think,
that over all, trust is not good.
9 I am saying, then, that there can be such a thing as trust among thieves.
But when there is, it likely bodes ill for the rest of us. I suspect that trust
among thieves will be less stable than among more virtuous people. If
A and B are both thieves and their relationship is one based on shared
criminal behaviour, A knows that B is willing to act wrongly and harm
others. Given such knowledge, it is only a small step for A to wonder
whether B might be willing some day to harm him.
10 Levi, The Drowned and the Saved. This beautiful book was Levi's last and
his most pessimistic.
11 "Living with Grizzlies: Research Takes Cochrane Couple Deep into Bear
Territory," Calgary Herald, 3 November 1996. When I began to work on the
topic of trust, I found examples about animals somewhat trivial. I have
now begun to think that the subject may be of some significance, both
theoretically and in terms of environmental ethics. However, it is not the
theme of the present book, and I am unable to say more about it here.
12 Waal, Peacemaking among Primates.
13 Harre, conversation with the author; K. Govier, Angel Walk. For a discus-
sion of our trust in various people doing jobs behind the scenes and
producing objects that we take to be reliable, see chapter 5 of Govier,
' Social Trust and Human Communities, especially the discussion of scatter
trust.
14 The notion of trusting an object such as a rope, life jacket, or computer
makes sense if we adopt an Aristotelian stance on useful objects. For Aris-
totle, the good object is the one that serves its purpose: for example, a
good knife cuts well. In these terms, a good rope for mountaineering is
one that will support a person's weight. A good life jacket will keep some-
one afloat. To trust a rope or a life jacket is to feel confident that it is good
in this sense and to rely on it to serve its function. In both cases, life may
be at stake. For a better sense of what would be involved in trusting the
people who made the rope or the life jacket, see Govier, Social Trust and
Human Communities, chapter 5.
15 The question of trusting the dead was raised, and taken very seriously,
when I presented an early version of my account of trust at a meeting
of the Canadian Philosophical Association at the Learned Societies
Conference in Victoria, BC, on 29 May 1990. My own view on the issue of
life after death is a resolutely secular one. I believe that when people are
dead, they do not exist in any realm and are not capable of speech or
action.
Notes to pages 18-36 215
16 Based on my personal experience as a volunteer mediator for the Dispute

Center at the Better Business Bureau of Calgary, 1992-95.
17 Thanks to Helen Hooker for helping me to understand the tremendous
importance that this topic will have for religious believers. As an agnostic,
however, I feel no obligation or capacity to theorize further about such
matters.
18 I consider social trust, professionals, institutions, and political contexts in
Social Trust and Human Communities.
CHAPTER TWO
1 Pogrebin, Among Friends, chapter i.

2 Mayeroff, On Caring, 20.
3 Quoted in Telfer, "Friendship." See also Friedman, "Friendship and Moral
Growth." Friedman emphasizes the centrality of trust in friendship.
4 Buber, I and Thou, 78; my emphasis. See also Buber, The Knowledge of Man.
5 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics.
6 L. Thomas, Living Morally, chapter 4.
7 Kupfer, "Can Parents and Children Be Friends?"
8 Hutter, Politics as Friendship.
9 As common experience and empirical studies such as that of Pogrebin in
Among Friends both testify.
10 The question as to whether and how preference for friends over strangers
can ethically be justified has been a central one in recent moral philoso-
phy. In particular cases, there is always room for argument. I would main-
tain that the more general question as to whether the kind of valuing
needed for intimate friendships is morally permissible is easily answered,
because such intimate connection is necessary for our development as
moral persons.
11 Relevant accounts of trust include Morgan, "On Trusting"; Rempel et al.,
"Trust in Close Relationships"; Isaacs et al., "Faith, Trust, and Gullibility";
and Rotter, "Interpersonal Trust, Trustworthiness, and Gullibility."
12 Malone and Malone, The Art of Intimacy. See also L. Thomas, "Trust, Affir-
mation, and Moral Character."
13 Cited in Pogrebin, Among Friends, chapter 4.
14 Morgan, "On Trusting." The relation between trustworthiness and genu-
ineness is beautifully emphasized in Haim Gordon's Dance, Dialogue,
and Despair. Gordon used Buber's theory of interhuman relationships and
existentialist literature and philosophy in a project seeking to improve
relationships between Arab Israelis and Jews.
15 Kahn and Turiel, "Children's Conceptions of Trust."
16 My discussions with children about trust were conducted with Sue
Govier 's grade four and five class at Harold W. Riley School on 3 June
1992, with Linda Campayne's grade six class at the same school on
11 June 1992, and with Carol Daffney's grade five and six class at
Glenbrook Elementary School on 23 June 1992.
17 There was perhaps some exaggeration of the significance of trust as a
result of a bandwagon effect and a desire to play to my expressed interest
in the issue.
18 Rawlins and Holl, "The Communicative Achievement of Friendship
during Adolescence."
19 Similar conclusions emerge from various sources. I have been greatly
influenced by Pogrebin, Among Friends, and Tannen, You Just Don't Under-
stand. See also Strickwerda and May, "Male Friendship and Intimacy,"
and Rubin, Intimate Strangers.
20 Tannen, You Just Don't Understand, 59.
21 Ibid., 42.
22 McGill, The McGill Report on Male Intimacy; cited in Pogrebin, Among
Friends.
23 Pogrebin, Among Friends, 263.
24 Ibid., 276. The theme of close relationships in the face of an adversary is
beautifully treated in Kathleen Hildebrand's "The Mythic Enemy in the
American Dream."
25 As implied by McGill and Pogrebin.
26 Did Dora betray Laura by telling Jake what Laura said about never
having an orgasm? The question as to whether this sexual confession
should have been confidential is never raised in the novel. Laura's use of
intimate exchange presupposes that Dora would naturally tell her
husband about it, which was why the manipulation was effective.
27 Baier, "Trusting Ex-Intimates," 230.
CHAPTER THREE
1 Globe and Mail, i January 1994.

2 See Coontz, The Way We Never Were. In preparing this chapter I was also
assisted by Meyers et al., Kindred Matters; Dizard and Gadlin, The Minimal
Family; Thorne and Yalom, Rethinking the Family; Orbach and Eichen-
baum, What Do Women Want; Lerner, The Dance of Deception; Poster, Criti-
cal Theory of the Family; and Tavris, The Mismeasure of Woman.
3 This statistic is taken from Thorne, "Feminism and the Family," in Thorne
and Yalom, Rethinking the Family. For strong and influential arguments
about how calculations of the GNP systematically ignore women's work
within the home, see Waring, If Women Counted.
4 See Brothers, Falling Backwards, for documentation and persuasive cases.
5 Clark, "Meaningful Social Bonding as a Universal Human Need."
6 Ibid.
7 Poster, Critical Theory of the Family.

8 Collier, Rosaldo, and Yanagisko, "Is There a Family? New Anthropologi-
cal Views," in Thorne and Yalom, Rethinking the Family.
9 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 67.
10 Barrie Thorne, "Feminism and the Family: Two Decades of Thought," in
Thorne and Yalom, Rethinking the Family, 3-30. The Statistics Canada
figures were cited in the Globe and Mail for 10 June 1996.
11 An actual case; names are altered to protect identities.
12 Interview, Victims Assistance Unit, City of Calgary Police, September
1989.
14 See Clark, "Meaningful Social Bonding as a Universal Human Need."
15 The Milan Approach to Family Therapy, as presented in workshops
offered by the University of Calgary Family Therapy Unit in the period
1982-85.
17 Bradshaw, Bradshaw On: The Family.
18 Kaminer, I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional.
19 Coontz, The Way We Never Were, 210.
20 Lerner, The Dance of Deception.
21 These points are extremely well argued in N. Chodorow and B. Contratto,
"The Fantasy of the Perfect Mother," in Thorne and Yalom, Rethinking the
Family.
22 Based on real cases; details are changed slightly.
23 This point is developed in detail by Okin in Justice, Gender, and the Family.
24 There are, of course, unusual cases, such as those in which people are
sexually aroused by danger or pain.
25 There is a great deal of anecdotal evidence for unwillingness, on the part
of people in their twenties and thirties, to commit themselves to relation-
ships. Doubts about commitment emerged with painful clarity on the
CBC'S phone-in show Cross Country Check up for 14 February (Valentine's
Day) 1993 and in Dennis, Hot and Bothered.
26 Bonnelle Strickling (philosopher and therapist), interview, May 1993. See
also Brothers, Falling Backwards.
27 Erikson, Childhood and Society.
28 Winnicott, The Family and Individual Development.
29 Coontz, The Way We Never Were, chapter 11.
30 Winnicott, The Family and Individual Development, , 90.
CHAPTER FOUR
1 Tannen, You Just Don't Understand.

2 Based on a real case; names are altered.
3 Brothers, Falling Backwards. Brothers notes that there has been a tendency
to assume that trust is diminished after assault and other traumas. She
argues plausibly that another kind of disturbance is possible: trust in the
self or in a family member may be exaggerated as a method of making
sense of the world after a traumatic event.
4 Havel, "New Year's Address 1990."
5 This seems to have happened in eastern Europe. See Govier, Social Trust
and Human Communities, chapter 7.
6 Lerner, Dance of Deception.
7 Pittman, Private Lies.
8 Ibid., 108,130.
9 For a discussion of Freud's rejection of the "seduction theory," see
Masson, The Assault on Truth. For a still more radical, and more recent, cri-
tique of Freud, see Crews, The Memory Wars. The matter is also discussed
in Brothers, Falling Backwards.
10 The Carleton study was described and criticized in the Globe and Mail in
December 1993.
11 Quoted in the Washington Spectator, i May 1991; cited by Stephanie
Coontz in The Way We Never Were.
12 Annalies Acorn, Law Reform Commission, Edmonton, Alberta, interview,
October 1993. Acorn is a researcher on law and domestic violence.
13 Just one example: my sister Katherine Govier came across a high propor-
tion of such cases in 1975 while interviewing a number of young Cana-
dian women for a government project associated with International
Women's Year. This aspect of her work was never made public. The
project was intended to be cheerful and to offer a positive account of the
aspirations of young women. When K. Govier tried to interest various
media outlets in the problem of incest (which her interviews suggested
was more common than people supposed), she was told that it was "too
depressing."
14 Forgiveness and reconciliation are explored in chapter 10.
CHAPTER FIVE
1 The case of Ellen West is described in Rogers, A Way of Being.

2 Brothers, "Trust Disturbances in Rape and Incest Victims." This account
of self-trust strikes me as slightly flawed in the way that it makes expecta-
tions of future success integral to self-trust. For instance, in a time of war
or social turmoil, one might believe that one had few opportunities to
develop one's talents and that one's prospects for success were limited,
but one might quite reasonably attribute these poor prospects to problems
in the larger world rather than to one's own shortcomings. Brothers later,
in Falling Backwards, 35, defines what I would call four dimensions of
trust, but she calls four dimensions of self-trust.These are (a) trust-in-
others, (b) trust-in-self, (c) self-as-trustworthy, and (d) others as self-
trusting. I would include only one's sense of (b) and (c) as self-trust;
(a) concerns our sense of whether other people are trustworthy (as
regards us), and (d) concerns our sense of whether others trust them-
selves. Thus my terminology is quite different from that of Brothers in this
later work.
3 Women do not always blame themselves, and it is not only women who
blame themselves. Various trust disturbances follow upon assaults,
including, sometimes, exaggerated trust in others. See Brothers, Falling
Backwards, 59, for instance. "A person whose trust-in-others is traumati-
cally betrayed may become suspicious, hyper-vigilant, secretive, and
withdrawn or so unswervingly trustful that even blatant signs of another
person's untrusworthiness are overlooked. Disturbed trust-in-self may be
expressed either as insecurity, indecisiveness, and self-doubt or as blind
self-confidence." A description of a man who was traumatized and
responded by taking blame upon himself is summarized on page 69.
4 In emphasizing the importance of autonomy, I do not mean to suggest
that people are totally self-sufficient, or that being autonomous is incom-
patible with dialogue or cooperation. Compare chapter 3 of my Social
Trust and Human Communities. For relevant accounts of autonomy, see
Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture, and Meyers, Self, Society,
and Personal Choice. Quoted passages from Meyers are from pages 76, 83,
and 84. Obviously, no one has complete autonomy. We acquire our con-
cepts, ideas, and skills from others; we must interact and cooperate with
others; we must make decisions and choices with some respect for the
needs of others, especially vulnerable friends and family members, to
whom we may have special obligations.
5 Self-trust requires the ability to reflect on what others do and say and to
make independent judgments about their actions. It also requires the abil-
ity to reflect on what we ourselves do and say and to make independent
judgments about that.
6 It strikes me as plausible that self-trust is more of a problem for women
than for men; however, I have no good empirical evidence for this claim
and will not defend it here.
7 Cases in Brothers, Falling Backwards, also suggest that absolute self-trust is
dangerous. Brothers claims (47) that mature criteria for trustworthiness,
whether of the self or of others, should be realistic, abstract, complex, and
differentiated.Criteria used by people who have been repeatedly traurria-
tized are usually immature by this definition. Compare chapter 7 below.
8 Brothers argues in Falling Backwards that self-trust should be central in
therapy and psychoanalytic theory. She says (145) that all her patients
have had their self-trust "scarred by past betrayals" and in response have
"disturbed" patterns of trust. (In interpreting this statement, it is impor-

tant to remember that on her definitions, as described in note 2, self-trustis
understood to include trust in others.) The trust disturbance is repre-
sented either by remote, suspicious, and formal behaviour or by the
patients indiscriminately revealing their most intimate thoughts, feelings,
and pain-shrouded memories at the first meeting. If Brothers's work
should gain influence, we may come to think about self-trust far more
than we presently do.
9 Compare Austin, Sense and Sensibilia. Austin speaks of contrastive terms
and asks which "wears the trousers" (sic). He is in effect asking which
term is the one by means of which the other is defined. Interestingly, for
some contrastives, it is the negative form that is primary. Austin argues
that this is the case for "real" and "unreal." (I owe this reference to Bela
Szabados.) If we ask this question for "trust" and "distrust," we find, I
think, that "distrust" wears the trousers. Trust tends to be assumed, to be
taken for granted; it is frequently not noticed. Often we notice that we
did, or should, trust only when there begins to be some reason to distrust.
And this relationship seems to hold for all the various forms of trust,
including self-trust.
10 Ludwig Wittgenstein argues this point in On Certainty.
11 This does not mean dogmatism or ignoring the views and interpretations
of others. What it does mean is that we reflect on what others tell us; that
we make judgments about it after reflection; that we do not simply accept
their values and beliefs as correct because we assume that other people
know, whereas we do not. My account here owes much to Meyers, Self,
Society, and Personal Choice.
12 Self-respect is discussed in chapter 6.
13 Compare chapter 4 of Govier, Social Trust and Human Communities.
14 The same view is taken in Brothers, Falling Backwards.
15 A person may trust herself as someone who is especially trustworthy for
others. Compare Brothers, Falling Backwards.
16 This clearly raises the tricky problem of just what the inductive evidence
does indicate. Ultimately, one comes to the whole philosophical problem
of inductive and interpretive knowledge of people and social affairs, a
problem that I obviously cannot solve here. In this discussion I rely on
commonsensical judgments without defending them, as to do so would
require (at least) another book.
17 I suspect that this phenomenon is more common in women than in men.
18 Bias in favour of oneself is well described in Greenwald, "The Totalitarian
Ego." Compare also Seligman, Learned Optimism. I make no pretence of
being able to specify exactly and exhaustively what would constitute too
little self-trust and what would constitute too much. The standards would
come from three sources: first of all, logical and epistemological standards
of inductive reasoning; secondly, ethical tenability and consistency of

standards for judging the self and others; and thirdly, psychological and
ethical standards of sound personal functioning. Compare chapter 7
below.
CHAPTER SIX
1 In A Theory of Justice John Rawls has much to say about self-esteem and
why it is a basic good. The expression "plagued with self-doubt" is taken
from this work. Interestingly, however, Rawls does not mention self-trust.
2 Michalos, in "The Impact of Trust on Business, International Security, and
the Quality of Life," cites a number of studies showing that most people
think they are in various significant respects above average. The paradox
involved is briefly discusssed in chapter 2 of Govier, Social Trust and
Human Communities.
3 Brothers, Falling Backwards; see especially chapters 2 and 6.
4 Buber, I and Thou, The Knowledge of Man, and The Way of Response.
5 Carl Rogers, "The Characteristics of a Helping Relationship," in Rogers,
On Becoming a Person; see especially 42-3.
6 Gordon, Dance, Dialogue, and Despair, 38-9.
7 Brothers, Falling Backwards. Brothers makes claims - which seem fairly
plausible in the light of case studies she cites, but are not clearly explained
- that empathy from one person, A, may support self-trust in another
person, B. From Buber and Rogers, we find support for the claim that, in
order for A to support B's self-trust by empathizing with him or her, it is
necessary for A to trust himself or herself.
8 Snyder, "When Belief Creates Reality." Compare also Govier, Social Trust
and Human Communities, chapter 2.
9 Social psychologists sometimes refer to this strategy as "self-handicapping."
Clearly, it can be taken too far, as, for instance, when a person does not
accept responsibility for failings and errors, but always conjures up a reason
to explain these by appealing to external circumstances.
10 Seligman, Learned Optimism.
11 Ibid.
12 As argued in chapter 5, self-trust can go too far. That it is advantageous
when kept within reasonable bounds is apparent from arguments in Selig-
man, Learned Optimism, and Brothers, Falling Backwards.
13 Belinda Cooper, interview, Berlin, Germany, 18 March 1994.
14 Cooper, "Women and the Stasi."
15 The link between betrayal and self-doubt was confirmed also by Fritz
Arendt, Berndt Joop, and Wolhard Prehl in an interview, Dresden,
Germany, 22 March 1994.
16 Schmookler, Out of Weakness.
17 Ibid. It would obviously be an exaggeration to say that the lack of self-

esteem and self-trust among these men was the sole cause of their rising to
power and being able to impose brutality on others. Obviously, political,
social, and economic circumstances need to be conducive to the operation
of tyranny.
18 Brothers, Falling Backwards.
19 Franklin, The Promise of Paradise, 262.
20 Ibid., 263. The use by leaders of the idea that a devotee is shown by his or
her rebellious or critical thoughts to be at fault because he or she is unsur-
rendered (so-called) is also documented in Hudner and Gruson, Monkey on
a Stick. Franklin describes herself, before entering the Rajneesh cult,
as having been dominated by her husband and, after her divorce, as still
affected by his demands as to how she should handle herself and take
care of their children.
21 CBC Journal documentary on the Church Universal and Triumphant in
Paradise Valley, Montana, broadcast in February 1990. The Calgary Herald
for 2 and 3 March 1997 contains several lengthy articles with further infor-
mation about this movement. The analysis of cult membership and trust
is my own. It coheres with other sources cited here and has been corrobo-
rated in interviews by John Guy, who has worked extensively with former
cult members.
22 I do not wish to imply that affiliation or disaffiliation with a cult is wholly
a matter of correct and consistent reasoning about issues of trust. Obvi-
ously, far more is at stake. However, the double standard on self-trust and
trust in others is noteworthy and could provide the basis for constructive
discussion.
23 Dahl, Working for Love, 35.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1 Brothers, Falling Backwards, 47-9. Despite the obvious importance of this

subject, Brothers does not devote much space to it.
2 The conception of balancing principles against judgments about particular
cases is derived from John Rawls, who developed the idea of reflective
equilibrium in A Theory of Justice. Interviews were intended, not as part of
a rigorous empirical survey of beliefs, but rather as a format to explore
reasoning about particular cases. In Rawlsian terms, this could be con-
strued as provided a better-than-armchair basis for "our considered judg-
ments." Donald Conrad's help in developing cases and conducting
interviews was indispensable. So too was the assistance of those who
participated in interviews, especially Helen Colijn. Conclusions similar to
those reached here are stated by Russell Hardin in "The Streetwise Episte-
mology of Trust." For other discussions of evidence and trust, see K. Jones,
"Trust as an Affective Attitude," Hardin, "Trustworthiness," and Becker,

"Trust as Noncognitive Security about Motives." Several of these papers
contrast cognitive or "evidentialist" and non-cognitive accounts of trust.
I see trust as an attitude founded on beliefs; those beliefs may be more or
less warranted. In this chapter I discuss reasons and evidence for the be-
liefs and expectations underlying interpersonal trust. But I do not want to
imply by doing so that trust is solely a matter of beliefs based on evidence.
3 One might wish to speak of general social beliefs instead of general social
knowledge, in deference to the fact that many of the claims accepted may
not be true. I have no objection to this approach; the word "knowledge" is
used loosely here.
4 Harre, Varieties of Realism. See also Govier, Social Trust and Human Commu-
nities, chapter 4.
5 This is clearly a case where institutional and individual factors intersect.
6 Walter Kaufmann, translator and editor, in Buber, I and Thou, 39.
7 We do trust, to varying degrees, in letters of reference. Ideally, they should
be used only in conjunction with other sources of information, preferably
interviews. A discussion of the lessening of confidence that is likely to
result from the practice of inflated letters of reference may be found in
Bok, Lying, chapter 5.
8 Presuming, of course, that we trust ourselves.
9 Johnson, Modern Times, 276.
10 It seems to me that the Internet should be rated lower in reliability than
the media because of ease of misrepresentation and the lack of institu-
tional restraints. Notoriously, on the Internet people have deceived others
about even such basic matters as their gender.
11 A real-life example supplied by Donald Conrad. Reactions to this case
support Brothers's idea that more mature criteria for trust are more differ-
entiated. One should make a distinction between the manager and the
administration in general.
12 This case obviously brings us back to the subject of self- trust and why it is
important.
13 Compare chapter 11 of Govier, Social Trust and Human Communities.
14 The same themes emerge in the discussion of therapeutic trust in chapter
8.
15 Compare Govier, "Belief, Values, and the Will." The fact that we cannot
just trust or distrust by fiat, but can nevertheless affect our attitudes of
trust and distrust, is noted by Russell Hardin in "Trustworthiness."
16 Arguments that slight trust as a standing attitude has advantages in most
contexts may be found in Govier, Social Trust and Human Communities.
People who tend to be "high trust" approach others with an attitude of
slight trust and are inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt or to see
things in a positive light. Those who are "low trust" begin with an
attitude of slight distrust and are inclined to see things in a negative light.
See Rotter, "Generalized Expectations for Interpersonal Trust" and "Inter-
personal Trust, Trustworthiness, and Gullibility." For a description of an
ethical system premised on basic generalized trust, see Logstrup, The
Ethical Demand.
17 One might object that the question of whether I trust or distrust Saddam
Hussein does not arise because I am extremely unlikely ever to have any
personal dealings with him; I do not have to decide whether to dine with
him or accept a ride in his car. However, I think that that objection is
based on an oversimplificaton. In an indirect way I "deal with" Hussein
when I support or dissent from foreign policy concerning his country,
Iraq.
18 Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, See also Putnam, Making
Democracy Work, and Govier, Social Trust and Human Communities,
chapter 6.
19 Pye, "China."
20 See Lord, Legacies, and Trevor-Roper, The Hermit of Peking.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1 Brown, "Dating: The Trust Principle."

2 Translated from the German on an interview played by the CBC program
Fifth Estate on 9 November 1992. See also Ash, The File.
3 Elon, "East Germany"; Jackson, "Germany"; and Kramer, "Letter from
Europe." An excellent discussion may also be found in Rosenberg, The
Haunted Land, and Ash, The File. The latter became availabe only as this
book was going to press.
4 The notion of face work is taken from Erving Goffman. See his The Presen-
tation of Self in Everyday Life and Relations in Public.
5 To the extent that one does trust, complexity is reduced. This theme is
emphasized in Luhmann, Trust and Power.
6 Zand, "Trust and Managerial Problem Solving."
7 E.E. Jones, "Interpreting Interpersonal Behavior." Jones reports on his
own work and summarizes that of a number of others.
8 Kulik, "Confirmatory Attribution and the Perpetuation of Social Beliefs."
9 Horsburgh, "The Ethics of Trust."
10 The classic discussion of the relationship between rules and public prac-
tice is that of Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations, 185-210.1 have
been influenced by Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language.
11 There are some contexts in which control over a short term or in a specific
regard may assist in development. But in general, it works against the
development of the autonomy and critical thinking that are necessary to
support maturity and growth.
12 Based on a real example at a Calgary elementary school in March 1992;

the name is altered.
13 In the fall of 1996 there were several items on television news broadcasts
about the growing popularity of surveillance devices among women who
hired nannies or babysitters. One showed a film obtained from such a
device; a nanny was striking a small child very hard. The installing of
such a device is an expression of distrust against the babysitter. Apart
from invasion of privacy, the obvious objection to this practice is that if
one distrusts a babysitter to that degree, one should not be hiring him or
her. Relations with the babysitter will surely worsen if such a device is
discovered, because the distrust and invasion of privacy are certain to be
resented. The dilemma is, of course, that some parents need to work,
require childcare, and cannot find anyone whom they trust deeply
enough. Hence they look to technology for a solution.
14 A common criticism of recourse to the law, urged by proponents of "alter-
nate dispute resolution," is that it sets relationships in an adversarial
framework from which it is difficult to emerge.
15 In making these comments, I do not wish to imply that law is unimpor-
tant. The nature of law, the rule of law, and people's attitude to the law are
profoundly important aspects of a culture and society. The point here is
that the law has little power to rectify problems in personal and intimate
relationships.
CHAPTER NINE
1 Often, "trust me" is said ironically; however, the appeal is also frequently
sincere (people really do want us to trust them when they say it).
2 Updike, Trust Me.
3 An actual case at a Calgary elementary school in 1992.
4 Active listening has been emphasized in all of the many workshops and
lectures on conflict resolution that I have attended since 1989. It has an
obvious relation to empathy. Compare chapters 5 and 6.
5 These observations are based on personal experience.
6 The strategy of active listening can, of course, be abused - as in a case
when someone uses it deceptively, pretending concern in order to elicit
information.
7 Horsburgh, "The Ethics of Trust."
8 Gandhi's view on human nature in the context of his activism are usefully
explained by Gene Sharp in Gandhi as a Political Strategist. Gandhi's com-
ments on trust and distrust are spread throughout his works. See for
instance, Collected Works ofMahatma Gandhi, 22: 333, 83, and 282; Gandhi,
Young India, 2 December 1924,430; and Gandhi, The Way to Communal
Harmony, 188 and 246.
9 Gandhi, Collected Works, 22: 333.

10 Horsburgh, "The Ethics of Trust," 352.
11 The appeal "trust me" comes from the one who is distrusted and whose
behaviour has (typically) provided some warrant for distrust. The expres-
sion "I trust you" comes from the other person in the relationship.
12 The tendency of people to want to reciprocate is described and docu-
mented in Cialdini, Influence, chapter 2.
13 Noddings, Caring.
14 Fisher and Brown, Getting Together, chapter 7.
15 There is, of course, a vast literature on cooperation and the Prisoner's
Dilemma. A good general source is Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation.
Contrary to what was assumed in many early studies, making the cooper-
ative move in a Prisoner's Dilemma situation does not necessarily dem-
onstrate that the player trusts his "opponent." Trust is an attitude too
complex to be successfully operationalized in a single discrete act.
16 Cialdini, Influence.
17 Mark Snyder, "When Belief Creates Reality." For a more specific applica-
tion to trust and distrust, see chapter 2 of Govier, Social Trust and Human
Communities.
18 Psychological studies support the existence both of the confirmation effect
and of the attribution effect. It would appear, then, that we naturally think
in these ways. At several places in this book, I have emphasized the
significance of these results because they help to explain the often-
observed tendency for both trust and distrust to be self-buttressing atti-
tudes. But the naturalness of thinking in this way does not imply its
inevitability; nor does it imply its correctness. When there is a problem in
a relationship, as in the imagined case of Susan and Elizabeth, we can
stop and reflect, examine the evidence, and make a conscious effort to
avoid selective evidence and the attribution fallacy, and we can
change our views if it is our considered judgment that the evidence
warrants it.
CHAPTER TEN
i There are various different accounts of forgiveness, including the belief

that only God can forgive, the idea that forgiveness is bilateral to the
extent that it is appropriate only if there is repentance from the offender,
and the concept that forgiveness may appropriately be unilateral pro-
vided that the victim does not forgive out of a lack of self-respect and fail-
ure to understand that she was wronged. Forgiveness may be approached
through an analysis of the implications of discrete acts of forgiveness or
by examining the implications of having a disposition to forgive (here
forgiveness may be seen as a virtue).
2 Forgiveness is not always linked tightly to reconciliation. One may

forgive and yet not be reconciled - as when the other person is dead or
absent or, though forgiven, still seems dangerous to be with. One may be
reconciled, in some sense, without forgiving, in a case where there is
practical pressure to do so.
3 There is, nevertheless, some relation between excusing and forgiving. We
may find some aspects of what a person has done understandable, though
wrong, and insofar as we do so, find him or her easier to forgive.
4 Relevant articles on forgiveness include McGary, "Forgiveness"; North,
"Wrongdoing and Forgiveness"; Richards, "Forgiveness"; Beatty,
"Forgiveness"; Downie, "Forgiveness"; Horsburgh, "Forgiveness";
Murphy, "Forgiveness and Resentment"; Lauritzen, "Forgiveness";
Holmgren, "Forgiveness and the Intrinsic Value of Persons"; Lang,
"Forgiveness"; Harvey, "Forgiving as an Obligation of the Moral Life";
Hughes, "Moral Anger, Forgiving, and Condoning"; Benn, "Forgiveness
and Loyalty"; and Hampton and Murphy, Forgiveness and Mercy.
5 I owe this point to a questioner at a meeting of the Calgary Apeiron Soci-
ety for Practical Philosophy in November 1995.
6 Harvey, "Forgiving as an Obligation of the Moral Life."
7 Benefits of forgiveness for the victim are emphasized by Holmgren,
"Forgiveness and the Intrinsic Value of Persons," and Flanigan, Forgiving
the Unforgivable.
8 The past, or our interpretation of it, is enormously important both politi-
cally and personally. Perhaps it is harder to transcend the negative
politically than personally, since for nationalist politicians there will
always be the temptation to build power by cultivating a sense of griev-
ance, resentment, and humiliation, the latter needing to be overcome by
fresh victories. Obviously I cannot pursue such themes here. But see
Scheff, Bloody Revenge.
9 This is not meant to diminish the importance of the past or its impact on
the present and future. But we live in the present and must make deci-
sions about how to go forward into the future. I am arguing that from the
point of view of practical and ethical decision-making, the future has
more importance than the past. That is not to deny that we go into the
future with our "baggage" from the past.
10 I am aware that there is not only one Christian account of forgiveness;
however, the theme treated here has certainly been a prominent one.
Compare Shriver, An Ethic for Enemies.
11 Murphy's criticism of the Christian account is in "Getting Even: The Role
of the Victim," in Murphy, Punishment and Rehabilitation.
12 On occasions when I have spoken on the ethics of forgiveness, people have
told me that they had managed to forgive their parents, sometimes after
their parents were dead, and that they felt great personal relief in doing so.
13 The description here is based on an interview with Pastor Turek in

Leipzig in March 1994. Of course, the situation of East Germany is not
unique. Issues of reconciliation in the wake of totalitarian regimes are
significant elsewhere in eastern Europe and also in South Africa and Latin
America. Forgiveness is a political topic as well as a personal one. For
their reflections on the situation in East Germany, I am also grateful to
Fritz Ahrend, R.M. Turek, Ulrich Seidel, Berndt Joop, and Wolfhard Prehl,
with whom I had extremely useful interviews in Dresden in March 1994.
14 Described to me by Belinda Cooper in an interview in Berlin in March
1994.
15 These events and the overall dilemma of political forgiveness in Germany
are described in Rosenberg, The Haunted Land, and Ash, The File.
16 By my brief description of this morally troubled situation, I do not mean
to imply that the lines between victims and wrongdoers were always
clear. There were Stasi agents who were coerced into reporting, victims
who were, in other contexts, wrongdoers, and many other complex and
problematic cases. Some such complexities are explored in Rosenberg,
The Haunted Land, and Ash, The File.
17 Holmgren, "Forgiveness and the Intrinsic Value of Persons."
18 Gustafson, "Incest."
19 Flanigan, Forgiving the Unforgivable.
20 Reflections on the Jewish theology of forgiveness may be found in
McGary, "Forgiveness," and Newman, "The Quality of Mercy."
21 Downie, "Forgiveness." Downie's position is similar to that of Holmgren
in "Forgiveness and the Intrinsic Value of Persons." It may be termed
broadly Kantian because it relies on a notion of the dignity of the person
and of treating people as ends in themselves and not as means to ends.
But in light of the fact that Kant argued in favour of capital punishment
for murderers, the positions of Downie and Holmgren should be distin-
guished from his. See also Hampton in Hampton and Murphy, Forgiveness
and Mercy.
22 Horsburgh, "Forgiveness."
23 The need for victims to reflect on what has occurred, understand that and
why it is wrong, and forgive from a position of self-respect is urged by
Hampton in Murphy and Hampton, Forgiveness and Mercy, and by
Holmgren in "Forgiveness and the Intrinsic Value of Persons."
24 Keeley and Du was presented by Alberta Theatre Projects in Calgary
in October 1995. The playwright was listed as Jane Martin. This is a
pseudonym; because of the vicious intensity of the abortion debate, the
author did not want his or her name revealed.
25 The play was not primarily about forgiveness; it was about abortion
and tried to portray both pro-life and pro-choice stances in a fair way.
What it illustrated was a case of non-forgiveness and one in which non-
forgiveness seemed to be the right stance, because of the risks involved

should the repentance and commitment to reform not be sincere.
26 North, "Wrongdoing and Forgiveness," 505. My emphasis.
27 In some situations, changes make the likelihood of the same kind of abuse
being repeated extremely small and thus lessen the risks of a reconcilia-
tion where there is less than complete acknowledgment or repentance on
the part of the offender(s). An example would seem to be that of post-
apartheid South Africa. Many whites who participated in abuse seem
unrepentant; however, given the new political situation, the likelihood of
apartheid being resurrected would seem to be extremely slight.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
1 A classic discussion of the benefits and occasional perils of optimism is

Seligman, Learned Optimism.
2 Dauenhauer, "Hope and Its Ramifications for Politics." Themes of opti-
mism, pessimism, and hope are also explored in the final chapter of
Govier, Social Trust and Human Communities.
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Index
abuse, 61-3, 82-5, 89-90, ing self and others, 97, communication, 8-9, 74,
100,130,192,198-9, 202 22on.n 146,168,181
Acorn, Annelies, 21811.12 bomb shelter: as expres- community: and need for
active listening, 168-70 sion of distrust by cult reintegration of offend-
adolescents, 37-8, 69,103, members of outsiders, ers, 198; and support of
157 116-17 family, 72
adult children, 62-3 Bradshaw, John, 61-3 competence: in relation to
animals: and trust, 14-15 Brothers, Doris, 88-90, 96, trust, 7
apology, 184-5 104,107-8,119,2i8n.3 & computers: and trust, 16
Aristotle, 24-6,40,46, 48 2, 2i9n.7, 222n.i condonation: in relation to
attribution fallacy, 149-50, Brown, Scott, 174-9 forgiveness, 185-6
226n.i8 Buber, Martin, 24,105-6 conflict resolution, viii, 74-5
Austin, J.L., 22on.9 Conrad, Donald, 222n.2,
authoritarian upbringing: children: their ideas about 223n.n
and self-trust, 103 trust in friends, 35-8; as contracts: as a solution to
autonomy, 90, 92, no, 118, likely victims for frus- problems of distrust, 158
179-82, 205-6, 211 trated adults, 112-14; as control, 158-61
possibly needing to for- Coontz, Stephanie, 82-3
Baier, Annette, 48-9 give their parents, 191- Cooper, Belinda, 111-12,
Banfield, Edward C., 150 2; role of trust by parents 22in.i3
battered women, 50, 60, in their development, cults: and attitudes of
82-5, 118, 202; and rec- 68-72; and rules, 157; trust, 113-17
onciliation with batter- their trust in parents, cynicism, 131, 206
ers, 85,100 68-9, 76-7
belief: as affecting social China: and attitudes of Dahl, Tessa, 118
reality, 108; as not fully trust, 137-8 Davis, Joseph E., 126
controllable by will, 134, Christianity: and concep- dead: and issues of trust,
148-9; as related to emotions of forgiveness, 16-17
tion, 182; self-fulfilling 190-1,199-200; 227n.io deception, 76-80
character of some, 109- Church Universal and Tri- dialogue, 105-7
10,150-1 umphant, 115-17 dogmatism: in relation to
Bernardo, Paul, 157,196-8 Cinderella, 101-2 self-trust, 98
betrayal, 47,142-4 codependency theory, domestic work, 50-2
bias: confirmation bias, 61-3 domination: as leading to a
149-51, 226n.i8; regard- commitment, 81 craving for power, 112-13
240 Index
Downie, R.S., 198 Gordon, Haim, 107 lesbians: in families, 50,

dysfunctional families, 61- Govier, Katherine, 15-16 53-5>64
3,83 groups: and trust, 17-18 Levi, Primo, 13
Gustafson, Dave, 195-6 Lewis, C.S., 23-4
Eichenbaum, Luise, 45-6 Guy, John, 222n.2i loyalty, 34, 77-80
emotion: as related to be- lying, 76-7,147-8
lief, 182,183 Hardin, Russell, 2i3n.8
empathy, 104,107-8 Harre, Rom, 15 McGill, Michael, 42
Erikson, Erik, 68-9 Havel, Vaclav, 77 Mahaffey, Debbie, 196-8
evidence: and trust, 119-38 Heraclitus, 208 Mahaffey, Leslie, 157,196-
excuse: in relation to for- Hitler, Adolf, 113,126 8
giveness, 185 Hobbes, Thomas, 5 manipulativeness, 127-8,
exploitativeness, 127-8 Holl, Melissa, 37-8 166-8
home, 52, 56-8, 82, 86 marriage: and contracts,
fallibility, 98,190 Homolka, Karla, 196-8 158; and risk, 85-6; and
family, 50-86 honesty, 76 sexual fidelity, 78-80;
family resemblance: as in hope, 205-6 and trust, 80-2
Wittgenstein, 54 Horsburgh, H.J.N., 151-2, media: as a source of infor-
family therapy, 59-62 170-3,175/198 mation about people,
family values, 51 Hugo, Victor, 172-3 124-5
Fisher, Roger, 174-9 Hussein, Saddam, 136-7, Milan Approach to Family
forgiveness, 183-203, 224n.i7 Therapy, 217^15
226n.i, 227nn.2-3 Hutter, Horst, 29-30 Miller, Alice, 112-13, T-99~
Franklin, Satya Bharti, 200
114-16 incest: and self-trust, 89- Miller, Stuart, 42
freedom: and development 90 moralization of trust, 9,11,
of trust in children, 70-1 institutions: and trust, 17- 13, 2i3n.8
French, Kristin, 196-8 19,123 mothers: argued by Alice
Freud, 5 insurance: and managing Miller to damage their
friendship, 21-49 relations of distrust, 163 children, 199; assumed
Frost, Robert, 56 integrity, 99, 111 role in infant care, 68;
interpretation: of actions as and blame of, 59; con-
Gandhi, Mohandas, 170-2, significant for trust, 129- ceptions of omnipotence
175, 225n.8 33 of, 63-4; as first intimate
gays: in families, 50, 53, 64 intimacy, 24-5, 33, 42, 47, partner, 45-6; notion of
gender: and abuse, 83; and 58, 65-7, 75, 79-80,106, good-enough mother,
activities of Stasi in the 164,167 64; as possibly needing
GDR, 112; and blaming of intuition, 7,128-9 to be forgiven by their
self, 2i9n.3; and commu- children, 191-2
nication styles, 75; and Judaism: attitudes regard- motivation: in relation to
expectations regarding ing forgiveness, 197-8 trust, 7,131-2
trustworthiness, 123; justice: in the family, 64 Mulroney, Brian: distrust
and friendship, 38-49; of, by Canadian public,
and risks within mar- Kahn, Peter H., 35-6 128
riage, 85-6 Kant, Immanuel, 17 Murphy, Jeffrie G., 191
generalization, 7 Kaufmann, Walter, 124 Music Box (film), 140-2,
German Democratic Re- Keeley and Du (play), 200- 195-6
public (former East Ger- 3, 228n.24
many), 111-12,142-4, Noddings, Nel, 173-4
192-5 law: and managing rela- North, Joanna, 202-3
God: and issues of trust, tionships of distrust,
19-20 162-3 optimism, 205
Index 241
Orbach, Susie, 45-6 95,173, 204, 208 surveillance, 139,161

Ordinary People (film), 73-4 Rogers, Carl R., 87-8,106
over-functioning, 97-8 roles, 29,122-3,132~4/ X45/ Tannen, Deborah, 41-2
170-1 Thayer, Nancy, 44-5
Pankan, Ed, 139,161 rules, 155-8 therapeutic trust: as de-
parents, 68-72 fined by H.J.N. Hors-
partiality: regarding family Schmookler, Andrew burgh, 170-3
and strangers, 59, Bard, 112-13 Thomas, Laurence, 26
2i5n.io secrets, 77-8 trustworthiness, 12,104-5,
pessimism, 205 security, 70, 86,102 209-11
Pittman, Frank, 78-81 self: developing concep- Turek, Rolf Michael, 192-4,
Plato, 25 tion of, 69-70 228n.i3
Pogrebin, Letty Cottin, 29 self-deception, 85 Turiel, Elliot, 35-6
Prisoner's Dilemma, 176- self-doubt, 96
9, 226n.i5 self-esteem, 92, 99-118 unforgivability: of deeds
privacy, 56-7 self-reflection, 179-82 or people, 195-8
Proo/(film), 153-5 self-respect, 99-118 Updike, John, 166
Pye, Lucian, 137-8 self-trust, 4, 87-118, 205,
211 victims, 199-200, 206
race, 123 sex: and intimacy, 65-7; violence: in the home, 83-4
Rajneesh cult: as described significance of sexual fi- vulnerability, 9, 32,48-9,
by a former adherent, delity in marriage, 78- 65, 78, 95,112-13,132,
114-16 81; and vulnerability, 163
rape: and trust attitudes, 65-6
89-90 social capital, 11 Wells, H.G., 125
Rawlins, William K., 37-8 social trust, 6,11 West, Ellen, 87-8, 90
reasons: for trust, 119-38 Stalin, Joseph, 113,125-6 Winnicott, D.W., 69-72
reassurance: seeking, as a Stasi: and spying, 111-12, Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 53-
means of restoring trust, 142-4,192-5 4, 22on.io, 224n.io
152-5 stereotyping, 149, 208 Wollenberger, Vera, 142-4
reciprocity, 178-9 strangers: as objects of
reconciliation: as related trust, 10 Zinacantenacos, 53
to forgiveness, 183-203 Strickling, Bonnelle,
risk, 8,10,12,47, 66, 85-6, 2i7n.26

Govier, Trudy - Dilemmas of trust-McGill-Queen's University Press (1998)

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Govier, Trudy - Dilemmas of trust-McGill-Queen's University Press (1998)

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Dilemmas of Trust

Every human relationship, whether between lovers, friends, family

TRUDY GOVIER is an independent philosopher who lives and works

McGil -Queen's University Press

Legal deposit fourth quarter 1998

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper

This book has been published with the help of a

McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Trust. 2. Interpersonal relations. I. Title.

BF575.T7G76 1998 177 C98-900800-2

This book was typeset by Typo Litho

we appeal to when we judge people to be more or less trustworthy

I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council

phases of this research. Members of Calgary's "public philosophy"

It would be rash to put forward as definitive any analysis of a topic as

Whether it is between lovers, friends, family members, or colleagues,

We have feelings and beliefs about another person, we have a sense of

a capacity to make sensible, independent judgments. Thus self-trust

itive expectations have two basic dimensions: motivation (the other

is seen as more reliably than a sloppily dressed one, a middle-aged

Trust, then, is an attitude that affects our emotions, beliefs, actions,

ETHICS, TRUST, AND EVIDENCE

Trust facilitates many good things - communication, love, friendship,

Consider, for instance, the case of Betty and Alfred, middle-aged

for it. If a young woman is assaulted after accepting a ride unwisely, it

attitude of trust is preferable to one of distrust. But other things are

capital" - that general availability of social connections which facili-

WHO TRUSTS? WHO IS TRUSTED?

This book is primarily about people trusting other people, as individ-

We often think of ourselves as trusting animals. For instance, it seems

A somewhat different, and particularly dramatic, case of trusting

We speak as though even mundane everyday things can be the

Would it make sense to trust someone who is dead? The question

Groups and Institutions

As for institutions and groups, we often speak of trusting or distrust-

noticed many errors in its administration of our account, we cancel

and what we are counting on them to do; we are, in effect, trusting

For religious believers, trust in God is paramount. It is a unique and

In this book I do not explore issues related to trust in animals,

The Focus of Friendship

We human beings are naturally interdependent and unwilling to

Being a friend is not a fixed role in life. We expect friends to be avail-

for growth. As friends, we help one another to grow and develop,

an opportunity for moral growth. Through our friends, who share

acknowledge and communicate those differences. Failing to do so will

incapable of friendship) could have friends of pleasure, with whom

cousin may become a friend as well, but it is still one thing to be a

Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a recent chronicler of North American

Deep friendships illustrate all the central aspects of intimate trust

and dependable person, we are assured in our self-esteem. We feel

In trusting our friends, we depend on them. We assume without

in a friend is based on accumulated evidence - sometimes a great deal

TRUST AND C H I L D R E N ' S F R I E N D S H I P S

Children's friendships are based to a large extent on play and shared

and lying - had the most serious effect on friendships. Social-conven-

MEN'S FRIENDSHIPS AND WOMEN'S FRIENDSHIPS

At the psychological level, survival depends on having at least one

and implausible dynamics of their escapades are more characteristic

Ways of Talking, Styles of Intimacy

Men's and boys' friendships are often depicted in contexts of adven-

Tannen stops short of saying that the characteristically female style

concerns, and sharing problems. Honesty about a whole range of top-