Preface

The overall aims of this book are to show that there is a core notion of
trustworthiness which centrally involves avoiding unfulfilled commit-
ments, and to explore how we face various obstacles to being trustworthy,
no matter how well-meaning we are. Aiming at trustworthiness can
force us into uncomfortable choices, and I show how the nature and
severity of these obstacles and discomforts often depend upon our social,
material, and bodily circumstances.
I have tried to write a book which will be useful—even interesting—
to readers who are unfamiliar with philosophical debates about trust and
trustworthiness. This includes people who are familiar with other areas
of philosophy, but also people who address trust using the resources of
other disciplines: I have had very fruitful cross-disciplinary conversa-
tions about trust, distrust, and trustworthiness, and hope that this book
will further those engagements. Chapters 2 and 3 (about promising and
asserting) are the most concerned with the nitty-gritty of philosophical
debate. Whilst I have done my best to make even those chapters accessible,
the book should make sense to readers who skip from chapter 1 straight
to chapter 4.
In the interest of highlighting the woods rather than the trees, I have
made relatively little reference to other philosophers’ writings in the main
body of the text, and there are neither footnotes or endnotes. But at the
end of each chapter there are section-by-section indications of sources
additional to those explicitly referenced in the text. These are intended
to acknowledge the many ways in which I have been deeply influenced
by others’ writings, and to provide initial direction for those who want
to explore the literature properly. I have not attempted to provide a sys-
tematic introduction to philosophical work on trust and trustworthi-
ness, nor to the other topics I discuss. But anyone who investigates these
additional sources will quickly find further guidance and route-maps.

* * *
vi Preface

A Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust made this

book both possible and necessary, and I am very grateful to the Trust for
providing financial support and for embodying a humane attitude to
research funding. Elements of chapters 1 and 4 are based on my ‘Trust,
Distrust, and Commitment’, Noûs 48.1 (2014), 1–20, Copyright © Wiley
Periodicals, Inc., permission granted by John Wiley and Sons.
I have been thinking and writing about trust—and then distrust, and
then trustworthiness and untrustworthiness—for almost a decade. One
of many reasons why this is a rewarding topic for research is that almost
everyone is at least somewhat interested in it, and willing to chat for a
while. (I have worked on other topics which don’t generate the same
response.) So I can’t now come up with an accurate list of everyone
whose comments, questions, and suggestions were influential, but I am
grateful to you all. Some people have been willing to chat for more than
a while, have sustained conversations over a period of years, or have
provided especially important input, whether they realized it or not: these
include Jessica Brown, Paul Faulkner, Sandy Goldberg, Josh Habgood-
Coote, Jon Hesk, Meena Krishnamurthy, David Owens, Ishani Maitra,
Onora O’Neill, and Nick Wheeler. OUP’s readers all provided thoughtful,
careful, useful comments, which collectively led me to reshape the book
in important ways, even where I could not follow all of their sugges-
tions. I very much appreciate the readers’ investment of time and effort.
I was honoured and fortunate to be able to bookend my work on
this project by giving the Mangoletsi lectures (Distrust, Ignorance, and
Injustice) at the University of Leeds in 2010, and the Edgington lectures
(How to Be Trustworthy) at Birkbeck, University of London, in 2018. On
both occasions, the discipline of distilling my ideas into talks, followed
by exceptionally thorough and constructive audience feedback, were
invaluable. Along the way, I also gave talks on aspects of the project at
the Universities of Aberdeen, Barcelona (LOGOS), Birmingham (Institute
for Conflict, Cooperation and Security), Cambridge, Copenhagen,
Durham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Gothenburg, Graz (Women in Philosophy
series), Helsinki, Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham, Oxford, Reading,
Southampton, Stirling, Toronto, Uppsala, Vienna, and York (UK); at the
Institute of Education, KCL, LMU (Munich), and Trinity College Dublin;
at the Irish Philosophical Club, Trust conference at Oxford’s Blavatnik
School of Government, Paris SOPHA conference, Madrid summer school
 Preface vii

in social epistemology, Social Epistemology Network meeting in Oslo,

and an APA Pacific division panel alongside Jason D’Cruz and Karen
Jones. Thanks to everyone for inviting, hosting, and cross-examining me,
and to my family for tolerating all of this gadding about.
Finally, I am very grateful to my colleagues at the University of
St  Andrews, within and outwith Philosophy, for intellectual input, for
moral support, and for providing such great raw material for this project
whilst I was Head of School.
 1
Trust and Distrust

Trust can be a hopeful leap in the dark; it can be the outcome of a detailed
investigation. Trust can be specific to a particular task, carried out by a
particular person on a particular day; it can be a generalized long-term
attitude towards the people around us. Trust can make us feel warm and
fuzzy; it can be the source of deep anxiety. Trust can be merited; it can
turn out to have been a terrible mistake.
Trust takes on many guises, and academic researchers use many
methods to study trust. Long-term opinion polls track responses to the
question ‘Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be
trusted, or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?’
Sociologists study proxies for trust such as community involvement.
Psychologists and economists design laboratory experiments measuring
participants’ willingness to cooperate or to take risks depending on oth-
ers’ cooperation; other psychologists study the effects of betrayal and
trauma. Historians, political scientists, and theorists of international
relations investigate how networks and attitudes of trust are built or
undermined in different contexts, and between different types of agent.
Organizational trust researchers study the effects of institutional culture
on individual trust behaviour, and examine trust relationships between
different organizations, large and small.
What can philosophers contribute to our understanding of trust? Here
as elsewhere philosophers can enhance the conceptual clarity of debates,
for example by distinguishing different notions of trust and its cognates,
by teasing apart easily confused questions and issues, or by highlighting
false dilemmas and fallacious inferences. The aim of such work is not to
supplant the contributions made by other disciplines, but to offer better-
honed tools for developing those contributions, and perhaps also for
enabling richer contacts between different disciplines. (At the very least,

How To Be Trustworthy. Katherine Hawley, Oxford University Press (2019). © Katherine Hawley.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843900.001.0001
2 Trust and Distrust

philosophers might enable trust researchers from other disciplines to

unite against a common pernickety enemy.)
Philosophers may also hope to make a distinctive contribution to our
understanding of ethical issues surrounding trust. Trust is not ethically
neutral. In the right circumstances, we expect others to trust us, and it is
an insult to be distrusted without good reason. Attitudes of trust and
distrust carry an evaluative message, and can have far-reaching conse-
quences of great ethical significance. Trustworthiness is an ethically
admirable trait, contrasting with both dishonesty and flakiness, although
this doesn’t mean that being trustworthy should always be our highest
ethical priority, or that there cannot be admirable reasons for dishonesty.
We can discuss trust and trustworthiness without focusing on their moral
dimensions, but such discussion is importantly incomplete. Philosophers
are well placed to help us understand those moral dimensions, as well as
to offer conceptual clarification.

1.1 Trust and Reliance

With these issues in mind, I begin in this chapter by articulating the

concept of trust I will use in the rest of the book. A common core of trust
is practical reliance: part of trusting people to do things is an expect-
ation that they will in fact do those things, whilst part of trusting some-
one’s word is relying upon what she says. Trust involves reliance. But, in
the wake of Annette Baier’s deservedly influential writings on trust (e.g.
1986), philosophers have generally agreed that trust involves more than
mere reliance.
This distinction between trust and ‘mere’ reliance is motivated by
considering how differently we react to misplaced trust as opposed to
misplaced reliance. Suppose I trust you to look after a precious glass vase,
yet you carelessly break it. I may feel betrayed and angry; recriminations
will be in order; I may demand an apology. Suppose instead that I rely
on a shelf to support the vase, yet the shelf collapses, breaking the vase.
I  will be disappointed, perhaps upset, but it would be inappropriate
to feel betrayed by the shelf, or to demand an apology from it. I trusted
you, but I merely relied upon the shelf. Whatever this difference amounts
to, it corresponds to a difference in my reactions when things go
wrong.
 1.1 Trust and Reliance 3

Inanimate objects can be relied upon without being trusted. And there
are plenty of circumstances in which people are relied upon without
being trusted. Suppose you regularly bring too much lunch to work, and
offer the leftovers for others to eat. Suppose you do this because you’re
bad at judging quantities, not because you’re keen to feed your colleagues.
I rely on you to provide my lunch: I anticipate that you will do so, and
I don’t make alternative arrangements. But this reliance should not
amount to trust: you would owe me no apology if you ate all the food
yourself, and I ought not to feel betrayed by this, even if I felt disap-
pointed (and hungry).
This point is often made by reference to Immanuel Kant’s reputed habit
of taking a walk at the exact same time every day, so reliably that people
could literally set their watches by him: ‘Kant’s neighbors who counted on
his regular habits as a clock . . . might be disappointed with him if he slept in
one day, but not let down by him, let alone had their trust betrayed’ (Baier
1986: 235). The people of Königsberg relied upon Kant for timekeeping,
but sensibly did not make this a matter of trust or potential betrayal.
So there is a distinction between trust in a rich sense—trust which
can be betrayed—and mere reliance. But isn’t mere reliance a kind of
trust too? After all, we do talk of trusting a shelf to hold a vase, or trust-
ing a sturdy lock to keep a bike safe from thieves, even though it would
be melodramatic to talk of betrayal if such things went wrong. Some
philosophers have chosen to distinguish two types of trust rather than
distinguishing trust from mere reliance: for example, Hollis (1998: 10)
writes of ‘normative’ and ‘predictive’ trust, whilst Faulkner (2007: 880)
distinguishes ‘affective’ from ‘predictive’ trust. At one level, this is a mere
terminological issue: I have chosen to follow more standard philosophical
usage, reserving ‘trust’ for the richer notion and ‘mere reliance’ for the
other.
But a deeper question is why I and other philosophers have concerned
ourselves with a distinction between trust and mere reliance which is
not consistently respected by our ordinary ways of talking. The answer
is that the concept of trust is central to a network of normative concepts
and assessments; mere reliance does not have such rich connections.
As already noted, trust, unlike mere reliance, is linked to betrayal.
Moreover trustworthiness is clearly distinguished from mere reliability.
Trustworthiness is admirable, something to be aspired to and inculcated
in our children: it seems to be a virtue. Mere reliability, however, is not.
4 Trust and Distrust

A reliable person is often simply predictable: someone who can be relied

upon to lose keys, or to succumb to shallow rhetoric, is predictable in
these respects, but isn’t therefore admirable.
Even reliability in more welcome respects need not amount to
trustworthiness: when you reliably bring too much lunch, you do not
demonstrate trustworthiness, and nor would you demonstrate untrust-
worthiness if you stopped. If we mistakenly think otherwise, then we
over-expand the sphere of what we can expect from other people. So
the distinction between the normatively loaded attitude of trust and the
merely predictive attitude of reliance is certainly significant, even if it is
not tidily marked in ordinary language. Recent philosophical writing on
trust has rightly taken on the challenge of explaining what this import-
ant difference consists in. The parallel distinction between distrust and
lack of reliance, however, is usually overlooked.

1.2 Distrust and Non-Reliance

What is distrust? It is not a mere absence of trust. Suppose I rely upon

the shelf to support the vase. This is mere reliance, falling short of the
rich trust I sometimes invest in the people around me: I do not trust the
shelf. But, despite this absence of trust, I do not distrust the shelf either:
the features of a wooden shelf which make it an inappropriate target of
trust equally make it an inappropriate target of distrust.
In fact, we can distinguish between distrust and non-reliance in much
the same way as we distinguish between trust and reliance. Our reaction
to misplaced trust (betrayal) differs from our reaction to misplaced reli-
ance (disappointment). And likewise the distinction between distrust
and mere non-reliance shows up in our different reactions to misplaced
distrust and misplaced non-reliance. If I discover that I have wrongly
distrusted you, appropriate reactions from me include remorse, apology,
and requests for forgiveness. In contrast, if I take my car to be unreli-
able, then discover that it is after all reliable, then remorse would not be
appropriate. I might regret some missed opportunities, but that’s all. Not
relying on an inanimate object does not amount to distrusting it.
The point extends beyond inanimate objects: not relying upon people
doesn’t always involve distrusting them. Sadly, my colleagues have never
 1.2 Distrust and Non-Reliance 5

bought me champagne, so in particular I do not rely upon them to buy

me champagne next Friday. But it would be wrong, even offensive, to
say that I distrust my colleagues in this respect—after all, they have
not offered to buy me champagne next Friday, and there is no social
convention that they should do so. If they did buy me champagne
unexpectedly, I ought to be grateful, but I would not need to feel
remorse about my earlier decision not to rely on them. Indeed, it
would be bad manners for me to suggest in retrospect that I should
have trusted my colleagues to buy me champagne, or to apologize for
my earlier non-trust.
So I do not rely upon my colleagues to buy me champagne, but this
non-reliance does not amount to distrust. And rightly so, for I would be
making an important mistake if I distrusted my colleagues on this basis.
Not because they can after all be trusted to buy me champagne, but
because neither trust nor distrust in this respect is appropriate. Earlier,
I  described a situation in which I relied upon you to provide enough
leftovers for my lunch: this was not a matter of trust since I was entitled
to feel disappointed (but not betrayed) if you stopped. Similarly, I do not
rely upon my colleagues to buy me champagne, but this is not a matter
of distrust, since I am not entitled to feel betrayed or angry if, as expected,
they do not buy me champagne—imagine how presumptuous my feelings
of resentment would be. Their ‘failure’ in this respect does not reflect
any aspect of untrustworthiness in their characters.
Distrust is richer and more complex than mere non-reliance, just as
trust is richer and more complex than mere reliance. Just as we should
distinguish trustworthiness from mere reliability, we should distinguish
untrustworthiness from mere unreliability: colleagues who do not buy
me champagne are unreliable in this respect, but not thereby untrust-
worthy. Just as there is a middle ground between trust and distrust, there
is a middle ground between trustworthiness and untrustworthiness—in
the clearest case, inanimate objects deserve neither trust nor distrust, so
they are neither trustworthy nor untrustworthy. This is not because we
do not have enough evidence to decide whether they are trustworthy or
untrustworthy. It is because we know that neither of these categories
apply. So ‘untrustworthy’—i.e. ‘meriting distrust’—is not simply the
complement of ‘trustworthy’. ‘Distrust-worthy’ would be more literal,
but I will resist the neologism.
6 Trust and Distrust

Two other linguistic glitches may have occurred to you. First, what
about ‘mistrust’? To my ear, and according to many dictionaries, ‘distrust’
and ‘mistrust’ are mostly interchangeable. Perhaps ‘distrust’ is a little
more definite than ‘mistrust’, and perhaps it implies better justification
for the attitude. But I don’t think that the distinction is philosophically
load-bearing, and I will stick to ‘distrust’.
Second, and potentially more troubling, is that although I have been
pressing a structural analogy between trust and distrust, in practice we
do not treat the words ‘trust’ and ‘distrust’ symmetrically. For example,
we can say that David trusts Theresa to remember his birthday, but
we cannot smoothly say that Theresa distrusts David to remember her
birthday. To express this thought, we might awkwardly say that Theresa
distrusts David with respect to remembering her birthday. But more
likely we’d just say that Theresa does not trust David to remember her
birthday. That is, we attribute distrust by highlighting an absence of trust.
Doesn’t this conflict with my claim that distrust is an attitude in its own
right, not the mere absence of trust?
I don’t think so. Although there are many situations in which an
absence of trust doesn’t amount to distrust, there are also plenty of situ-
ations in which it’s clear that either trust or distrust is appropriate, so
that the absence of one indicates the presence of the other. Here’s a
similar phenomenon. An absence of liking doesn’t amount to disliking:
sometimes we feel neutral about something, sometimes we don’t even
know it exists. Nevertheless, there are plenty of situations in which it’s
clear that either liking or disliking is appropriate, so that the absence of
one indicates the presence of the other. I don’t like students to be late for
class, which means I dislike it, but it’s awkward to say that I dislike stu-
dents to be late. Still, dislike is an attitude in its own right, not the mere
absence of liking.
It’s a nice question why English works this way, but it shouldn’t
distract us from more substantive issues about trust and distrust. For
now, we can focus on the fact that there are plenty of situations—such as
our attitudes to inanimate objects—where it is plain that trust is not
appropriate, but also that distrust is not appropriate either, and not just
because we are unable to make up our minds. We need to understand
both trust and distrust if we are to understand the different ways in
which trust can go wrong, the reasons why both trust and distrust
 1.3 Reliance and Non-Reliance 7

are  sometimes unwanted or unwarranted, the nature and limitations

of  trustworthiness, and the difference between unpredictability or
unreliability and untrustworthiness.

1.3 Reliance and Non-Reliance

What about the notions of reliance and non-reliance which underlie these
richer notions of trust and distrust? How are we to understand these?
I  adopt Richard Holton’s view (1994) that to rely on someone to do
something is to act on the supposition that she will do that thing. Acting
on this supposition does not require an outright belief that she will do
that thing, though it is incompatible with outright belief that she will
not. Relying is not always a matter of belief, it can be justified by prag-
matic reasons (e.g. convenience or politeness) as well as or instead of
reasons which point towards the truth of the supposition that the per-
son will act that way. Moreover, unlike believing, relying is sometimes a
matter of direct choice.
In this sense, relying on someone to do something needn’t mean putt-
ing your fate in their hands. You can rely upon me to bring enough food
for everyone at the picnic whilst nevertheless bringing plenty of food
yourself, because you don’t want to seem ungenerous: you’re acting on
the supposition that I will bring lots of food, and indeed this partly
explains the large quantities you bring along. Thus reliance in this sense
needn’t imply substantial risk or genuine vulnerability. Building an
account of trust on this notion of reliability therefore leaves space for
cases in which someone trusts another without taking any significant
risks, and without making herself vulnerable through her trust.
For me, this is one attraction of Holton’s account: it allows us to inves-
tigate when and why trust can make us (more) vulnerable, without writ-
ing vulnerability into the very definition of trust. But others will prefer a
more demanding account of reliance and therefore trust, in order to
focus on what seem like the most significant cases. We can all agree that
the decision whether to rely on someone takes on special importance
when reliance brings vulnerability; circumstances in which one cannot
avoid vulnerability are of distinctive interest; moreover our duties to be
trustworthy seem to be heightened when others are vulnerable to us.
8 Trust and Distrust

I recognize all of these points, and will return to some of them later in
this book. But for now my strategy is to offer an account of trust and
trustworthiness quite generally, rather than focusing on situations of
greater vulnerability.
So relying on someone to do something involves presupposing that
she will act as expected. And trust involves such reliance, plus some
further factor we have not yet explored. What about distrust and non-
reliance? Although trust involves confident prediction of appropriate
behaviour, distrust does not require confident prediction of misbehaviour.
So distrusting someone with respect to a certain act involves not relying
upon her to act that way, rather than relying upon her not to act that
way. Extending Holton’s framework, non-reliance means not acting on a
particular positive supposition, rather than acting on the corresponding
negative supposition.
There are good questions to ask about degrees of reliance, degrees of
reliability, and the fact that suppositions are sometimes idle wheels.
When I don’t need your help, it may make no practical difference whether
or not I act under the supposition that you would help if asked.
It’s also not clear what to say about situations in which I outwardly act
as if I suppose that you will do something, yet inwardly fret that you will
not: is this reliance? Disagreements on this point may reflect broader
disagreements about what trust feels like. Some picture trust as a kind of
relaxed confidence, incompatible with inner fretting. On a different
picture, we sometimes trust—or are left with no option but to trust—
despite our doubts, and without thereby erasing those doubts. I am
inclined towards the second of these pictures, so that trust and reliance
are both compatible with anxiety. But overall I do not have anything
particularly insightful to say about borderline cases of reliance: I am
consoled by the fact that similar questions arise for many, perhaps all,
different accounts of trust. Moreover, our understanding of these grey
areas between reliance and non-reliance can only be enhanced by paying
proper attention to distrust alongside trust, as I recommend.

1.4 The Commitment Account

So how can we best understand both the difference between trust and
mere reliance, and the difference between distrust and non-reliance?
 1.4 The Commitment Account 9

In my view, the notion of commitment is key, and the commitments

I have in mind are those which generate obligations whether we like it
or not. I will explain the commitment account of trust and distrust,
and some of its strengths, before discussing its limitations, and why
others have preferred alternative accounts. I do not think that this
view can capture absolutely everything which gets called ‘trust’ or
‘distrust’. Nor can it satisfactorily account for all the phenomena
which draw people from many academic disciplines to the study of
trust. But I will argue that it does capture a central and ethically sig-
nificant notion of trust (and of distrust), one which connects in fruitful
ways to other important notions; some of these connections will be
drawn out later in the book.
So: recall the situation in which you reliably bring too much lunch to
work, because you are a bad judge of quantities, and I get to eat your
leftovers. My attitude to you in this situation is one of reliance, but not
trust, and your reliability in this respect shows nothing about whether
you are trustworthy. In my view, this is not a matter of trust—or distrust—
because you have made no commitment to provide me with lunch. But
if we adapt the case so as to suggest commitment, it starts to look more
like a matter of trust. Suppose we enjoy eating together regularly, you
describe your plans for the next day, I say how much I’m looking forward
to it, and so on. To the extent that this involves a commitment on your
part, it seems reasonable for me to feel betrayed and expect apologies if
one day you fail to bring lunch and I go hungry.
Recognized lack of commitment also explains our judgement about
the colleagues who do not buy me champagne. They are unreliable
in this respect, but it would be unreasonable of me therefore to distrust
them, or to consider them untrustworthy in any respect. They have not
offered to buy me champagne, and there’s no social convention that they
should do so. They have incurred no commitment to buy me champagne
and so their failure to do so is not a failure of trustworthiness.
Here is my account of trust and distrust:

• To trust someone to do something is to believe that she has a com-

mitment to doing it, and to rely upon her to meet that commitment.
• To distrust someone to do something is to believe that she has a
commitment to doing it, and yet not rely upon her to meet that
commitment.
10 Trust and Distrust

(If you cannot accept the formulation ‘distrust someone to do

something’, then I hope that you can get along with ‘distrust someone in
respect of doing something’, at least for long enough to see why I think
that the benefits of this account outweigh the awkwardness of this
formulation.)
The central notion of commitment needs immediate clarification.
In one sense, having a commitment to do something involves having a
determined intention to do it; this is the sense in which we can admire
someone’s commitment to a project. But, crucially, this is not the relevant
sense for the commitment account of trust and distrust. After all, this
sort of psychological commitment is often exactly what’s missing when
distrust is appropriate.
In the relevant sense, one can be committed to doing something one
has no intention of doing: if I’ve promised to come to your birthday
party, but I now decide I can’t be bothered, I still have a commitment in
the relevant sense, even though I have no intention of fulfilling it. This is
of course a situation which makes distrust appropriate: I undertook to
do something but don’t intend to live up to my commitment, and if you
know this about me, then you should distrust me in this respect at least.
Promising is one clear, even paradigmatic way of acquiring the relevant
sort of commitment; I explore promising in some depth in chapter  2.
But explicit promising is not the only route to commitment; if it were
I would be able to account for only a narrow range of cases of trust and
distrust. After all, there seem to be obvious, immediate counterexamples
to the claim that trust and distrust presuppose that commitment has been
incurred through explicit promise-making. We often trust people to do
things which we know they have not explicitly promised to do. I trust
my friends not to steal my books when they come to my house, and, at
least in some circumstances, I trust strangers to let me walk unhindered.
Indeed, an important element of trust involves trusting people not to be
overly legalistic about what they are committed to doing. Sticking to the
letter of a promise rather than its spirit can often be a form of untrust-
worthiness: think of election pledges.
So to make my account plausible I must use a very broad notion of
commitment: commitments can be implicit or explicit, weighty or trivial,
conferred by roles and external circumstances, default or acquired, wel-
come or unwelcome. In particular I will take it that mutual expectation
 1.4 The Commitment Account 11

and convention give rise to commitment unless we take steps to disown

these. In chapter 3 I will argue that assertion or telling involves commit-
ment, so that trusting someone’s word falls within the scope of the account.
Although I hope that this notion will become clearer as I use it, I do
not offer anything like an analysis or a reductive account of commitment.
But this doesn’t meant that my account of trust and distrust can be ger-
rymandered to fit just any old judgement about cases. Although there
are borderline cases, there are also clear cases of commitment, and of
non-commitment, and these are, respectively, cases in which either trust
or distrust is appropriate, and cases in which neither trust or distrust is
appropriate. Indeed, we will come across cases where the right verdict
seems to be that it is indeterminate whether commitment has been
incurred, and that it is therefore indeterminate whether either trust or
distrust is appropriate. In section 5.1 I explore the ways in which we can
lack insight into our own commitments, and even lack control over which
commitments we are landed with. For now, I will primarily focus upon
transparent, voluntary commitments, but that is not intended to be the
full picture.
I think it is clear that there is an important attitude we bear to other
people when we rely upon them to live up to their commitments; this
much should be acceptable even to those who hesitate to call this atti-
tude ‘trust’. I plan to explore this attitude, and, relatedly, to investigate
the demands and significance of living up to one’s commitments. It is
often unclear whether someone has incurred a commitment in the rele-
vant sense. But this is a real-life characteristic of social interaction, and
the source of distinctive kinds of difficulties; these unclarities should be
recognized by our theorizing, not defined out of existence.
Should we instead place obligation rather than commitment at the
heart of trust and distrust? Commitments typically give us obligations;
and perhaps I have stretched the notion of commitment far enough to
ensure that obligations always give us commitments. Perhaps trusting
someone to do something is a matter of thinking her obliged to do it,
and relying upon her to fulfil her obligation, whilst distrusting involves
taking someone to have an obligation, yet not relying upon her to fulfil it.
This seems nearly right. But such an account washes out the distinct-
iveness of trust, distrust, trustworthiness, and untrustworthiness. For
example, the virtue of being trustworthy is not the very general virtue of
12 Trust and Distrust

meeting one’s obligations. Relatedly, being trustworthy does not involve

meeting all legitimate expectations, only those legitimate expectations
which are distinctively associated with trust and distrust. In fact, the
way in which trustworthiness requires less than all-round good behaviour
is the source of some of the most interesting difficulties and tensions we
encounter around trustworthiness; I explore these in more depth in
chapter 4, and follow their consequences through chapters 5 and 6.
Another question about commitment: when I trust-or-distrust some-
one, must I believe that she has a commitment to me? Or is it enough
that I believe that she has a commitment to someone or other? I will
take it that trust-or-distrust requires only that we think the person has a
commitment to someone or other. For example, suppose your daughter’s
friend promises to her (not to you) that she will stay to the end of the party
and give your daughter a lift home. Suppose you rely upon the friend to
keep this promise: you drink several glasses of wine, making it impossible
for you to safely drive and fetch your daughter yourself. I will take it that
you trust your daughter’s friend to keep her promise to your daughter.
But if this seems implausible, then the commitment account could in
principle be restricted so that genuine trust-or-distrust is available only
when we think someone has made a commitment to us. We might then
say that you judge your daughter’s friend to be trustworthy in this respect,
and that you believe it’s appropriate for your daughter to trust her, but
that strictly speaking you can neither trust nor distrust her yourself,
since she made no promise to you. This restriction coheres with accounts
of trust which emphasize its second-personal character; I will return to
the issue when I discuss betrayal in section 1.7.
Relatedly, we may wonder whether a person can make a commitment
to herself, and thus underpin self-trust, or indeed self-distrust. In the
psychological sense of commitment, a person can have a determined
intention to do something for her own sake. But this is not the sense
of commitment I have invoked to understand trust and distrust—i.e.
commitment of the kind which can be generated through promising.
Although we talk of making promises to ourselves, there seems to be an
important difference between such cases and promises to others, from
which we cannot unilaterally release ourselves. More generally, self-trust
seems a poor fit for the issues which preoccupy me later in this book,
which turn on the social costs and benefits of trustworthiness.
 1.5 Looking Beyond Expectations 13

1.5 Looking Beyond Expectations

As I have presented it so far, the commitment account is a primarily an

account of trust, and of distrust—i.e. of our attitudes towards others.
But, as I have hinted, one of its key strengths is that it readily corresponds
to a substantive account of what trustworthiness and untrustworthiness
amount to. Given that trust aims at trustworthiness—as a rule, we try to
ensure that our trust is mostly directed at trustworthy people—this gives
us an account of what makes trust accurate or inaccurate. Likewise for
distrust. Perhaps surprisingly, not every account of the nature of trust
provides us with insight into the nature of trustworthiness. To illustrate
this, I will now discuss the views of Richard Holton (1994) and of Karen
Jones  (2004); these are not antithetical to my own, but they illustrate
how accounts of trust do not automatically illuminate trustworthiness.
Holton invokes the ‘participant stance’, an attitude of treating others
as people in their own right, not as mere features of the world:

I think that the difference between trust and [mere] reliance is that
trust involves something like a participant stance towards the person
you are trusting . . . trusting someone is one way of treating them as a
person. But if this is right, it shows how important it is that we do not
treat the participant stance as an all or nothing affair. Even when you
do trust a person, you need not trust them in every way . . . .You can
trust a person to do some things without trusting them to do others.
(Holton 1994: 4)

Taking the participant stance towards someone does seem to be a neces-

sary condition for trust, since it makes reactive attitudes possible. Indeed,
following Baier (1986) I earlier identified trust via its connections with
reactive attitudes such as resentment and the sense of betrayal. Moreover
taking the participant stance seems also to be a necessary condition for
distrust: we do not distrust faulty machines, or wonky shelves. So there
is clearly something right about this approach. But the trouble is that
interpersonal respect for others sometimes requires us neither to trust nor
to distrust them in a given regard, since to do so would be an imposition.
Suppose that my colleagues do after all plan to buy me champagne.
Still, they do not invite or welcome my trust in this respect; instead, they
want to give me a treat, not merely to act as trustworthiness requires,
14 Trust and Distrust

and certainly not to risk betraying me if they forget to buy the champagne,
or realize they can’t afford it. Similar situations arise in even the most
intimate, trusting relationships. Imagine that I cook dinner for my hus-
band each evening and he comes to rely on this. Even if I enjoy cooking,
in this scenario I do not want my husband to make this a matter of trust.
That is, I do not want to risk betraying him in even a minor way if I don’t
cook one evening, and nor do I want that to count against my trust-
worthiness. We aspire to a completely trusting relationship—we would
like to avoid even the slightest distrust—but we do not aspire to turn
all our interactions into issues of trust, for that would be oppressively
exhausting. (What if we disagree about whether a particular issue or
interaction should be an issue of trust? I will take up such thorny issues
in chapters 5 and 6.)
Holton correctly identifies the participant stance as a necessary
element of trust, and adopting this stance is necessary for distrust too.
But relying upon someone to whom you take a participant stance does
not always mean trusting that person: some interactions lie outside the
realm of trust and distrust. Likewise, deciding not to rely upon someone
to whom you take a participant stance need not mean distrusting that
person: you may just decide to buy your own champagne, or give up any
aspiration to drinking champagne. And adopting the participant stance
can sometimes require us not to turn every interaction into a matter of
trust and distrust. But such non-trust interactions are still within the
scope of the participant stance: it’s supremely appropriate for my hus-
band to express his gratitude for my cooking, even though he should not
convert his reliance into trust.
Jones  (2004) also connects trust and the reactive attitudes but in a
more modulated fashion than Holton:

[Three-place t]rust is accepted vulnerability to another person’s power

over something one cares about, where (1) the truster foregoes searching
(at the time) for ways to reduce such vulnerability, and (2) the truster
maintains normative expectations of the one-trusted that they not use
that power to harm what is entrusted. (2004: 6)

For my present purposes, I will take it that the notions of accepted vul-
nerability plus forgoing the attempt to reduce such vulnerability capture
roughly the notion of reliance. One might have something a bit like this
 1.5 Looking Beyond Expectations 15

attitude to an inanimate object like a car, for example. Only ‘a bit like’,
because there are crucial differences between Jones’s notion, character-
ized in terms of power, care, vulnerability, and harm, and the thinner
characterization of reliance I have adopted from Holton. But, as I said
earlier, once we have framed an account of trust and trustworthiness in
rather thin terms, we can go on to identify certain situations—perhaps
exactly those in which there is vulnerability and risk—as being of special
moral significance.
In this context, normative expectations must do the work of distin-
guishing trust from mere reliance. Normative expectations, for Jones,
are ‘multistranded dispositions, including dispositions to evaluative
judgement and to reactive attitudes’ (2004: 17, note 8): when you trust
someone, you are liable to feel resentful if she lets you down through ill
will or laziness, and whilst you might not feel resentful if she lets you
down by accident, you may still think that an apology is warranted. Jones
distinguishes normative expectations from predictive expectations: we
can normatively expect something of someone without predicting that
she will in fact do what we expect of her.
If this is trust, what might distrust be? Let’s understand non-reliance
as a refusal to accept vulnerability, or as a continuing attempt to reduce
such vulnerability. One might have this attitude to a machine one takes
to be unreliable. What more is needed for distrust? Plausibly, the norma-
tive expectations involved in distrust are exactly the normative expect-
ations which would otherwise be involved in trusting that person in that
respect. So distrust is non-reliance plus a tendency to resentment, a
tendency to judge the distrustee negatively, or tendency to think that an
apology is warranted: distrust is something like disappointed trust,
though perhaps not preceded by an episode of trust.
Because Jones pins normative expectations to specific tasks (or, rather,
to specific cared-for things), she can accommodate the important fact
that respect for others, even in very intimate relationships, can require
us to stick with reliance-or-non-reliance rather than trust-or-distrust in
certain respects. I am happy for my husband to predict that I will cook
dinner tonight, but I do not want him to develop normative expect-
ations, to be poised to resent me if I don’t cook.
Normative expectations can help us understand both trust and dis-
trust, but there is something important missing from the picture. Both
16 Trust and Distrust

Holton and Jones tell us more about the truster’s attitudes than they do
about the features of the trustee to which those attitudes are directed.
We also need a story about when trust, distrust, or neither is objectively
appropriate—what is the worldly situation to which (dis)trust is an
appropriate response? When is it appropriate to have (dis)trust-related
normative expectations of someone? This is not just a question of practical
self-interest or mental hygiene: we owe it to others to get this right.
Mistaken distrust can be insulting, and limit other people’s options,
Mistaken trust can be burdensome, or allow vulnerable others more
leeway than they can properly manage.
We also need to understand the virtue of trustworthiness and the
vice of untrustworthiness, as they are distinguished from reliability and
unreliability. To do all this, we need a basis for our judgements about
reliability: how, if at all, can we predict what others will do? (A closely
related question is key to the epistemology of testimony: how, if at all,
can we judge who is speaking truthfully?) But we also need a basis for
our judgements about when it is appropriate to trust-or-distrust, not
merely to rely-or-not-rely. Many of the relevant norms apply only when
we enter the realm of appropriate trust-or-distrust.
The commitment account of trust and distrust provides this extra
richness. Seeing others as having undertaken commitments to us engages
the participant stance; it makes us poised for certain distinctive reactive
attitudes, specifically resentment when commitments are not met, and a
measure of regret about earlier distrust when commitments are unex-
pectedly fulfilled. It also allow us to distinguish between situations in
which trust is inappropriate because the person in question is not reliable,
and situations in which trust is inappropriate because the person does
not in fact have the relevant commitment.

1.6 Why Commitment Rather than Motives?

Like most other philosophers writing in this tradition, I am taking trust to

involve reliance, plus some extra factor. Unlike many other philosophers,
I have not identified this extra factor with a positive view of the motives
of the trusted person. A motives-based account has it that if I trust you
to look after my vase then I rely upon you to do so, and moreover I take
 1.6 Why Commitment Rather than Motives? 17

it that you have the right kind of motive for looking after my vase; different
accounts disagree about what the ‘right kind’ of motive might be, but
typically this will involve some sort of concern for me.
Motives-based accounts seem initially to be a good fit for the distinc-
tion between trust and mere reliance: after all, when I merely rely upon
the shelf to hold the vase I don’t impute any kind of motive to the
shelf, and when I merely rely upon you to generate leftovers for my
lunch I know that you do not do this with my interests in mind. Moreover,
motives-based accounts seem to offer a more illuminating account of
trustworthiness: it will involve acting out of the right kind of motives.
But the emphasis on motives seems less attractive when we attempt to
extend the picture to include distrust. I cannot survey every motives-
based account of trust but will focus on representative suggestions from
Russell Hardin  (2002) and Karen Jones  (1996) (this view differs from
Jones’s 2004 account, which as we saw above is framed in terms of nor-
mative expectations). Both theories are well developed, sophisticated,
and prominent in the literature. Moreover they differ significantly from
one another, turning on the trustee’s rational self-interest and other-
directed goodwill respectively.
Hardin argues that when we trust someone, we expect the trustee
to encapsulate our interests within her own, because she has an inter-
est in maintaining or strengthening her relationship with us. In trust-
ing you to look after my vase, I take it that you will do so because you
have incorporated my interest in preserving the vase amongst your
own interests: looking after the vase now serves your own interests.
In contrast, when I rely upon the shelf to hold the vase, I do not have
any expectation about the shelf ’s motives or interests, for I realize it
has none.
Jones defines trust as an attitude of optimism that the goodwill and
competence of another will extend to cover the domain of our interaction
with her, together with the expectation that the one trusted will be dir-
ectly and favourably moved by the thought that we are counting on her
(1996: 1). As with Hardin, it is clear how this definition entails that we
do not trust the shelf when we rely upon it to hold the vase. Moreover
reference to the trustee’s responsiveness to our counting on her permits
a distinction between genuine trustworthiness and reliable but paternal-
istic benevolence.
18 Trust and Distrust

Hardin and Jones have each identified genuine attitudes that we do

indeed sometimes adopt to one another. Moreover these attitudes may
sometimes be of great significance to all concerned. But if we identify
either of these attitudes with trust, we limit our ability to account for a
wide range of related phenomena, including distrust and trustworthi-
ness. On the motives-based picture, we might expect distrust to involve
non-reliance, plus a negative attitude regarding the motives of the per-
son distrusted.
This negative attitude must go beyond expecting the person to lack
the motives required for trustworthiness. After all, inanimate objects
lack the motives required for trustworthiness: they do not incorporate our
interests amongst their own, and they do not act out of goodwill towards
us. Yet we do not distrust inanimate objects, even when we decide not
to rely upon them. The same is often true in interpersonal situations.
Consider the colleagues who do not buy me champagne. I do not rely
upon them to buy me champagne; moreover I know that they have not
incorporated my interest in drinking champagne amongst their own
interests, and sadly I am not optimistic about their goodwill in the
champagne-buying domain. Yet it’s not appropriate for me to distrust
my colleagues: they are not displaying untrustworthiness, and if they do
surprise me with champagne I needn’t feel remorse about not having
trusted them. Neither trust nor distrust is appropriate in this context.
So if distrust involves an imputation of motives, these must be more
sinister than the mere absence of positive motives towards us. Perhaps
distrust involves expectation that the person will act out of ill will towards
us, or to have an interest in frustrating our interests. This would explain
why we do not distrust inanimate objects (contrary to occasional
appearances, they are not actively working against us), and why I should
not distrust my colleagues (they are not maliciously striving to deny
me champagne).
But neither expectation of ill will nor expectation of attempts to frus-
trate my interests is necessary for distrust. After all, someone who lies
and cheats to achieve her goals should be distrusted, even if she does not
bother to bear either goodwill or ill will to others, and does not care
about other people’s interests. Nor are gloomy expectations sufficient for
distrust, even in combination with non-reliance. Suppose that a deeply
honourable person campaigns to have me imprisoned for my real and
 1.6 Why Commitment Rather than Motives? 19

heinous crimes. I cannot rely on this person to help me; moreover I know
that she bears me ill-will and is actively trying to frustrate my goals. But
my attitude to her needn’t amount to distrust, for she is straightforward
and honest in her campaigning. (This doesn’t mean that I should trust
her; only that I do not have grounds to distrust her.) My opponent does
not display untrustworthiness in her open campaigning against me. And
if she turns out to be more helpful than I had expected, I need not feel
remorse about my previous attitude of non-reliance.
Now, I have not explored all the options here, nor represented the full
complexity of Hardin’s and Jones’s positions. Nevertheless, I have shown
that neither account of trust can handle distrust easily, and this for
reasons which generalize to other motives-based accounts. Both Hardin
and Jones take care to distinguish genuine trust from mere reliance. But
each considers decisions about distrust only in situations where either
genuine trust or genuine distrust is appropriate, where a person’s
behaviour demonstrates either trustworthiness or untrustworthiness
(i.e. distrust-worthiness). This narrow focus means that trust, distrust,
and indecision seem to exhaust the options, leading Hardin and Jones to
think of distrust as a kind of decisive lack of trust (Hardin 2002: 90;
Jones 1996: 17; see also McLeod 2002: 34).
Instead, we should ask about the preconditions for trust-or-distrust:
what is it about the excess-lunch-bringer, the non-champagne-buyers,
and indeed inanimate objects which mean that they are not suitable
recipients of either trust or distrust in the relevant respects? The primary
reason that trust is not appropriate in these cases is that neither trust or
distrust is appropriate. And—in my view—this is because there is no
commitment involved, not because of any feature of the other person’s
motives or interests.
Might we understand trust in terms of both commitment and motive?
The idea might be that when I trust someone I take her to have a commit-
ment, and I take her to be motivated by that commitment in ways which
make her reliable. Correspondingly, perhaps when I distrust someone
I take her to have a commitment, yet take her to be insufficiently motiv-
ated by that commitment, so that I do not rely upon her. I reject these
suggestions, for reasons that I will explain more fully later: I will return
to the relationship between trustworthiness and being motivated by
commitment in section 4.1, and I comment again on the (un)importance
20 Trust and Distrust

of motive in section 1.8. In my view good motives are neither necessary

nor sufficient for trustworthy action, and thus they are neither neces-
sary nor sufficient for appropriate trust.

1.7 Betrayal

Getting it right about reliance is important. If someone relies upon a

rope bridge to hold their weight, but the bridge is unreliable, the practical
consequences might be very serious, even unto death. If someone relies
upon Kant’s regular morning walk as a reminder to take their medication,
but Kant is unreliable in this respect, this might also lead to the ultimate
bad consequence. Relying on the unreliable can be dangerous.
But trusting the untrustworthy can generate harms go beyond those
caused by relying on the unreliable. One sort of harm is emotional dam-
age caused by discovering that you have trusted someone who turned
out not to deserve your trust. This sort of damage can have long-ranging
and complex consequences. Important though such harms are, I will set
them aside here in order to discuss the kind of distinctive harm done
when trust is violated, even if the violation is never discovered and so
does not cause emotional damage.
It does seem that there is something intrinsically problematic about
betrayals or violations of trust, something in addition to both the prac-
tical consequences of unreliability and the emotional consequences of
discovering such violations: the wrong of lying, cheating, and promise-
breaking goes beyond its contingent practical harm. But being trusted
is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the possibility of
such betrayal.
Trust is not necessary, because we can be betrayed by those we dis-
trust, and indeed distrust can include expectation of betrayal. You can
know that you will be betrayed: Jesus knew that Judas would betray him.
Yet trust is incompatible with outright belief that betrayal will occur, so
betrayal does not require trust. Relatedly, if I lie to you and you are not
misled, the practical damage may be mitigated, yet I wrong you none-
theless, and not just through any emotional damage I may cause. Finally,
if you trust me and I prove untrustworthy, my behaviour does not
become acceptable once your trust ceases. In such cases, there may be
 1.7 Betrayal 21

practical consequences of unreliability, or emotional consequences of

the discovery of untrustworthiness. But, on the assumption that there is
a further, intrinsic wrongness in violating trust, there is likewise a fur-
ther, intrinsic wrongness in being untrustworthy even when you are
not trusted.
Conversely, we do not always do wrong when we knowingly disap-
point those who trust us. We can distinguish two kinds of mistake in
trusting: trusting someone who merits distrust, and trusting someone in
a respect which merits only reliance or non-reliance. The first of these
involves recognizing that someone is a suitable target for our normative
expectations, but misjudging their reliability: this kind of mistake results
in betrayal. But the second is a mistake about whether someone is a suit-
able target for normative expectations in this respect: if such a person
proves unreliable, we may feel betrayed, but we have not been betrayed,
and the trustee may rightly complain of our moralizing presumption.
The commitment account can explain all this: we do wrong when we
fail to fulfil a commitment, absent mitigating circumstances. This is inde-
pendent of whether we are in fact expected to fulfil the commitment—
i.e. whether we are trusted or distrusted in this respect. Being trusted is
not necessary. Moreover, if someone mistakenly thinks I have a commit-
ment, and I do not act as that supposed commitment would require,
then I have not in fact behaved badly. Letting down someone who trusts
is not sufficient for morally problematic violation of trust, regrettable
though it may often be.
Granted, in some circumstances we acquire commitments simply
by allowing others to continue to rely upon us, or by allowing others to
think that we have commitments. And we cannot always minimize
commitment and thus minimize the risk of unmet commitments: this
fetishization of honour would in any case make for an unrewarding,
lonely life. Nevertheless, we are not entirely at the mercy of others’ deci-
sions to trust us.
I argued above that trust-or-distrust does not require a direct rela-
tionship: you trust your daughter’s friend to keep her promise to your
daughter, even though the friend has made no commitment to you. But
are you really betrayed when someone fails to meet a commitment to a
third party? It seems more plausible to say that the only person betrayed
is the person to whom the commitment is made. This weakens, though
22 Trust and Distrust

does not break, the connection between trust and betrayal. The alternative
is to rule that genuine trust-or-distrust is available only to those to whom
commitments are made.
This uneasy dilemma is not generated by the commitment account
per se; rather, it arises from a tension between two tempting thoughts
about cases like that of your daughter’s friend. On the one hand, it is
natural to think of your attitude towards your daughter’s friend as trust:
you are disposed to hold many of the trust-related reactive attitudes
towards your daughter’s friend, and reasonably so. On the other hand,
it is natural to think that it is only your daughter who is betrayed if her
friend breaks her promise to her. Any account of trust (and distrust) must
make a difficult choice between retaining these two intuitive judgements
whilst weakening the trust–betrayal connection, or else retaining the
trust–betrayal connection whilst rejecting one of the two intuitions.
Motives-based accounts of trust treat distrust as an afterthought and
thus struggle to explain the wrong involved in violating trust. On such
accounts, to trust someone to do something is to rely upon her to do it
for the right sort of motives. Such trust is disappointed either when the
task is not completed or else when the motives are ‘wrong’. This makes
unfeasibly heavy demands upon trustees, putting us in moral jeopardy,
liable to betray—not just disappoint—people who have unrealistic
expectations of us. My colleagues don’t care about my interest in drinking
champagne, nor do they bear me goodwill in this respect; surely they
cannot be criticized for this. But if I foolishly persuade myself otherwise,
then on such accounts my colleagues will subsequently ‘betray’ me when
they fail to buy champagne.
Moreover understanding trust (and distrust) in terms of normative
expectations does not by itself explain when such expectations are
appropriate. If I unreasonably develop normative expectations of my
colleagues in respect of champagne-buying—whether or not I also pre-
dict that they will buy me champagne—then I will wrongly feel betrayed
when they do not buy me champagne.
Now, we do indeed sometimes develop inappropriate expectations of
one another, and end up feeling resentful or betrayed. But the commit-
ment account enables us to see this as a consequence of miscommu-
nication or misunderstanding about what commitments have been
undertaken, rather than inevitably casting the fault upon the person
 1.8 Where Next? 23

who ‘fails’ to act as expected. In chapters 5 and 6 I will discuss the ways
in which such miscommunication can arise, and how it can be avoided.

1.8 Where Next?

When we think about trust, we wonder who merits our trust, why, and
to what degree. When we think about trustworthiness, we are anchored
by the obvious thought that to be trustworthy is to merit trust. So trust
and trustworthiness are enmeshed. My own view is that trustworthiness
is best understood in terms of commitment—to be trustworthy is to live
up to one’s commitments, whilst to be untrustworthy is to fail to live up
to one’s commitments—and correspondingly that the attitude of trust
involves expectations of commitment-fulfilment. Understanding trust
in terms of seeing commitment in others enables us to understand the
differences between distrust, suspension of judgement between trust and
distrust, and cases where we clearly judge that neither trust nor distrust
is appropriate. Moreover it gives us a grasp of what trust aims at, of what
trustworthiness requires: matching commitment with action.
Let me concede before going any further that this account does not
make sense of every ordinary use of the word ‘trust’. Nor does it capture
everything that theorists have wanted from an account of trust. I have
already noted that there is a more demanding notion of trust which ties
it more closely to risk and vulnerability: I don’t deny that trust takes on
special significance in such contexts, but I see these as special instances
of a more general attitude of trust.
In addition, I am not placing much weight on people’s motives for
living up to their commitments, or failing to do so. On my view, if
someone lives up to her commitments for purely mercenary reasons (to
earn her salary, to bank favours, to avoid punishment), or for the self-
aggrandizing pleasure of placing herself on a moral pedestal, this in
itself does not undermine her trustworthiness. But of course there are
morally significant differences between someone like this, and someone
who lives up to her commitments for more noble reasons, perhaps
involving her sense of honour, or indeed others’ dependence upon her.
And often when we trust someone we hope and expect that she will live
up to her commitments for more admirable reasons, and we may feel
24 Trust and Distrust

disappointed if baser motives are in play. This emphasis on the ‘right’

motives may be especially common within intimate personal relationships.
In the workplace, on the other hand, motives may seem less important
so long as things get done. Our attitudes to politicians and public figures
seem to waver between these poles.
Are you tempted to insist that only such nobility constitutes genuine
trustworthiness, unlike the superficial patterns of seemingly trustworthy
behaviour I am prepared to dignify with the term? Then let’s not quarrel
over terminology. I will argue that commitment-fulfilment (or its absence)
is important and interesting in all sorts of ways, regardless of motive,
but I will not insist that this is the only important or interesting notion
in the vicinity. I will continue to use the language of trustworthiness in
discussing this habit of commitment-fulfilment, but if you wish to sub-
stitute a less grand label, you are welcome to do so.
Another potential concern: the attitude of trust which corresponds to
this commitment-based notion of trustworthiness has no distinctive
phenomenology, since it is at heart merely an expectation regarding
another’s behaviour under certain circumstances. One can trust without
experiencing any particular feeling or emotion, on this view. But of
course trust (and distrust) can have enormous emotional significance,
especially in the context of personal relationships. Again, if you are
tempted to insist that it’s not really trust if it doesn’t have the appropriate
emotional texture, then we may not have a deep-seated disagreement.
I will argue that the attitude I call ‘trust’ is interesting and important in
lots of ways, but this is not to diminish the significance of more phe-
nomenologically distinctive attitudes.
Rival notions are often special cases of the more general notion I call
‘trust’, or ‘trustworthiness’. Well-motivated commitment-fulfilment is a
type of commitment-fulfilment more generally, and emotionally charged
expectations of commitment-fulfilment are nevertheless expectations of
commitment-fulfilment. But are there plausible rival notions of trust or
trustworthiness that do not fit this pattern? Here I will put up more
resistance: I think we do need to see commitment as central to the con-
cepts of trust and trustworthiness in order to understand many of
the ways in which we use those concepts, and moreover to understand
the relatively neglected notions of distrust and untrustworthiness.
Nevertheless, there are of course important and valuable traits, virtues,
 Additional Sources 25

and patterns of behaviour which correspond to a habit of responding to

others’ needs and wishes, whether or not one is committed to doing so.
My main point is that it is useful to separate these things conceptually:
I will explore this in greater depth in chapter 4.
Finally, let me acknowledge that I am focusing on trust as a three-place
relation, involving two people and a task: you may trust me to look after
your children, to keep a secret, or to tell the truth. We do however some-
times speak of simply trusting someone, and I will return to this notion
of generalized trust and the corresponding notion of trustworthiness
in chapter 4.
In the next two chapters I will explore first promising and then telling,
treating both as the explicit acquisition of commitment. Indeed I will
argue that telling is a type of promising. My particular concern will be
the norms which govern promising, and thus telling. Promises should
be sincere, but in addition there are competence norms on promise-
making: we shouldn’t make promises we are not well placed to keep, no
matter how good our intentions. The fact that we should not acquire
commitments we are not competent to keep has important implications
for what trustworthiness demands of us, given the connection between
trust and commitment: the demands of trustworthiness are the topic
of chapter 4.

Additional Sources

1.1 Trust and Reliance. Simon (2013) and McLeod (2015) provide very

useful overviews and bibliographic guidance into philosophical literature
about trust. Hawley (2012) is a whistle-stop tour of different disciplinary
approaches to trust, and Hardin (2002) is a more advanced introduction.
Hawley (2014a) is the basis for much of the current chapter; it includes
more detailed discussions of rival pictures, and more extensive reference
to sources.
1.2 Distrust and Non-Reliance. Distrust is given philosophical centre
stage less frequently than is trust; an important exception is the issue of
distrust in politics. See Hardin (ed.) (2004), Krishnamurthy (2015), and
other papers in the October 2015 issue of The Monist on Trust and
Democracy. Some forms of epistemic injustice can be understood in
26 Trust and Distrust

terms of unfair distrust and its consequences; I return to these issues in

chapter 6.
1.3 Reliance and Non-Reliance. Thompson (2017) resists the standard
connections between trust and reliance. Govier  (1993) understands
trust in terms of vulnerability, as does Jones e.g. in her (2004).
1.4 The Commitment Account. For accounts of various different types
of commitment, see Chang (2013), Calhoun (2009), and Holton (2009).
Hollis (1998: 11) and Nickel (2007) link trust to obligation. For McLeod
(2002) trust involves the expectation that the trustee will act out of moral
integrity; McLeod’s book is an important discussion of self-trust. On the
second-personal nature of trust, see especially Darwall (2017), and the
sources listed below under section 1.8.
1.5 Looking Beyond Expectations. Strawson  (1974) introduces the
notion of the ‘participant stance’ as invoked by Holton. In later work Jones
develops her views of trust in many interesting ways, e.g. (2004), (2012),
(2013). On the importance of getting it right about trust and distrust,
see e.g. Fricker (2007), Jones (2002), and Marsh (2011); I return to this
issue in chapters 5 and 6.
1.6 Why Commitment Rather than Motives. Other accounts in terms
of motive are reviewed by McLeod (2015).
1.7 Betrayal. Jones (2004) usefully writes of ‘basal (in)security’ in this
context, whilst Sunstein (2007) discusses our aversion to ‘betrayal risk’,
though without strictly marking the trust-reliance distinction. Ratcliffe,
Ruddell, and Smith (2014) explore connections between trauma and trust.
1.8 Where Next? For resistance to taking three-place trust as basic, see
Domenicucci and Holton (2017), Faulkner (2015), and Faulkner (2017).
 2
Promising

Commitment is at the heart of my preferred notions of trust and distrust.

But where do our commitments come from? In chapter 5, I will explore
a range of less explicit ways in which our speech and action generate
commitments relevant to the realm of trust and distrust. But in the
present chapter I focus on promise-making, the most explicit mechanism
through which we take on new commitments. Trusting someone to keep
a promise is a high-stakes, central case of trust, whilst anticipating that
someone will break a promise is a paradigmatic case of distrust.
In thinking about promises and trust, obvious questions include how
to decide who to trust, whose promises to accept and rely upon. And in
thinking about these questions, we typically take on the perspective of the
promise-receiver. But my central concern in this chapter arises primarily
from the perspective of the promise-giver, rather than the promise-
receiver. If we aspire to be trustworthy, we aspire to be good promisors;
bad promisors are untrustworthy people. So what do good promisors do?
They keep their promises. But not only this: they make the right promises
in the first place.
Promises are offered and accepted in the spirit of hope, whilst a broken
promise is a sad business. And not just sad, but bad: breaking a promise
is not the worst crime imaginable, yet it is paradigmatically wrong,
unless there are extenuating circumstances. We may regret our promises,
but regret alone cannot release us from the moral obligation to follow
through on our words. This much is evident, even though it is less evident
exactly why promises have the moral force they do, and very far from
evident what qualifies circumstances as extenuating.
It is also evident, though less commonly remarked, that a promise can
be bad without being a broken promise: some promises should not have
been made in the first place, even if they are eventually kept. For
example, it is prima facie wrong to make an insincere promise, even if a

How To Be Trustworthy. Katherine Hawley, Oxford University Press (2019). © Katherine Hawley.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843900.001.0001
28 Promising

later change of heart or change of circumstance reconciles the promisor

to acting as she promised. Moreover a promise to act immorally is itself
prima facie immoral, and not because it is a broken promise. Indeed,
given that such a promise has been made, breaking it may be the least
bad option.
Insincerity and immoral intent: who could deny that these are nasty
traits? But bad promises can sometimes be rooted in the very best of
intentions, in an optimistic desire to be helpful. A reckless or incompe-
tent promise—a promise to perform the infeasible—is a promise which
should not have been made, even if it is, by some miracle, eventually
kept rather than broken. Or so I will argue in this chapter.
How will I try to persuade you? By describing cases in which a prom-
ise should not have been made, even though it is a sincere promise to do
something permissible, and it is eventually kept rather than broken. But
various issues muddy the water. First, we may disagree about what it
takes for a promise to be sincere, and about what it takes for a promised
action to be permissible. Second, we should recognize that maintaining
a hygienic practice of promise-making is not always of paramount
importance. Making an insincere or reckless promise might sometimes
be the best option, all things considered; indeed, being untrustworthy
might sometimes be the best option, all things considered. Third, we
should distinguish between our assessment of a promise and our assess-
ment of the promise-maker. For example, someone might reasonably
but falsely believe that her promise is permissible, in which case we may
love the sinner whilst hating the sin. These last two issues are not distinct-
ively associated with promise-making: analogous concerns arise whenever
we discuss norms and evaluations for our practices. Important goals can
come into conflict with one another, and we can in general distinguish
between whether someone has violated a norm and whether she could
reasonably have been expected to know that she has violated a norm.
Moreover we may reasonably disagree about the type of normativity
in question here. It seems clear that the obligation to keep one’s prom-
ises is a moral obligation. Indeed, it is a central, paradigmatic case of
moral obligation. But what about the norms which govern promise-
making? In chapter 3 I will argue for a close connection between norms on
assertion—purporting to provide information to others—and norms
on promise-making. Since norms on assertion are not standardly thought
 2.1 Sincerity 29

of as moral norms, this might suggest that norms on promise-making

are not moral norms. I will suggest, however, that we should make the
opposite inference, understanding the moral dimensions of assertion in
terms of its connection to promising.
For lots of reasons, then, we may disagree about the exact content of
norms on promise-making, and about the source or nature of those
norms. But that’s okay. My main goal in this chapter is to illuminate the
importance of competence in good promise-making, and conversely to
explain what is wrong with reckless or incompetent promise-making.
I will argue that, no matter how we articulate the sincerity norm, and
the norm that one should not promise to do something which is itself
immoral, these do not exhaust the norms on promise-making. Instead,
there is a third way in which promise-making can go wrong: roughly
speaking, one should not make promises which one is not competent to
keep. The paired notions of recklessness and competence need closer
scrutiny, but my first task is to show that something like this third norm
is needed, because there are sincere promises to act permissibly which
nevertheless should not be made.

2.1 Sincerity

Insincere—‘false’—promises are bad promises. If Ruth insincerely prom-

ises to come to Kenton’s party, privately intending to stay at home in
front of the TV, she thereby violates a norm of promise-making: that’s
not the kind of promise you should make. Suppose Ruth later changes
her mind, either because of a pang of conscience or because there’s
nothing much on TV. She shows up for the party, thus keeping her
promise. Well, better than not showing up, we may say. Still, Ruth is at
fault for having made an insincere promise, and Kenton in particular
may be cross if he discovers what Ruth did. Showing up—keeping the
promise—doesn’t automatically wipe the slate clean.
Now, extenuating circumstances may make insincere promising per-
missible or even required, all things considered: insincerely promising
to come to a party seems okay if it is a cover for your secret hostage res-
cue mission. Nevertheless, making an insincere promise should be the
source of some regret: all else being equal, it would be better if you could
30 Promising

rescue the hostages without needing to make an insincere promise.

Insincere promises fall short as promises, even when they are permitted
or even mandated on other grounds.
What is it for a promise to be insincere? A natural thought is that a
sincere promise communicates the promise-maker’s genuine intentions,
and so a promise is insincere when the promise-maker lacks the inten-
tion communicated by the promise. But philosophers disagree about what
intention is communicated by a promise. For example Scanlon (1998: 307)
argues that a promise to do something communicates an intention to do
that very thing: when Ruth promises to come to the party, she commu-
nicates her purported intention to come to the party. (That’s not all she
does, but it’s an important part of what’s going on.) Then an insincere
promise is one made without the corresponding intention to act.
In contrast, Owens (2012: chapter 8) argues that a promise essentially
communicates not an intention to act, but the intention to place oneself
under an obligation to act. Suppose Tony promises Pat that he will help
with the harvest, although he does not intend to help with the harvest
because he assumes that Pat will later release him from his promise. So
long as Tony intends to become obliged to help with the harvest, then
Owens will classify his promise as sincere. Marušić (2015) argues for a
third account of sincerity: for him, a sincere promise must be under-
pinned not merely by an appropriate intention, but by a belief that the
promise will be kept. As Marušić shows, this raises all sorts of intriguing
issues about how such a belief may be rational in situations where
evidence suggests we’re likely to be tempted to break our promise.
There are many subtleties here, for example around the differences
between having an intention and foreseeing that you will acquire an
intention. Sometimes, it seems, we make a promise in an effort to acquire
an intention we wish we had. Fortunately, these subtleties are not
important for my purposes here, and neither is the issue of exactly
which intention is communicated by a promise. This is because sincerity
is not my main focus in the context of this book. I will argue that a
promise can be a bad promise even when the promisor has all the good
intentions and attitudes which might be thought relevant, including an
intention to act, an intention to become obliged to act, and a belief that
the promise will be kept.
 2.2 Promising to Behave Badly 31

Might we unwittingly make insincere promises, falsely but reasonably

believing ourselves to be sincere? If so, then we should distinguish sub-
jective from objective dimensions of evaluation. When Jill reasonably
believes that she intends to go to the gym, although she does not in fact
intend to go to the gym, she may be blameless in promising to do so.
Likewise if she falsely but reasonably believes she believes she will go to
the gym. Nevertheless there is an important sense in which Jill should
not have made the promise. With the benefit of hindsight, Jill might
reasonably say ‘I realize now that I didn’t really mean to go to the gym,
so I shouldn’t have promised to do so’. In chapters 4 and 5, I will discuss
what kind of self-knowledge we need in order to be trustworthy.
Insincere promises are sometimes kept, just as sincere promises are
sometimes broken. If an insincere promise-maker eventually keeps her
promise, we may regard the person as having redeemed matters some-
what. Nevertheless, we may still criticize the initial promise, and indeed
the person concerned should look back with some regret. We care about
whether promises are sincere, as well as whether they are eventually
kept or broken.

2.2 Promising to Behave Badly

What else do we care about? Sometimes a promise is wrong because it is

a promise to act immorally. Such promises are test cases for whether
promising to do something inevitably generates at least some obligation
to do it. On the one hand, the central point of promising is that it gener-
ates obligations; but on the other hand, surely an immoral act does
not inch closer to becoming obligatory when we promise to do it. The
broader context for this debate is the issue of how promises generate
obligations to act. Can we—should we?—derive an ‘ought’ from the ‘is’
of promising?
But we can recognize that we should not promise to act immorally,
regardless of whether such promises generate obligations. For starters, if
the immoral action involves a harm to others then a public promise is in
effect a threat, and can be condemned on those grounds. Even where
others are not immediately threatened, we should not promise to act
32 Promising

immorally. On the one hand, if making such promises generates even

a weak, outweighable, obligation to do something immoral, this counts
against making such promises. On the other hand, if such promises do
not generate obligations, they would still be problematic. Suppose the
person promising to act immorally intends to keep her promise: then
she is criticizable on those grounds. Suppose that the person intends
only to become obliged to act immorally (as Owens would require for
sincerity): it seems perverse to try to put oneself in this position. Suppose
instead she has no such intentions: then the promise is insincere.
Whichever way we look at them, promises to act immorally are bad news.
As before, extenuating circumstances may make promising to act
immorally permissible or even required, all things considered. To take a
standard type of example, suppose an undercover police agent promises
to assassinate a criminal’s rival, hoping with this promise to gain the
criminal’s trust. Assassinating the rival would be immoral. But merely
promising to do so does not seem so bad, might even be morally required
if this were the only way to further the investigation. In such cases, it’s
hard to imagine the agent having any kind of regret about having made
the promise. But this is because the criminal is not worthy of the usual
respect due to others. If instead the agent ends up promising to an inno-
cent bystander that she will perform some immoral act, this should
inspire some regret even if overall it would be the right thing to do.
As with the sincerity norm, we can assess the promise but we can also
assess what the promise-maker reasonably believed about her promise.
Suppose Jolene promises to do something which she reasonably but
mistakenly believes to be morally permissible. We might exonerate her
from blame, but nevertheless maintain that in some objective sense this
promise should not have been made. Indeed Jolene herself should regret
the promise once she appreciates the immorality of the act, even if she
recognizes that she is not blameworthy.
Holly M. Smith (1997) considers a principle somewhat like the norm
I am proposing:

Prohibition Principle: If an act would be wrong, all things considered

(independent of any promise to perform it), then it would be wrong,
all things considered, to promise to perform that act. (158)

Smith argues that the Prohibition Principle is falsified by cases such as

the undercover agent, where the promise is not all-things-considered
 2.3 Competence 33

wrong, even though assassinating the rival would itself be wrong. More
controversially, Smith also argues, aligning herself with Henry Sidgwick,
that ‘a promise can be morally permissible even in cases where the
promised act occurs and would be wrong were it not for the promise’
(159). That is, promising and then keeping a promise may be the overall
best option, even though it would have been wrong to take the action in
question had it not been promised. For example, it might be best overall
for a politician to make (and keep) a promise to implement a wasteful
policy, if that’s what it takes for her to win the election and implement a
host of good policies.
In effect, Smith advocates a norm on promise-making which is weaker
than the Prohibition Principle: she endorses promises like the politician’s
wasteful pledge, which the simple norm condemns. Fortunately, I do not
need to resolve this issue. My aim is to show that there are promises which
should not be made even though they satisfy very high standards of
sincerity and morality-of-promised-action, because we also assess
promises on a third dimension—that of competence.

2.3 Competence

A good promise requires both a sincere intention and the permissibility

of the action promised. But these together are not enough—sometimes
we go wrong by promising too much, even though we sincerely intend
to live up to our words and believe that we will. After all, it is easy to
misjudge either our own capacities or else what it will take to keep a
given promise. But what counts as over-promising? How cautious do we
need to be?
Julia Driver  (1983, 2011) discusses cases where people promise too
much, intentionally or unintentionally. Sometimes a person makes
conflicting promises and cannot keep them all, although any individual
promise could be kept at the expense of the others. Sometimes a person
makes an individual promise which simply cannot be kept. Driver’s main
concern is whether unkeepable promises generate obligations. If they
do, this undermines the idea that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’: the promisor ends
up with an obligation to do something she can’t in fact do. If they don’t,
this undermines the claim that promises inevitably generate some type
or degree of obligation. For my purposes, however, it matters only that
34 Promising

such unkeepable promises should not have been made in the first place;
moreover, I will not distinguish individual and collective unkeepability,
important though the distinction may be elsewhere.
Call this the ‘keepability norm’: do not make promises that you can-
not keep (don’t write cheques you can’t cash). As with other norms, we
should concede that the keepability norm can be overridden by other
considerations, most obviously in extreme circumstances where good
promising is not the foremost goal. If making an unkeepable promise is
the only way to save the world, then you should go right ahead and
promise. Moreover we can again distinguish subjective from objective
evaluation, separating the question whether a promise-maker reasonably
believes her promise to be keepable from the question whether the
promise is indeed keepable.
What’s wrong with unkeepable promises? It seems almost too obvious
to say, but if you make a promise which is unkeepable you condemn
yourself to breaking a promise, thus violating the basic requirement not
to break promises. This marks a difference from the other norms I dis-
cussed above: an insincere promise may nevertheless be kept, as may a
promise to act immorally. There are no unkeepable promises which are
nevertheless kept.
But we sometimes over-promise even though the promises we make
are individually and even collectively keepable: mere keepability is too
weak a constraint. Imagine that a child is brought into hospital, very sick,
with an unidentified, unfamiliar condition. The junior doctor oversee-
ing the case promises the parents that she will save their child’s life, and
this is what she sincerely intends to do. It turns out that the child’s
condition can be treated with a particular type of antibiotic, which the
doctor happens to try first, and so the doctor saves the child’s life. Great!
Still, a more experienced physician may rightly criticize the junior doc-
tor for having made such a rash promise: after all, she had no idea what
condition the child was suffering from, nor whether it would turn out to
be treatable. The doctor could have promised to try her best to save the
child. But she should not have simply and recklessly promised to save
the child.
Likewise, we can imagine reckless promises to track down a mysteri-
ous criminal, or to win an Olympic medal some day, or to learn to speak
Polish with no trace of an accent; in each case we can imagine that the
 2.3 Competence 35

promise is kept, against the odds. These are promises to do permissible,

indeed admirable, deeds. Such promises could be made sincerely: it’s
easy to imagine someone genuinely—optimistically—intending to do
these things, not just intending to try. Indeed, it’s fairly easy to imagine
someone genuinely, optimistically believing that she will successfully do
these things, as Marušić (2015) requires for sincerity. The promises
are keepable, indeed the promises are kept. Nevertheless, they seem
problematic—this is over-promising.
In all these cases, the promise is a sincere commitment to do some-
thing which is both practically possible and morally permissible.
Moreover, the promise-maker can reasonably believe that all this is so.
The junior doctor knows that she intends to save the child, and that this
would be a wonderful outcome. And she can quite reasonably believe
that it is possible to save the child’s life. After all, the child is still alive on
arrival at the hospital, which is full of medical personnel, drugs and
equipment. So the doctor satisfies the keepability norm, and moreover
she reasonably believes that she satisfies the norm, and thus is not criti-
cizable on this count.
The trouble is that mere keepability—the mere possibility of keeping
the promise—doesn’t seem enough, and likewise reasonable belief in
mere keepability doesn’t suffice to vindicate the promise-maker. We
evaluate promise-making by a more demanding standard. But what is
this more demanding standard? An attractive first thought is that, since
the mere possibility of keeping the promise is not enough, perhaps
what’s required is that the promise will in fact be kept: other things
being equal, a good promise is one which will be kept, and a bad prom-
ise is one which will be broken.
A first challenge to this first thought is that the junior doctor does
keep her promise, does successfully save the child’s life. Likewise, we
imagined the detective, the Olympic hopeful, and the aspiring Polish
speaker as successfully keeping their promises, against the odds. What,
then, has gone wrong in such cases? This first challenge is met by distin-
guishing our evaluation of the promise from our evaluation of the
promise-maker. Although such promises are good, because they will be
kept, the promise-makers themselves are reckless, because they cannot
reasonably believe that their promises will be kept, cannot reasonably
believe that they satisfy the will-be-kept norm. The junior doctor saves the
36 Promising

child, and reasonably believed that this was possible. But if she believed
that she would in fact save the child, that belief was not justified.
A tougher challenge is this. We can imagine various sorts of cases in
which someone makes a sincere promise to do something permissible,
that promise will be kept, and moreover the promisor reasonably believes
that all this is so; yet the promise is a bad promise. These cases are struc-
turally analogous to cases in which someone has a true, justified belief
and yet lacks knowledge.
Here is one sort of case. Suppose that Usha promises to buy Alan a
pint of the best beer in Borsetshire, but has no idea which this is. She
takes advice from the confident-seeming barman, and so she reasonably
believes she will buy the best beer. But the barman is brand new, knows
nothing about beer, and picks the best one merely by luck. So Usha
keeps her promise: she buys Alan a pint of the best beer in Borsetshire.
And Usha is quite reasonable in her belief that she is keeping her prom-
ise: it’s perfectly reasonable for her to take advice about beer from the
barman, who does seem to know what he is talking about.
Still, the promise seems problematic. You may be sceptical about my
evasive use of ‘problematic’. As a stopgap, consider how Usha might feel
later when she grasps the true situation. She might think that she had a
lucky escape, that if she had known the barman was a novice she would
not have made the promise, and that that would have been safer; she
might regret making the promise, even knowing that she did manage to
keep it. This is not an ideal promise: we shouldn’t make a habit of prom-
ising in this style, and should take steps to avoid such promising.
Here is a different sort of case. Faced with taking a ball at random
from an urn containing 999 red balls and one black, Sid reasonably
believes that he will pull out a red ball, and so he does. But he should not
promise to do so; if he did promise, we’d suspect he had rigged the draw.
If Sid promised to draw a red ball, he would be sincerely promising to
do something permissible, he would keep his promise, and he would
reasonably believe all this is so. Still, this is not the sort of promise he
ought to make, not an ideal promise.
When they make their promises, Usha and Sid each have a reasonable
true belief in their own success. But their beliefs do not amount to
knowledge. So it is tempting to suppose that good promising requires
not just success, and reasonable belief about success, but full-blown
 2.3 Competence 37

knowledge that one will successfully keep the promise. There is a really
bad way and an only slightly better way to spell out this suggestion. The
really bad way is to build a knowledge requirement into our ‘subjective’
evaluation of the promise-maker, to argue that a good promise is one
which will be kept, and a good promise-maker is someone who knows
her promise is good. This is a bad move because half the point of
separating subjective and objective evaluations is to exonerate people
who blamelessly violate an underlying norm. If blamelessness requires
knowledge that the norm is satisfied, then blameless violations of the
norm will be impossible.
The only slightly better way is to strengthen the norm itself: do not
make promises unless you know you will keep them. (The correspond-
ing ‘subjective’ evaluation would assess whether the promise-maker
reasonably believed she knew she would keep her promise.) Although
this is slightly better, it is nevertheless not much good, because it
imposes an enormously stringent requirement on promise-making.
Indeed, on reflection we might think that even the original success
requirement is too strong, that there are perfectly good promises which
nevertheless are eventually broken. This is not to say that it is sometimes
good to break a promise, though that may also be true if the circum-
stances are extreme. The thought is that a promise’s being broken does
not inevitably mean that it should not have been made in the first place;
one might regret breaking a promise yet not regret having made the
promise, even with hindsight.
This is a tricky business, as is reflected by some complicated remarks
from J. L. Austin:

you are prohibited from saying ‘I promise I will, but I may fail’ . . .
[however] ‘but I may fail’ does not mean merely ‘but I am a weak human
being’ (in which case it would be no more exciting than adding ‘D.V.’
[‘God willing’]): it means that there is some concrete reason for me to
suppose that I shall break my word. It is naturally always possible
(‘humanly’ possible) that I . . . may break my word, but that by itself is
not bar against using the expression . . . ‘I promise’. (1946: 170)

Austin makes these remarks whilst discussing the impropriety of saying

‘I know it is so, but I may be wrong’; such claims are not my direct focus
here. But I take two main points from what Austin says. First, there is
38 Promising

something like a performative contradiction in saying out loud ‘I promise

I will, but there is some concrete reason for me to suppose that I shall
break my word’. Of course, it may be true that you promise even though
there is concrete reason for you to think that you will break your prom-
ise, so there is no outright inconsistency here. But there is something
self-undermining about putting things this way. In my view, this reflects
the existence of a competence norm on promise-making: to acknowledge
that there is a concrete reason to think you will not succeed is to
acknowledge your lack of proper competence in this regard. Thus you
simultaneously announce your promise and announce that you are
violating a norm of promising.
Marušić (2015) offers an alternative explanation of why it is problem-
atic to say ‘I promise I will, but there is some concrete reason for me to
suppose that I shall break my word’. In his view, this would reveal either
that the promise is insincere, because the promisor does not believe that
she will keep the promise, or else that the promise is based on an unrea-
sonable belief that the promise will be kept, unreasonable because the
promisor openly acknowledges that there is concrete reason not to
believe this. Marušić’s primary concern is the internal consistency of the
promisor’s stance regarding her commitments and future behaviour. As
will emerge later, I am more concerned with the promisor’s social
situation, including the judgements of others regarding her competence,
and I want to retain sight of the idea that a promise is a good one if
based on underlying competence, even if the promisor herself is uncer-
tain about this. She may be subjectively in a non-ideal state, but that
does not automatically undermine the quality of her promise. Conversely,
I want to retain sight of the issues around both Sid and Usha, who seem
internally consistent and subjectively reasonable, yet make what seem
from an external perspective to be problematic promises.
The second point I take from the Austin passage is that there is no
performative contradiction in saying ‘I promise I will, but I am a weak
human being, at God’s mercy’. This suggests that actually keeping a
promise is not a condition of properly making it in the first place. Good
promise-making is compatible with the outside chance of failure to keep
the promise, through an act of God or through general human frailty.
Again, this marks a contrast between my concerns and those of Marušić:
 2.3 Competence 39

his central cases are those in which temptation, or insufficient trying,

are the principal obstacles to success, rather than broader worldly (or
other-worldly) challenges.
So mere keepability is not enough, and arguably actually keeping a
promise is neither necessary (bad luck doesn’t make a promise bad in
retrospect) nor sufficient (good luck doesn’t always make for a good
promise). Instead, I suggest that something like competence to keep the
promise is a norm on promise-making: do not make promises you are
not competent to keep. I will now show how this accounts for the coun-
terexamples to other proposed norms. And I will offer some clarification
of what competence amounts to, but I will not offer anything approach-
ing a reductive analysis of competence. (I return to related issues in
section  5.2, where I discuss how best to individuate competences and
how to match commitment to competence.)
Recall the case of the junior doctor, where obeying the keepability
norm—and reasonably believing oneself to do so—is not enough. The
doctor does not have insight into the child’s condition, nor any unusual
skill of diagnosing and treating such conditions (unlike, say, the protag-
onist of the TV drama House). It is through good fortune that she
happened first to try the antibiotics which worked. The promise to save
the child was keepable, and indeed kept, but the doctor was not compe-
tent to keep the promise. This is not to say that she was an incompetent
doctor; the point is just that she, like most doctors other than House,
lacks competence in this particular respect.
What about Usha and Sid? Usha kept her promise to buy the best beer
in Borsetshire, relying upon the testimony of the novice barman, so
succeeding only through good luck. My suggestion is that Usha did not
succeed through exercise of her competence. Again, it’s not that she is a
totally incompetent beer buyer, who thinks that beer is sold by the gram
at the library. Rather, she is was not competent to keep the specific
promise she made. Sid reliably draws a red ball from the urn, but should
not promise to do so. Why not? Because it is not competence at drawing
red balls on demand that explains his success. Conversely, a competence
norm can explain why promises which are broken through bad luck are
not automatically bad promises. This is because competence is not an
absolute guarantee of success: circumstances may be unusual in various
40 Promising

ways which frustrate us in the exercise of our competence. So it is possible

to satisfy the competence norm, thus making a good promise, even when
the promise is not kept.
My suggestion is that promises are subject to a competence norm: do
not make promises unless you are competent to keep them. As with the
other norms, we should allow that incompetent promises may be all-
things-considered permissible if the stakes are high, and we should also
distinguish the question of competence from the question of whether
the promise-maker reasonably believed that she was competent to
keep the promise.
What, then, is competence? Just as I failed to offer a reductive account
of commitment, I will fail to offer a reductive account of competence.
But this is unsurprising, given that most of us have given up trying to
offer reductive accounts of notions such as knowledge. We can, however,
identify a number of relevant features. Competence is a matter both of
the person’s intrinsic qualities and dispositions and also of the environ-
ment she finds herself in. Competence is not a guarantee of success,
even when combined with good intentions: this explains why the suc-
cess norm seems too strong in some circumstances. And lack of suitable
competence may not amount to ‘incompetence’ in the normal sense: the
junior doctor is a competent doctor, just as competent as her peers, but
is nevertheless not competent to save a child with the unusual condition.
Is competence a statistical notion: do not promise unless there is a
high probability you will succeed? Consideration of lottery situations
suggests otherwise. Sid should not promise to draw a red ball, even
though there is a high probability he will keep such a promise. On the
other hand, a skilled baker’s promise to make a delicious cake seems
perfectly acceptable, even though there’s some real chance that the oven
will break down, or the power will fail.
Ernest Sosa has made sophisticated, fruitful use of the notion of com-
petence in his epistemology. For Sosa, ‘Competences are dispositions of
an agent to perform well’ (2010: 465), and, like dispositions generally,
they have a three-part structure: constitution, condition, and situation.
In the case of archery competence, these take in respectively ‘the seat of
the archer’s skill’, her being awake and sober, and the external circum-
stances, such as lighting and weather, which are conducive to success.
Likewise, the competence required for good promise-making should
 2.3 Competence 41

encompass all three of these elements, including appropriate external

circumstances, and not just internal constitution; the role of external
circumstances will be a major theme in later chapters.
I will continue to treat competence as a kind of placeholder notion—
we will be able to say a bit more about what kind of feature it is in the
light of later discussions. My primary purpose is not to pin down an
exact notion, but rather to get a good enough grip to be able to explore
the connections to trustworthiness and to our social dealings around
competence, knowledge, and judgements thereof. For now, the key points
are that competence is not mere success, and nor is it mere justified
belief about success: it is something like a steady, reliable capacity to
achieve success. In the second half of this book I will be concerned with
practical issues around competence, commitment, and trustworthiness:
for the most part, answers to the interesting questions do not turn on
precise formulations of the core terms.
My overarching goal in this chapter is to argue for the existence of this
kind of third norm on promise-making. In the next chapter I will argue
that there is a parallel norm on telling, or assertion-making. I will explain
this parallel by arguing that assertion-making involves promise-making.
This means that readers who prefer success to competence, or have
specific views about competence, can stay on board to see what conse-
quences their preference should have when it comes to assertion. It is
philosophically contentious which norms govern assertion, so it should
not be a surprise if the exact form and strength of the norms governing
promise-making are equally open to dispute. Indeed these parallel
disputes reinforce my claim that promise-making and assertion-making
are linked.
That said, I do think that the competence norm is more plausible than
the success norm. Part of my argument relied upon contestable intu-
itions about cases, such as Usha, Sid, the junior doctor, the skilled baker,
and so on. Intuitions about such matters are especially prone to haziness,
given the availability of both ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ dimensions of
evaluation: if a case seems intuitively problematic, is this because a norm
has been violated, or because the promise-maker has not been careful
enough about whether she satisfies the norm?
One way to circumvent this reliance on intuitions is to consider what
norms for promise-making we should expect there to be, given the
42 Promising

nature and source of our obligation to keep our promises. There are, of
course, differing philosophical accounts of why we should keep our
promises, and to some extent these correspond to variation in the detail
of what we should say about the exact competence norm. I will not
explore this issue in detail. But I will sketch how different accounts of
promissory obligations might explain certain competence-related norms
on promise-making. The literature on promising is strikingly concerned
with the temptation to make insincere promises, whilst issues of incom-
petence or recklessness rarely reach the surface. Nevertheless, the concerns
which direct us towards sincerity also direct us towards competence.

2.4 Why These Norms?

Promises typically generate obligations, and it would be very surprising

if norms on promise-making were independent of this fact. Indeed, we
might expect the nature and importance of norms on promise-making
to derive from the nature and importance of the promise-keeping norm.
So why is it that we should keep our promises?
T. M. Scanlon (1998: 300) identifies what he calls ‘the principle of
Due Care’.

Principle D: One must exercise due care not to lead others to form
reasonable but false expectations about what one will do when one has
good reason to believe that they would suffer significant loss as a result
of relying on these expectations.

Promising to do something can often give rise to reasonable expectations

that one will act as promised, and often a promisee puts herself at risk of
significant loss by relying upon a promisor. In such circumstances, prin-
ciple D directs us to exercise due care not to make promises we will
break. Scanlon focuses primarily on good intentions, but due care must
also demand something like competence to act as promised.
As Scanlon shows however, Principle D seems to permit changes of
mind about what we will do, so long as we warn others before they put
themselves at risk of significant loss, or else compensate them for any
loss incurred. But promises don’t work that way: I cannot ‘keep’ my
promise to do something either by warning you I will not do it after all
 2.4 Why These Norms? 43

or by compensating you for my failure to act. More generally, I am not

released from my promise if it turns out you will suffer no significant loss
if I do not keep my promise. Once I have promised to do something, my
only option is to go ahead and do it, unless you release me.
Scanlon accounts for this in terms of the value of assurance, claiming
that when expectations are raised, and assurance openly offered and
accepted—as in a promise—then the assurer is obliged to act as expected.
(Scanlon’s Principle F (Scanlon 1998: 304) is more complex than this,
but these elements are key for my purposes.) This in turn is justified by
reference to Scanlon’s contractualist moral theory, and the interest that
we all have in being able to obtain, and to offer, assurance. Again, this
points towards requirements both for an intention to perform and for
competence to do so: ‘assurance’ is not the genuine assurance we value
unless it is backed by competence, and the degree of competence required
is all the greater where neither warning nor compensating are permis-
sible options.
Rawls  (1971) explains our obligation to keep promises in terms of
fairness: since we have benefited in the past from the practice of promis-
ing, we would be free-riders if we now broke our promises. On this
picture, the existence of sincerity and competence norms on promise-
making is to be expected: if it were common practice to make incompetent
promises, the institution of promising would not have the hoped-for
benefits of helping ‘to set up and to stabilize small-scale schemes of
cooperation’ (346), and without these benefits there would be no fairness-
based reasons for us to keep our promises.
David Owens (2012) rejects both Scanlon’s account and that of Rawls,
arguing that the key function of promising is to transfer authority: when
I promise you to do something, I give you authority over me in that
respect. ‘I maintain that promising exists because it serves our authority
interest, our interest in having the right to oblige others to do certain
things.’ (146) Why should I ensure that I give you authority over me
only in respect of things I am willing and able to do? A very general
explanation is available here: perhaps I ought to make it the case that if
I ought to do something then I do it. This explanation is general both in
that it would apply to other situations in which we have some control
over our obligations—not just through promise-making—and also in
that it is available to Scanlon, Rawls, and others.
44 Promising

Does the notion of an authority interest suggest any more specific

explanation of why promising might be governed by particular norms?
Perhaps I can transfer authority only if I already have it myself, and
perhaps there is a sense in which I myself do not have authority over
whether I do something unless I am competent in that respect. Perhaps,
but perhaps not: this line of thought (which I do not attribute to Owens)
blurs normative authority together with practical control, and moreover
suggests that it is simply impossible to make an incompetent promise.
Owens’s account of promising in terms of our authority interest does
not readily explain why promise-making should be governed by either a
sincerity or a competence norm, except insofar as such norms may
govern any voluntary acquisition of an obligation. This can be seen as a
challenge either to Owens or to me. But Owens does acknowledge that
in practice promising often does serve our information interest (our
interest in giving and obtaining assurance), and he explains this in terms
of the primary importance of the authority interest. Thus Owens can
allow that promise-making will often be governed by the norms I have
identified, even whilst denying that these are constitutive or essential to
promise-making.
Scanlon, Rawls, and Owens do not exhaust the possibilities in this area,
but they do represent important strands of thought about the nature of
promising. With this express tour, I have merely sought to illustrate how
these rival frameworks can give us different reasons to expect promise-
making to be governed by certain kinds of norm, including both sincerity
and competence.
We might now wonder what the source of this normativity is. Are
these moral norms, whatever that means? Are we under a moral obliga-
tion to make sincere, competent promises if we make promises at all?
Promises to act immorally are often referred to as ‘immoral promises’, or
‘wicked promises’, following J. E. J. Altham:

The example I shall consider is of a promise to do something that there

is a stringent obligation not to do. I call such promises wicked, thinking
mainly of the wicked things that would be done if they were carried
out, but recognising also the wickedness of making them, where the
promisor is in a position to know what he is about. (1985: 1)

Is it likewise ‘wicked’ or at least morally wrong to make insincere or

incompetent promises? I am inclined to think that it is. But one potential
 2.5 Offering to Promise 45

obstacle is that I want to understand norms on telling as a special cases

of norms on promise-making, and it may seem contentious to regard
norms on telling as moral norms. For that reason, I will return to this
issue at the end of chapter 3, following my discussion of telling.

2.5 Offering to Promise

Throughout this chapter, I have discussed norms which govern promise-

making, taking it for granted that these norms apply to the person
making the promise, not to anyone else. But it takes two to promise.
Making a promise generates an obligation to a particular person (or
people) to whom the promise is made. And these obligations are not
generated unless the promise is accepted. Often when someone says
‘I promise to . . .’ this is best understood as an irrevocable offer to take on
promissory obligations, should the audience accept the offer. In some
contexts, for example where a promise has been requested, acceptance is
already in place. We see a similar pattern with offers to bet, offers to buy,
and so on; this is no coincidence.
Is there any onus upon an audience to accept an offer only where the
resulting promise satisfies the norms I have already discussed? Should
you decline someone’s offer to promise if you know that she is insincere,
or incapable of keeping such a promise? In practice, all sorts of consid-
erations will be in play, depending upon your relationship to the promise-
offerer, whether she is a child or adult, the costs and benefits of causing
her embarrassment either now or later, the interests of any third parties,
and so on. Sometimes we can benefit when others wrong us (for example,
when they break their promises to us); the moral high ground has many
advantages. In general, it seems unduly demanding to suppose that we
have obligations to prevent others from making bad promises to us.
Conversely, what about situations in which someone offers to promise,
but the offer is not accepted, so no promise is made: are such situations
governed by the norms of sincerity, competence, and permissibility-
of-promised-action? Suppose first that the person making the offer knows
that the offer will not be accepted. Even so, it seems to me, there is some-
thing problematic about holding oneself to lower standards in such a
situation. The point about an offer is to put oneself at the disposal of
the person to whom the offer is made, and one should not offer to do
46 Promising

something one is not in a position to do, even if one knows the offer will
be rejected. For example, I should not offer to give you something which
does not belong to me, even if I know you will not accept my offer.
Suppose instead that the person making the offer is not in a position
to know that the offer will be rejected. Then it seems even more clear
that she should not offer a promise which would, if accepted, violate the
norms of promise-making: she does not know that she will avoid violat-
ing those norms, and even if she did, as above, this does not seem to
justify her behaviour.
I am not surveying all the possibilities here: we would need to distin-
guish different epistemic and doxastic situations for both parties, dis-
tinguish more rigorously between assessing the offerer’s actions and
assessing her blameworthiness, and perhaps be more careful about what
exactly is required by sincerity. Nevertheless, I will continue to suppose
that we should not even offer incompetent promises. The issue of offering
promises which we do not expect to be accepted may seem rather niche.
But it is relevant to a range of situations in which we offer (purported)
information to others, through attempted testimony, assertion, or telling:
this is the topic of the next chapter.
For now, I hope to have established the following points. Promise-
making is governed by norms which derive from the norm that one
should keep one’s promises. These include a norm of competence: don’t
make promises you are not competent to keep, where competence
requires both more and less than successful promise-keeping. Rival
theories of why we ought to keep our promises provide foundations for
different accounts of why it is we should not make promises we are not
competent to keep. Since promise-making is a paradigmatic, though not
entirely typical, situation in which we incur new commitments, these
constraints on promise-making give us some insight into the demands
of trustworthiness—I will explore this connection in chapter 4.
Admittedly, I have not pinned down exactly what it is to be competent
in some respect, nor what it is to succeed through the exercise of com-
petence. Yet it’s clear that something of this sort is missing in cases where
promises are problematic even though they are sincere. Appreciating the
importance of competence for promise-making raises questions that
I will explore in the remainder of the book. For example, how do we judge
our own competence so as to become good promise-makers (which might
 Additional Sources 47

sometimes mean declining to promise)? How do we judge others in

respect of their promise-making skills, and how does this relate to judg-
ing their trustworthiness? Emphasis on the role of competence in good
promise-making will also allow me to draw fruitful connections between
promising and telling, the topic of chapter 3.

Additional Sources

2.1 Sincerity. Stokke (2014) discusses insincerity and conscious mental

attitudes. D’Cruz and Kalef (2015) respond to Marušić’s earlier articulation
of his account in his (2013).
Shiffrin (2014) is an important contribution to these debates.
2.2 Promising to Behave Badly. Altham (1985) is an important discussion
of ‘wicked promises’, whilst Searle  (1969) focuses on the relationship
between ‘ought’ and ‘is’ here.
2.3 Competence. The arguments for a competence norm on promising
shadow Williamson’s (2000: chapter 11) arguments for a knowledge norm
on assertion, including lottery concerns, conversational patterns around
assertion, and Moore’s paradoxical claims. Usha’s promise about beer-
buying is analogous to the ‘Gettiered’ justified true belief of someone
who falls short of knowledge (Gettier 1963). Hawley (2018b) takes up
some analogous issues around competence and creativity. Hawthorne
and Stanley (2008: 578) discuss the shakiness of intuitions about norm
violations.
2.4 Why These Norms? There is an extensive philosophical literature
about the nature of promising. Heuer (2012a, 2012b) provides a helpful
review, and the essays in Sheinman (ed.) (2011) cover a lot of interesting
ground.
2.5 Offering to Promise. Here I draw on (Owens 2006: 73) and (Thomson
1990: 298).
 3
Telling

Trusting someone to keep her promises typically means trusting her as

an agent, relying upon her to behave as she has committed to behaving.
But not all trust concerns action: we also face important decisions about
whose words to trust, in both private and public spheres. It is no coinci-
dence that we speak of trust, distrust, and betrayal both in regard to
speech and in regard to practical action. So, given my emphasis on
commitment in connection with trust and distrust, it’s important for me
to show how trusting other people’s words involves relying upon them
to fulfil a commitment. The present chapter therefore focuses on trust
and telling—that is, speech (or writing, or signing) which purports to
offer reliable information to others.
In chapter 2, I argued that promise-making is governed by norms of
sincerity, competence, and permissibility of what’s promised. In this
chapter, I will argue that we can understand telling as involving a promise
to speak truthfully. And I will argue that telling is governed by norms of
sincerity, competence, and permissibility of speaking truthfully on that
matter. Across the two chapters, the cluster of claims is mutually
supportive: it is independently plausible that telling is governed by such
norms, and moreover this is just what we should expect if telling
involves promising.
I am not the first to suggest that telling and promising are somehow
connected. But, in my view, this connection has not previously been
articulated in the most plausible fashion, and so has been vulnerable to
easy objections. Exploring the connection also has a broader purpose in
the context of this book. It helps us understand the way in which
‘epistemic’ or ‘intellectual’ trust, distrust, and trustworthiness are related
to their practical counterparts: trusting someone to speak truthfully is a
special case of trusting him or her to do something. This will allow me
to move between epistemic and practical concerns in later chapters

How To Be Trustworthy. Katherine Hawley, Oxford University Press (2019). © Katherine Hawley.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843900.001.0001
 3.1 Telling and Asserting 49

more easily, and to explore what obstacles there are to trustworthiness

in each domain.

3.1 Telling and Asserting

I am interested in situations where people purport to offer information

in a relatively serious fashion (although the information itself may be
trivial), presenting it as truthful. We make assertions, testify, and tell
each other things, and there has been plenty of recent philosophical
discussion of such activity, cast in quite varying terminology. Telling
seems often to be regarded as something we do in, through, or by
making an assertion to an audience, whereas it is possible to make an
assertion with no audience around. On this picture, we assert without
telling when writing in a private diary or soliloquizing on the windswept
moors. But different philosophers writing on these topics use terms in
different ways. Even if assertion is possible without an audience on some
particular occasion, it is nevertheless a social practice generated by our
need to give information to one another.
The social nature of language and communication means that in
practice we do not exercise absolute authority over what we do with our
words. We may sometimes make commitments we did not anticipate, or
fail to make commitments we intended to incur. We can incur commit-
ment through speech even when we do not present ourselves as making
serious assertion—for example by failing to object to a suggestion, by
asking loaded questions, or by our choice between apparent synonyms.
But I will defer these complications and grey areas to chapter  5, and
focus in this chapter on more straightforward assertion or telling.
There is a tangle of issues and terminology here, and my main con-
cern is to extract the notion which is most useful for thinking about
trust, distrust, trustworthiness, and competence. If we focused solely on
trust, it might seem that the core situation is one in which someone
offers (purported) information, or offers to do something, and in conse-
quence others come to rely upon the speaker. Thus it might seem that
the interesting issues arise only once the speech is somehow properly
received by an audience. But, as elsewhere, we should also keep distrust
in focus whilst theorizing. If the speaker knows that she will be
50 Telling

distrusted, does she have any obligations to speak truthfully? What if the
speaker knows that she will simply be ignored, not treated as eligible for
either trust or distrust? Indeed, issues of trustworthiness arise even
before anyone speaks, as we consider who to ask for their opinion, or
who to ask for practical help.
These concerns connect naturally with the issues around promising
and offering to promise which I discussed at the end of chapter  2. To
explore them properly, I first need to explain how and why, in my view,
asserting or telling involves a kind of promise, and so I will return to
these issues later in this chapter. For now, I will stick to the terminology
of ‘assertion’ rather than ‘telling’, mainly because this fits with the majority
of the authors I engage with. But the paradigm case is one in which an
assertion is made to an audience, and involves at least an attempt to tell
someone something.

3.2 Connecting Asserting with Promising

Assertion is a way of speaking seriously, more so than in play-acting,

sleep-talk, or speculation; many philosophers have thought that asserting
involves taking responsibility for something, or making a commitment
of some kind, or offering something to the audience. So it is not a
coincidence that there are norms governing the assertions we may
make. Moral issues around lying and the norm of sincerity have been
debated since philosophy began; contemporary debate has dwelt on
whether we ought to know what we are talking about, as well as sincerely
believing what we say.
Likewise, promise-making is a serious business, which involves
taking responsibility, or committing, or offering, and which is governed
by norms, as I discussed in chapter  2. But if we try to assimilate
asserting to promise-making, we seem to face an unattractive dilemma.
Philosophical accounts of promising standardly focus on promising to
do something, whereas asserting seems to be a matter of asserting that
something is true. So if we want to treat assertion as a form of promise,
then either we have to assimilate asserting that to promising that, or
else we have to work out what we are promising to do when we make
an assertion.
 3.2 Connecting Asserting with Promising 51

The first of these options is not attractive. Asserting that the front
door is locked amounts to something less than promising that the
front door is locked. Someone who promises that the door is locked needs
to be in a stronger epistemic situation than does someone who asserts
that the door is locked. She seems to be taking more responsibility onto
her own shoulders when she promises, and this is why we sometimes
ask people to promise that something is true, even when they have
already asserted it—sometimes we want more than just an assertion.
But the second option—identifying assertion with a promise to do
something—can seem problematic too. In particular, where a proposition
concerns the speaker’s future behaviour, the difference between promising
to do something and asserting is crucial: if I promise to come to your
party, then (barring emergencies) I am obliged to come to your party,
whilst if I assert that I will come to your party, then at most I am obliged
to inform you if my plans change. Promising to do something seems to
be more charged with responsibility than merely asserting or predicting
that I will do it.
So it is tempting to account for assertion in terms of promising, but
difficult to see how. My preference is for the second option, that is, the
claim that asserting involves promising to do something. I need to show
how we can take this option whilst recognizing the difference between
my promising to do something and merely asserting that I will do that
very thing. That is the central task of this chapter.
I claim that asserting as to whether p involves both

(a) promising to speak truthfully as to whether p; and

(b) speaking truthfully or untruthfully as to whether p, i.e. keeping
or breaking the promise.

I focus on ‘asserting as to whether p’; this contrasts with the more

standard focus on ‘asserting that p’ or ‘asserting p’. But what is it to assert
as to whether p? As I stipulatively use the phrase, there are two ways to
do this: either one asserts that p, or one asserts that not-p. To make an
assertion as to whether the front door is locked, I must either assert that
the front door is locked, or assert that the front door is not locked.
There are various other assertions one might make about whether
the front door is locked. One might assert that it’s insignificant whether the
front door is locked, unknown whether the front door is locked, even
52 Telling

taboo to discuss whether the front door is locked. One might assert that
it’s probable that the front door is locked, or possible that the front door
is locked. But for my purposes none of these will count as asserting as to
whether the front door is locked.
‘Speaking’ here is a neutral term, which could be substituted by ‘writing’
or ‘signing’ (e.g. in BSL or ASL). Speaking as to whether p can be done
without asserting—e.g. as part of a game, or whilst performing in a play.
A speaker speaks truthfully as to whether p if she says that p and p is
true, or if she says that not-p and not-p is true: speaking truthfully
requires match between words and world, rather than words and beliefs.
(Where beliefs are the topic of conversation, then beliefs are part of the
world, in the relevant sense.)
This means that, on my view, assertion involves a promise to speak in
ways which in fact match the world, not merely to do one’s best on this
front. Assertions are therefore faulty when they are in fact false, even if
the speaker could not have known this, indeed even if nobody could
have known the truth of this matter. In my view this is an advantage of
the account, since factually inaccurate assertions are indeed faulty; more
broadly this fits with the themes of chapters 4, 5, and 6, where I explore
how we can unwittingly become untrustworthy. Nevertheless, uninten-
tional falsehoods are usually treated with more sympathy than intentional
lies; I return to questions of blame and criticism later in this chapter.
I claim that assertion involves a promise, but it is not only a promise:
assertion also involves keeping or breaking that very promise. So the
promise made in assertion is unusual, because it is simultaneously made
and kept, or else simultaneously made and broken. More usually, a
promise binds us to act at some later time, specified or unspecified,
somehow offering assurance to others about our future behaviour. (We
can accept that promises often assure without determining whether this
is constitutive of their role.) One reason to value this assurance is that
guidance and insight about the future are otherwise in short supply,
especially where others’ free actions are concerned.
But it is not only the future which can be hidden from us. Often the
audience for an assertion lacks independent access to whether what is
said is true. This explains why a promise to speak truthfully can be valuable
in such a case. Even though it is simultaneously kept or broken, it is not
is immediately obvious which of these has occurred, and so the fact that
 3.2 Connecting Asserting with Promising 53

the speaker has promised to speak truthfully offers assurance of the

truth of what’s said.
Here is a different example of a promise which is simultaneously
made and kept-or-broken. Clarrie asks Eddy ‘Do you promise to say
your next word as loudly as you can?’ Eddy shouts back ‘YES!’ but it is
not obvious whether this is his maximum volume. Eddy promises to
speak as loudly as he can manage, and simultaneously either keeps or
breaks the promise. For Clarrie the promise has the same value as it
would if it were a promise about some future state of affairs.
Could a promise be kept by a past action? Suppose that Shula is anxious
for Elizabeth to destroy a private diary for her. Elizabeth has already
destroyed the diary, but explaining this would be complicated or embar-
rassing. Instead, she simply says ‘Yes, I promise to destroy the diary’.
There is something misleading about this, since it at least implicates that
the deed has not yet been done (perhaps Elizabeth could weaken this
by  saying instead ‘I promise to ensure that the diary is destroyed’).
Moreover it’s not the most informative thing which Elizabeth could say,
given the circumstances. Nevertheless, it functions to assure Shula much
as a promise would do, and it looks more like a kept promise than a
broken promise. Can we identify what Elizabeth says with a promise
that she has destroyed the diary? No, but I will wait until section  3.5
before discussing what it is to promise that something is the case.
I don’t need to insist that such retrospective ‘promises’ are indeed
promises. But I do put weight on the ideas that promises can be simul-
taneously made and kept-or-broken, and that such promises can be
valuable to an audience. I hope that readers who still cannot accept
that such simultaneously kept-or-broken commitments are genuine
promises will nevertheless be able to understand my claims in this
chapter as concerning the type of commitments which are typically
generated by promises, which come with the norms and social role
promises typically involve.
Does simultaneity collapse any distinction between a promise and a
mere offer to promise? After all, in chapter 2 I endorsed the view that
promissory obligations are generated only when promises are accepted.
But, as I noted then, an offer to promise may be immediately binding if
acceptance has been indicated ahead of time: if I ask you to promise,
then I don’t need to specify later that I accept your promise, since my
54 Telling

acceptance is implicit in my request. Even where it’s less clear whether

the audience will accept what’s offered, a promise-offerer needs to be
cautious, acting on the assumption that the offer to promise will receive
uptake, since it will be too late to change matters once this becomes
clear. If a promise must be simultaneously kept, in order to be kept at all,
then the promise-offerer must act to keep the promise; in this case, to
speak truthfully.
To help make the case for this promise-based account of assertion,
I will show how the proposal differs from the stronger view, associated
with Brandom (1983), that assertion involves a commitment to defend-
or-retract in the future. I will also show how the proposal can explain
why testimony—offering information to others—involves ‘assurance’,
but that it doesn’t entail that such assurance has a distinctive epistemic
significance. And I will show how this proposal differs from the dis-
credited idea that an assertion that the front door is locked is simply a
promise that the front door is locked.

3.3 Asserting and Committing

It is widely thought that asserting involves taking responsibility, mak-

ing oneself accountable, making a commitment, or undertaking some-
thing. For Peirce, ‘to assert a proposition is to make oneself responsible
for its truth’ (1932: 384). For Searle an assertion of p ‘counts as an
undertaking to the effect that p represents an actual state of affairs’
(1969: 66). For Alston, an assertion that p involves a speaker’s taking
responsibility for its being the case that p (2000: 120); more generally,
Alston understands a whole variety of speech in terms of the speaker’s
taking responsibility for the satisfaction of relevant conditions. For
Williamson, ‘To make an assertion is to confer a responsibility (on
oneself) for the truth of its content; to satisfy the rule of assertion, by
having the requisite knowledge, is to discharge that responsibility, by
epistemically ensuring the truth of the content.’ (2000: 268–9). For
Williamson, the relevant responsibility is simultaneously self-conferred
and discharged in the very act of assertion: likewise on my account
everything happens at once, as a promise is simultaneously made and
kept-or-broken.
 3.3 Asserting and Committing 55

According to ‘commitment accounts’ of assertion, in contrast, the

responsibility extends beyond the moment of assertion. Brandom
suggests ‘taking the commitment involved in asserting to be the under-
taking of justificatory responsibility for what is claimed’ (1983: 641): to
assert p is to become committed to justifying the claim that p, if challenged
to do so. In his (2005) MacFarlane says that ‘commitment to withdraw
the assertion if and when it is shown to have been untrue’ (318) is also
involved: retraction in the face of counter-evidence fulfils a commit-
ment made in assertion, rather than abandoning it. This is the same
general notion of commitment as I used in chapter  1 in setting out
my  commitment account of trust and distrust. That is, it is not the
psychological sense of having a determined intention—one can have
a commitment in this sense whilst having no intention of fulfilling
the commitment.
In contrast, more recently MacFarlane writes that the commitment
view ‘offers a simple and natural account of retraction, as the act of
backing out of a commitment to the truth of the asserted proposition’
(2011: 91). This makes sense only if we understand commitment as a
kind of determined intention, rather than something which generates
obligations to others: retraction is often legitimate, whereas promise-
like commitments cannot legitimately and unilaterally be abandoned.
More charitably, we can read MacFarlane as pointing out that once you
retract an assertion, you are no longer obliged to justify it. Then on this
view commitment to truth is best understood as commitment to either
justify or retract.
My view that asserting involves promising to speak truthfully is a
version of the idea that asserting involves taking responsibility for the
truth of what is said. However it does not entail that assertion involves
commitments which reach beyond the moment of making the assertion,
with regard either to justification or retraction. Let me explain.
My account does not entail that assertion involves commitment to go
on and justify. People who promise to do something become obliged to
do it; they do not thereby become obliged to provide evidence of having
done so if challenged. My son promises to finish his homework before
dinner without thereby agreeing to show me the completed homework:
he can keep his promise without showing me that he has done so.
Likewise, a promise to speak truthfully is kept by speaking truthfully;
56 Telling

speakers are not required in addition to provide evidence that they have
spoken truthfully, even if challenged.
So assertions do not automatically involve justificatory commitments,
on my view. But we can appreciate why speakers are often under pressure
to justify their assertions if challenged. My son fulfils his obligations—
keeps his promise—even though he does not show me his homework.
My main concern is that he do his homework, but I would also like
assurance on this front, so that I can relax: I value my son’s promise
more if he is also willing to show me the completed homework. Likewise,
assertions are often more valuable to the audience, and thus indirectly to
the speaker, where they are accompanied by a justificatory commitment.
So it is not surprising if assertions often come with this extra commit-
ment, even though the commitment is not incurred merely by asserting.
Such situations involve many social complexities. Perhaps my son
refuses to show his homework because he wants me to trust him, to
take him at his word. Perhaps my inability to relax otherwise does
reveal a lack of trust, but my son’s refusal to offer assurance makes
trusting even harder. More generally an assertion which does not
come accompanied with a commitment to later justify does seem to
embody a kind of challenge to the audience: take it or leave it, trust
me or don’t. When we hear a surprising assertion, we may ask in
response ‘how do you know?’ But it’s not obvious that we are entitled
to an answer to that question.
What about retraction? Suppose I promise to lock the door when
leaving your house, but forget to do so. Once I realize what I have done,
I may have a number of obligations: to let you know, to apologize, to
compensate you if possible. Related actions may be appropriate even if
I merely doubt whether I have locked the door. Moreover I might regret
my promise, and might inform you of my regrets, either before or after
I leave the house. But that doesn’t change my commitments and obliga-
tions, unless you decide to release me from the promise. None of this
amounts to retracting the promise, because promises cannot be unilat-
erally retracted once accepted.
So if an assertion involves a promise to speak truthfully, then it
involves a commitment or undertaking which cannot simply be
retracted; the commitment is immediately fulfilled, or not. Nevertheless,
we can make sense of the obligations of those who realise they have not
 3.4 Promising, Asserting, and Assuring 57

spoken truthfully: these are the obligations of compensation and

apology owed by someone who realises she has broken a promise.
A promise to do something generates an obligation to do that very thing,
not an obligation to either do it or else inform, apologize and compensate
(this is one respect in which promises seem to differ from contracts).
Nevertheless, someone who promises to do something and breaks this
promise may thereby acquire obligations to inform, apologize, and
compensate.
If I have promised to speak truthfully as to whether p, and I realize
I have broken this promise, then likewise I am perhaps obliged to let you
know that I did not speak truthfully, to apologize, and to compensate
you if possible. Some similar actions may be appropriate even if I merely
come to doubt whether I have spoken truthfully. This explains why
we expect certain behaviours of someone who realizes she asserted a
falsehood, even on the assumption that assertion does not involve a
commitment to justify what’s said.
So my account of assertion in terms of promising to speak truthfully
fits into a tradition of understanding assertion as a type of undertaking
or commitment, without entailing anything as extensive as Brandom’s or
MacFarlane’s ‘commitment’ accounts of assertion. Nevertheless, it can
help explain why we sometimes feel pressure to justify our assertions,
and to apologize when we get things wrong. Moreover, those who still
find it plausible that assertion entails commitments to justify could
adopt a version of my view according to which assertion involves both
promising to speak truthfully and promising to justify (just as my son
might promise to complete his homework and also promise to show me
the completed homework).

3.4 Promising, Asserting, and Assuring

Assimilation of telling or asserting to promising is often associated with

a distinctive ‘assurance’ view of the epistemic significance of testimony.
On such a view, someone’s telling me something can give me a distinctive
kind of reason to believe it: this is provided by the speaker’s assurance,
which is understood in terms of the speaker’s taking responsibility for
the truth of what is said.
58 Telling

In developing his assurance view, Richard Moran (2005) compares

promising and assertion without identifying them; for example, he
writes of a person ‘giv[ing] his word on something to another whether
as promise or assertion’ (295), referring to ‘assurance’ in both cases.
Moreover Edward  S.  Hinchman concludes his ‘Telling as Inviting to
Trust’ thus:

telling is indeed like promising. When I sincerely promise you I’ll φ, I

intend to make available to you an entitlement to perform acts that rely
on taking me at my word. When I sincerely tell you that p, I intend to
make available to you an entitlement to believe that p. If each case goes
as I intend, in giving you my word I entitle you to take it. (2005: 587)

This recalls Scanlon:

When I say ‘I promise to be there at ten o’clock to help you,’ the effect is
the same as if I had said, ‘I will be there at ten o’clock to help you. Trust
me.’ (1998: 306)

For those who are tempted by the assurance view of testimony, accept-
ing my account of assertion as involving promising to speak truthfully
provides a robust framework within which to develop that view. (Still,
some caution is advised, given that it is controversial whether promising
is primarily aimed at providing assurance.)
But my view does not entail an assurance view of the epistemic sig-
nificance of testimony, as the situation of eavesdroppers illustrates.
Critics of the assurance view (Lackey 2008, Owens 2006, Goldberg 2015)
argue that, when I hear you say that p, it makes no epistemic difference
whether you are addressing me directly (thus offering me your assur-
ance and inviting me to trust you), or whether I happen to overhear
something which was not intended for my ears. Owens remarks that the
duty to keep a promise is owed to the promisee in particular, whereas

By contrast, the kind of epistemic responsibilities at stake in testimony

are not duties owed to anyone; testimony can be presented quite
unintentionally to an audience who thereby learn that it is true because
they are entitled to depend on the speaker for justification. (117)

On my account, we can acknowledge the special situation of the

person who is addressed by the speaker—the person who receives the
 3.5 Alternative Connections 59

promise—without insisting that she has some epistemic advantage over

the eavesdropper. When an assertion goes wrong—e.g. it is reckless,
insincere, or turns out to be false—the person who was addressed seems
specially entitled to complain. The eavesdropper lacks such entitle-
ments, even though she may criticize the speaker, just as we criticize
people who break their promises to other people. Correspondingly,
the responsibility to speak sincerely and competently seems to be
owed to the intended audience, rather than to anyone who happened to
be passing.
It doesn’t follow, however, that the person who was addressed is in a
specially advantageous epistemic situation when all goes well. The fact
that a speaker is willing to promise to speak truthfully on some matter
has the same evidential significance for all concerned, whether addressee
or eavesdropper. If such a promise—or any promise—offers something
additional and distinctively epistemic to the addressee alone, this needs
to be established through further work, and doesn’t follow merely from
the fact that an assertion involves a promise. It is worth recalling that
even Williamson, who is no advocate of assurance accounts, writes of
assertion in terms of taking and discharging responsibility:

To make an assertion is to confer a responsibility (on oneself) for the

truth of its content; to satisfy the rule of assertion, by having the
requisite knowledge, is to discharge that responsibility, by epistemically
ensuring the truth of the content (2000, 268–9).

So my account of assertion and thus telling or testifying in terms of

promising does not commit me to the assurance account of the epi-
stemic value of testimony. However I will return to related issues later
on when I discuss trust and trustworthiness in both practical and testi-
monial situations.

3.5 Alternative Connections

My account allows us to spell out the notion of asserting as incurring

responsibility, but without accepting either the ‘commitment account’ of
assertion, or the assurance view of the epistemic significance of testi-
mony. Moreover, it avoids the difficulties encountered by those who
60 Telling

have tried to draw analogies between asserting that p and promising

that p, as I will now illustrate.
According to Thomas Carson, ‘Roughly, a lie is a deliberate false
statement that the speaker warrants to be true’ (2010: 15). The notion of
warrant distinguishes lies from statements made for example in obvious
jest, so plays the role given to assertion in other accounts of lying.
Carson explicitly connects warranting and promising: ‘A warranty of
truth is a kind of guarantee or promise that what one says is true.’ (25)
Carson notes that to make a promise is to place oneself under an
obligation to do something, but that

special problems arise if we attempt to extend this account of promis-

ing [to provide] an analysis of warranting the truth of a statement. If
one promises to do X, one is placing oneself under an obligation to
perform a specific act . . . However, often when one warrants the truth
of a statement, one is not placing oneself under an obligation to
perform any particular action or kind of action. (25)

In particular, by warranting that p, one does not become obliged to

make it true that p (i.e. to change the world to make it the case that p).
Unable to identify a suitable action which is promised in assertion,
Carson feels required to treat the notion of warranting the truth of a
statement as sui generis, rather than as a special case of promising to do
something. But if, as I suggest, we see assertion or warranting as involv-
ing a promise to speak truthfully (which is simultaneously kept or
broken), we have identified a suitable action, without having to associate
assertion with obligations of truth-making.
Gary Watson also draws explicit parallels between assertion and
promising (2004), arguing that these are different ways of taking respon-
sibility for something, or different ways of warranting. A promise
involves a commitment to act as promised, whilst an assertion that p
involves commitment to the defensibility of p, where this is weaker than
a commitment to defend p if required. Although Watson makes many
more interesting points than I can discuss here, it is striking how his
distinctions between promises and assertions often depend upon the
assumption that if an assertion that p involved a promise, it would either
be a promise that p (with attendant puzzles), or else a Brandom-style
promise to justify-or-retract p. I am advocating a third—better—way of
assimilating assertion to promising.
 3.5 Alternative Connections 61

For example, Watson writes ‘Promising itself gives rise to a reason to

intend (and do), whereas asserting doesn’t create for the asserter a rea-
son to believe what is asserted’ (62): this is compatible with the thought
that asserting as to whether p creates for the asserter a reason to intend
to speak truthfully as to whether p. Or ‘In asserting my future intentions,
I express my mind; in a promise I commit my mind’ (63): again, this
distinction can be recognized even if we accept that in asserting my
future intentions, I commit to speaking truthfully about my future
intentions (there and then).
Assertion is governed by a word-to-world direction of fit. That’s to
say, we are supposed to adjust our assertions so that they match the
world. Promising is governed by a world-to-word direction of fit. That’s
to say, we are supposed to adjust the world (by acting in it), so that it
matches the promises we have made. But when we try to use this dis-
tinction in thinking about promises to speak truthfully, we encounter
special complexities: adjusting the world here amounts to adjusting
what we say. This point holds for situations in which we explicitly
promise to speak truthfully, even if I am wrong in claiming that normal
assertion involves such a promise.
What then, on my account, is it to promise that p? Suppose Emma
says ‘I promise that the Moon is smaller than the Earth’. On a deflationary
view, Emma makes a sort of heightened assertion that the Moon is
smaller than the Earth. It is heightened in the sense that she is governed
by especially stringent epistemic norms, or that she is committed to
especially grovelling apologies if she gets things wrong. (She is not, of
course, promising to make it the case that the Moon is smaller than the
Earth). Deflationists might disagree about whether this is really height-
ened assertion, or just something in the same family as assertion, but
the underlying picture is clear.
I endorse this deflationary view of the relationship between promis-
ing that p and asserting that p. On my account, then, when Emma says
‘I promise that the Moon is smaller than the Earth’, she makes an especially
solemn, or heightened, promise to speak truthfully as to whether the
Moon is smaller than the Earth. The same is true if she says ‘I promise
that I posted that letter already’. Things get more complex if Emma says
‘I promise that I’ll come to your party’. There are two ways of reading
this: either Emma is making a very firm prediction about her own later
state (compare: I promise that I’ll have a headache after just one glass of
62 Telling

wine), or else she is promising to come to the party. The natural reading
is the second, in most contexts.
I have now set out my account of assertion in terms of making and
breaking/keeping a promise to speak truthfully. I have distinguished this
account from other accounts of assertion in terms of commitment, and
from assurance accounts of the epistemic significance of testimony.
I  have also shown how other authors who have noticed the affinities
between assertion and promising have been too quick to set these aside,
because of the obvious unattractiveness of identifying an assertion that
p with a promise that p.
This means I’m now able to draw on the conclusions of chapter  2,
where I argued that promise-making is governed by norms of sincerity
and competence. Applying these norms to the special case of promising
to speak truthfully helps us understand assertion, and explain our
intuitions and disagreements about the norms which govern it.

3.6 Norms on Assertion

I highlighted a sincerity norm, a competence norm, and a norm against

promising to act immorally. The last of these raises especially complex
issues with regard to speech, which I will discuss later in this chapter. But
for the purposes of understanding trust, distrust, and trustworthiness, it is
the sincerity and competence norms which are key. Applying these to the
case of promising to speak truthfully as to whether p gives the following:

• One must promise to speak truthfully as to whether p only if this

promise is sincere
• One must promise to speak truthfully as to whether p only if one is
competent to speak truthfully as to whether p.

I will discuss these in turn, before discussing the relationship between

norms for promising to speak truthfully and norms for assertion as usually
understood.
What is required for sincerity in a promise to speak truthfully as to
whether p? Recall the rival suggestions that promises essentially commu-
nicate an intention to act or else essentially communicate an intention to
become obliged to act. These suggestions return different verdicts in some
 3.6 Norms on Assertion 63

cases which involve a time-lag between the making of the promise and the
keeping-or-breaking of the promise. One might intend to acquire an
obligation whilst lacking the intention to meet the obligation, either
because one anticipates that acquiring the obligation will generate the
appropriate intention, or because one anticipates being released from the
obligation before being called upon to act; Owens (2012) can condone
such promises as sincere, whilst Scanlon (1998) would not.
But where a promise is simultaneously made and kept-or-broken,
there is no space for such cases. Moreover, Owens allows ‘that a promise
usually carries the implication, or communicates the information that
the promisor intends to perform’ (2012: 202). So I will assume that one
ought to promise to speak truthfully as to whether p only if one intends
to speak truthfully as to whether p. Marušić (2015) would argue that
sincerity requires us to believe that we will indeed speak truthfully as to
whether p. I disagree on this point: this requirement seems to be unduly
harsh on hesitant speakers, who do know the truth of what they say,
though they have doubts about their ability to express it properly. But
this disagreement is not very significant here; at worst, it blurs the
distinction between sincerity and competence without undermining the
importance of either.
I argued in chapter  2 that good promise-making requires compe-
tence: in this instance, do not promise to speak truthfully as to whether
p unless you are competent to speak truthfully as to whether p.
Keepability is too weak: the mere possibility of speaking truthfully as to
whether p does not justify promising to do so. Success here amounts to
speaking truthfully, whilst competence involves something like a secure
or stable disposition to speak truthfully in this matter.
I am now in a position to make more explicit connections with the
standard debate about norms for assertion. If assertion is, as I claim, a
matter of promising to speak truthfully as to whether p, and simultan-
eously keeping or breaking that promise, we should expect it to be
governed both by the norms relevant to promise-making and by the
norm that promises should be kept. So we’d expect the following:
One must assert as to whether p only if
• One intends to speak truthfully as to whether p
• One is competent to speak truthfully as to whether p
• One does in fact speak truthfully as to whether p.
64 Telling

Distinguishing these various norms makes sense of the range of

criticisms to which acts of assertion are prone. Someone who knows
whether p but intends to deceive may stumble and reveal the truth: she
violates the first norm. Someone well-meaning but foolish may acci-
dentally get things right: she violates the second norm. Someone who
knows whether p, is competent to speak truthfully in this regard, and
speaks in good faith may nevertheless stumble and say the wrong thing:
she violates the third norm. And of course we may violate more than
one norm in a single episode of speech. This multistranded norm recog-
nizes the different ways in which assertions can fall short of the ideal:
even imperfect assertions may be satisfactory in certain respects.
Moreover, the distinction between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ dimen-
sions of assessment—in terms of whether the speaker can reasonably
believe herself to satisfy the underlying norm—corresponds to what is
called ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ propriety in the literature on assertion:

While those who assert appropriately (with respect to this rule) in a

primary sense will be those who actually obey it, a speaker who broke
this rule in a blameless fashion (one who asserted something she didn’t
know, but reasonably thought she did know) would in some secondary
sense be asserting properly. (DeRose 2002: 180)

DeRose invokes a knowledge rule, but the distinction between primary

and secondary propriety generalizes; for example, it is invoked by
Weiner (2005) in defence of a truth norm, though Lackey (2008: section
4.5) criticizes this move.
My account of assertion in terms of promising to speak truthfully
does not directly commit me to any particular alethic or epistemic
norm on assertion, even in conjunction with my earlier account of the
norms which govern promise-making (see Maitra (2011) for ‘alethic
or epistemic’). But it helps us compare, develop, and perhaps vindicate
such norms. As illustration, I will briefly survey some proposed norms
in the light of this framework.
Williamson (1996,  2000) advocates a knowledge norm of assertion:
assert p only if you know p. Someone who conforms to this rule will at
least typically intend to speak truthfully as to whether p: an exception
would be someone who intends to lie, but accidentally blurts out what
she knows, and indeed such an assertion does seem problematic.
 3.6 Norms on Assertion 65

Likewise, someone conforming to the knowledge rule is competent to

speak truthfully as to whether p, and, moreover, keeps her promise to
speak truthfully. (Critics who find the knowledge norm too demanding
may argue that knowledge is sufficient but not necessary for competence.)
A side benefit of working with ‘asserting as to whether p’, as opposed
to the standard ‘asserting p’, is that it becomes easier to separate the sin-
cerity requirement from the knowledge/competence requirement.
Williamson’s rule that one must know p in order to assert p does of
course involve a sincerity requirement, because knowledge involves
belief, but this is obscured by the formulation, and by the ‘knowledge
rule’ moniker.
Lackey (2008: 125) advocates the Reasonable To Believe Norm of
Assertion:

One should assert that p only if (i) it is reasonable for one to believe
that p, and (ii) if one asserted that p, one would assert that p at least in
part because it is reasonable to believe that p.

The RTBNA does not require that the assertor in fact believe that p:
Lackey condones ‘selfless assertors’, such as a creationist teacher who has
strong evidence that Homo sapiens evolved from Homo erectus, and
asserts this proposition to her pupils, without believing it herself.
Plausibly, the creationist teacher is competent to speak truthfully on
whether Homo sapiens evolved from Homo erectus, and succeeds in
doing so.
Is she sincere? I take it that the teacher does not intend to speak
truthfully, but that she does intend to become obliged to speak truth-
fully: this incurring of unmet obligation is, from her perspective, one
downside of her current job. Lackey (2008: 113) says that the asser-
tion is insincere given Bernard Williams’s account of insincerity, and
yet that the teacher does not aim to misinform her pupils about evo-
lution, seemingly because she aims only to inform her pupils that
scientific evidence supports the evolutionary claim. It is not clear to
me whether Lackey herself thinks that the assertion is insincere, nor
whether she thinks that the teacher intends to misinform her pupils,
even if this is not the teacher’s aim.
What about Weiner’s (2005) truth norm: one must assert p only if p is
true? This matches the third strand, the requirement to keep the
66 Telling

promise to speak truthfully as to whether p. On this view, the sincerity

and competence norms are by-products of the efforts which are required
to satisfy the fundamental norm of speaking truthfully. I am not evalu-
ating these rival proposals, but it is worth noting that my account
enables us to give appropriate weight to truth in its own right—that’s
how the promise is kept—whilst enabling us to understand why sincerity
and competence have values which are linked to, though not reducible
to, the value of truth.
This concludes a non-exhaustive look at some significant philosophical
views on the norms of assertion: I have not plumped for one view rather
than another, but have instead attempted to show how the consider-
ations which may motivate these different views can be understood and
evaluated by accepting that assertion involves promising to speak
truthfully.

3.7 Immoral Assertions?

In discussing promise-making, in chapter  2, I identified norms of

sincerity and of competence, and along with Altham (1985) and others a
requirement that we not promise to do things that are themselves
‘wicked’ or morally impermissible. How might that third norm apply to
the special case of promising to speak truthfully? Under what circum-
stances could it be immoral to speak truthfully as to whether p? We
might think of someone who betrays a secret, utters hurtful truths for
fun, or intentionally distracts a bus driver during a tricky manoeuvre.
But this is quite a delicate matter. Sometimes it is morally permissible to
speak truthfully as to whether p, even though it would be morally
impermissible to make a true assertion as to whether p. For example, if
you and I have a habit of exchanging jokey insults, I may permissibly say
‘your mother never loved you’ in a jesting tone—and I know it’s true!—
but it would be intolerably cruel to assert this.
Can we can make a similarly delicate distinction for other types of
promise? Are there instances in which it would be immoral to promise
(sincerely, competently) to do something which, considered in itself, is a
morally acceptable action? Yes. Suppose we are friends, and you are selling
your amateur handicrafts at a charity fundraiser. I purchase various
 3.7 Immoral Assertions? 67

items which I secretly think are too ugly for anyone else to buy: this is a
kind gesture which pleases you whilst benefiting the charity, and I
manage not to tell any outright lies. But it would be unkind to promise
to buy all the too-ugly items, even if you would accede for the charity’s
sake: making the promise would hurtfully reveal my opinion of the
items I subsequently buy. Likewise I shouldn’t promise to fix you up a
date with my boring cousin, or promise to drive you to your surprise party,
at least not in those terms, even though each promised action is perfectly
permissible (you’re a great match for my hypothetical boring cousin).
When I promise to do something, this can enable others to make
reasonable inferences from my subsequent actions to my beliefs, via the
assumption that my action is at least partly explained by my desire to
keep my promise. And under certain circumstances enabling others to
make such inferences is morally impermissible—e.g. it is gratuitously
unkind—even though the promised action is itself permissible. (These
promises are the mirror image of those discussed by Smith (1997), such
as the politician’s permissible promise to enact an otherwise-impermissible
policy in order to get elected and do much good overall.)
Now, the ‘morality’ norm on promising which I explored in chapter 2
does not condemn such promises, but this should seem neither surprising
nor problematic. We should not expect norms specifically tailored to
promise-making to encompass every respect in which an act of promise-
making can be assessed: to achieve this, we would need an entire moral
theory providing guidance for assessing practical actions of all sorts.
How does this apply to promises to speak truthfully? It can be okay
for me to utter a sentence which expresses the claim that your mother
never loved you. But if I precede this utterance by promising to speak
truthfully, then my utterance takes on a different, crueller, aspect.
(Imagine I promise to write something true on a piece of paper, then
write ‘your mother never loved you’ and hand it over.)
So the ‘morality’ norm on promise-making has limited impact on
promising to speak truthfully, forbidding only those promises where
merely speaking truthfully would itself be morally problematic, for
example where merely voicing a thought can cause the audience to enter-
tain suggestions they would not otherwise have considered. Presenting
certain claims in fiction or pretence, or merely as supposition, can
sometimes be inflammatory and objectionable, even when it is clear
68 Telling

these are not assertions. So promising to speak truthfully in uttering

such claims could be forbidden by the norm against promises of
immorality. (These remarks presuppose that there are no countervailing
considerations: I do not intend to make any contribution here to debates
about freedom of expression, nor to suggest that inflammatory fictions
are always impermissible.)

3.8 What Sorts of Norms Are These?

I have made constant reference to norms for promise-making, and

norms for assertion. But I have not yet discussed whether the latter are
constitutive of the practice of assertion, a question which looms large in
the literature. Following Williamson (2000: 238), we may compare the
practice of assertion to a rule-governed game—the constitutive rules are
those which govern the game. One may break the rules and yet play the
game, but if one is not sensitive to those rules at all then one is not
playing that particular game. In her critical discussion, Maitra (2011:
278) describes constitutive norms as those which one cannot violate
‘flagrantly’ without ceasing to play the game in question; Rescorla (2009:
101) says that ‘a norm is constitutive of a practice iff one must obey the
norm to engage correctly in the practice’.
Given the explanatory power of taking assertion to involve both
promising to speak truthfully and breaking-or-keeping that promise,
it is natural to conclude that this relationship between assertion
and  promising is itself essential to assertion: if I am right that this
relationship holds, then this is simply what it is to make an assertion,
rather than something we usually do whilst making an assertion. Then
we can ask whether the norms of promise-making which I identified
are constitutive of the practice of promising; likewise for the norm of
promise-keeping. If so, that would imply that the corresponding
norms are constitutive of the practice of assertion, as a special case
of promising.
It seems very plausible that if the idea of constitutive norms makes
sense at all, then the norm of keeping promises is constitutive of the
practice of promising. This is not to say that promises are never
broken, but that someone who made no pretence of even attempting
 3.8 What Sorts of Norms Are These? 69

to  keep their ‘promises’ could not be sensibly regarded as a promisor.

In Rescorla’s terms, to engage correctly in the practice of promising one
must keep one’s promises. Now, I have described this claim as ‘very
plausible’, but a full assessment of the claim would require us to adopt
some specific account of the nature and source of promissory obligations.
For example, an Owens-style account of promising in terms of our
‘authority interest’ might make this harder to establish, whilst Rawls
(1971: 345) explicitly describes the rule of promise-keeping as a ‘consti-
tutive convention’, like the rules of a game.
If indeed the norm of keeping promises is constitutive of the practice
of promising, then the norm of speaking truthfully is constitutive of the
practice of assertion, because assertion involves a promise to speak
truthfully. Can we say anything stronger?
Even if we accept that the norm of keeping promises is indeed con-
stitutive of the practice of promising, it is less clear that the norms on
promise-making are likewise constitutive. Above, I briefly surveyed how
different accounts of promising might explain why promise-making
is governed by norms of sincerity and competence in particular. In
discussing Rawls on promising, Rescorla says

He does not mention a constitutive norm against promising to φ when

one has no intention of φ-ing, or even when one knows one cannot φ.
A natural interpretation, then, is that Rawls does not think insincere
promises violate any constitutive norm of promising. (2009: 107)

Rawls does not endorse insincere promise-making: the point is rather

that the norm against insincerity in promise-making is not constitutive
of the practice of promising as such, but is an instance of some more
general moral norm. Again, establishing whether the norm of sincerity
is constitutive of promising would require us to look more closely and
carefully at a range of different accounts of the nature of promising
(indeed, Rescorla mentions Rawls only to establish the mere coherence
of denying that the sincerity norm is constitutive).
So it is less clear whether norms of sincerity and competence are con-
stitutive of promising, and thus constitutive of assertion, as opposed to
merely associated with it. Nevertheless, the connection between promis-
ing and assertion provides us with another avenue to explore in investi-
gating constitutive norms.
70 Telling

A somewhat different question is what type of normativity is at stake

here, and in particular whether these are moral norms. The literature on
norms for assertion seems generally to assume that there is no moral
issue in play. But false promising and indeed lying are paradigmatically
matters of (im)morality. This is a point at which it may make a differ-
ence whether we theorize in terms of ‘telling’ or ‘asserting’. Directing our
attention to the involvement of an audience makes it easier to recognize
the moral dimensions of our practice: both promising and telling are
important elements of the ways in which we live together, and they are
governed by norms of competence and sincerity. If you lack relevant
competence, or you are not recognized as competent by yourself or
others, you are distanced from being able to engage properly in these
activities. Often we have a moral obligation to be in a certain epistemic
state, especially where we have rendered other people dependent upon
our competence. I will explore this kind of dependence, and the limitations
on what it demands of us, in chapter 4.
I have shown how we can understand assertion as involving a promise
which is immediately kept or broken; this enables us to vindicate the
thought that assertion and promising are importantly similar, without
implausibly identifying asserting that p with promising that p. Moreover,
we can adopt this view without thereby adopting either a ‘commitment
account’ of assertion or an assurance account of the epistemic signifi-
cance of testimony, though it is compatible with such accounts. Finally, I
have argued that promising is governed by a competence (or perhaps
success) norm, and that this, in combination with the view of assertion
as involving promising to speak truthfully, explains the structure of
debate around norms for assertion. Having examined both promising
and asserting as ways of incurring commitment, I now turn to questions
of trustworthiness.

Additional Sources

3.1 Telling and Asserting. Hornsby (1994) and E. Fricker (2006) explicitly
work with ‘telling’, though their primary interests differ from one
another. Heal (2013) also writes of ‘telling’, with very helpful distinctions
between types of telling. ‘Assertion’ is both the title and the core term
 Additional Sources 71

throughout the various essays in Brown and Cappelen (eds) (2011) and
in Goldberg’s monograph (2015), although Goldberg also discusses telling.
Kukla (2014) emphasizes the audience’s role in determining whether an
utterance is an assertion, and I draw on her work through chapters 5 and 6.
3.2 Connecting Asserting with Promising. Watson (2004) is a key dis-
cussion of the seeming differences between assertion and telling; like-
wise Owens (2006). My neutral use of ‘speaking’ is much like Cappelen
(2011: 22–4) on ‘saying’; again, verbal utterances are standing in for
writing, signing (e.g. ASL, BSL), Morse code, semaphore, etc. It’s not
obvious how far this list could be extended.
3.3 Asserting and Committing. References to Brandom and Macfarlane
are given in the text.
3.4 Promising, Asserting, and Assuring. A different, rewarding treat-
ment of assurance, in connection with J. L. Austin, is given by Lawlor
(2013).
3.5 Alternative Connections. Williamson (2000: 244–5) discusses
swearing that p.
3.6 Norms on Assertion. In addition to citations in the main text, the
essays in part 2 of Brown and Cappelen (eds) (2011) cover a lot of rele-
vant ground.
3.7 Immoral Assertions? A much richer set of discussions of speech
and ethics is gathered in Maitra and McGowan (eds) 2012. I take up on
some related questions around coercion and lies in my (2018a).
3.8 What Sorts of Norms Are These? Key references are in the main text.
 4
Trustworthiness

In my opening chapter, I proposed an account of trust and distrust in

terms of commitment. In chapters 2 and 3 I focused on two prominent
ways in which we explicitly take on new commitments, through promis-
ing, and through assertion; I argued that assertion involves promise-
making. Such commitments should not be incurred unless the person in
question is both competent to fulfil the commitment and sincere in tak-
ing it on.
Paradigm cases of promising and assertion are voluntary and explicit:
we imagine the speaker as saying ‘I promise . . . ’, or as clearly and seriously
articulating the proposition asserted. But in practice we often acquire
commitments in much less clear-cut ways, for example by nodding, by
failing to object to suggestions or presuppositions, by allowing others to
continue in their expectations of us, or by receiving a favour within a
social practice of reciprocity. This inevitable lack of clarity means that
we are often mistaken about what commitments we have, or about what
commitments those around us have, and indeed about what we and
others know about our own commitments. These are familiar phenom-
ena which create difficulties and drama in our ordinary interactions, at
home, at work, and in public life; I will explore some of these difficulties
and dramas in chapters 5 and 6.
I won’t offer a detailed theory of how commitments are incurred: in
large part this will be an empirical question, one which is answered
differently in different social contexts. Nevertheless, I plan to explore
the notions of trust, distrust, and trustworthiness which are tied to
commitment-fulfilment, in ways which go beyond the more explicit cases
of promise-making and assertion discussed in earlier chapters. Even
though the boundaries are fuzzy, it is obvious that we are deeply involved
in non-explicit practices of commitment: imagine how much of our
everyday social life would crumble if people insisted upon fulfilling only

How To Be Trustworthy. Katherine Hawley, Oxford University Press (2019). © Katherine Hawley.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843900.001.0001
 4.1 Trustworthiness and Commitment 73

those commitments they had explicitly signed up to. Disingenuousness

on this front can make someone maddening to deal with, either in
person or as a political figure. And in my view these practices of non-
explicit commitment are tied up with issues of trust, distrust, and
trustworthiness of the same general kind as those concerning explicit
promise and assertion.
In this chapter, I explore trustworthiness in the context of the com-
mitment account of trust and distrust, articulating a rather negative
account of trustworthiness, in terms of avoiding unfulfilled commitment.
Untrustworthiness can be a matter of deceit or malicious intentions; but
equally, I will argue, it can arise from well-intentioned over-commitment,
from allowing our commitments to outstrip our ability to meet those
commitments. As I will show, the pursuit of trustworthiness is compatible
with some neglect of other virtues, values and goals. Indeed, it sometimes
requires us to neglect those other aspects of life, for better or for worse.

4.1 Trustworthiness and Commitment

I began the book with trust and distrust. But trustworthiness and
untrustworthiness often seem more central to moral philosophy than do
trust and distrust themselves. Trust sometimes has value in its own
right, but usually this is conditional on the trustworthiness of the trusted
person. As Linda Zagzebski puts it, the virtue of trust is ‘a mean between
gullibility and suspiciousness’ (1996, 160–1): virtue involves wise trust-
ing and distrusting, not trust per se. We owe it to ourselves and to others
to place our trust appropriately, where appropriateness depends at least
in part on the trustworthiness of the trustee. This is especially important
where we make decisions about trust which in turn affect people who
depend upon us, whether these are our children, colleagues, friends,
or neighbours.
Different notions of trust and distrust correspond to different notions of
trustworthiness and untrustworthiness. Given the commitment account,
to be trustworthy is to ensure that our commitments are matched by
action, and thus, as a special case, to ensure that what we say in making
an assertion is true. This requires diligence in fulfilling commitments
already acquired—a trustworthy person keeps her promises. But it also
74 Trustworthiness

requires judiciousness in the acquisition of new commitments: trustworthy

people must sometimes disappoint up-front by refusing new commit-
ments, rather than violate trust later on. Likewise, when we are asked for
information we do not have, ‘no comment’ may be a disappointing
response, yet it can reflect greater trustworthiness than an ill-founded
assertion would.
On this view, trustworthiness is above all a matter of avoiding untrust-
worthiness, by following through on existing commitments, but also
by avoiding certain commitments in the first place. In this sense, it is a
negative account: trustworthiness does not require us to take on as many
commitments as we can manage, or to make certain commitments rather
than others, except where these follow from our existing commitments.
It only requires us to avoid unfulfilled commitments. I will explore the
ramifications of this idea at some length below. But at this point I want to
offer some motivation for taking this kind of negative picture seriously.
One motivation is that this account of trustworthiness is the flipside
of the account of trust and distrust which I advocated in chapter  1: if
such an account of trust and distrust is worth taking seriously, then so
too is the corresponding account of trustworthiness. In addition, think-
ing about trustworthiness provides further reasons to reject alternative
accounts of trust and distrust.
For example, accounts which understand trust as imputing a certain
kind of motive to the trusted person do not straightforwardly generate
an account of what trustworthiness in general requires. Someone merits
your trust on a particular occasion, on such a view, if they are motivated,
in the right way, to act as you prefer or need. But this cannot generalize:
if trustworthiness is thought of as a kind of well-meaning helpfulness, it
will always be possible for us to subjugate more of our own interests to
those of others, demonstrating more goodwill, competence, and respon-
siveness. We will be pulled in different directions by the whims of those
around us, unable to be trustworthy to all. Worse, if trustworthiness
were a generalized tendency to respond to people’s trust, rather than to
their interests or needs, then it would be relatively easy for distrusted
people to be trustworthy, since they have little trust to respond to.
Moreover trustworthiness cannot in general be a matter of respond-
ing to others’ normative expectations, because such expectations may
be unreasonable, and defying unreasonable expectations is not a sign of
 4.1 Trustworthiness and Commitment 75

untrustworthiness. Trustworthiness involves responding to reasonable

or appropriate normative expectations, but this returns us to the ques-
tion of what makes such expectations appropriate.
Thinking in terms of commitment reminds us that other people’s
expectations are sometimes unreasonable, and that trustworthiness
does not require us to respond to all the needs or wishes of those around
us. A trustworthy person may appear to be untrustworthy, if others are
mistaken about what commitments she has incurred. Anticipation of
this kind of misunderstanding may lead a trustworthy person to behave
as other people expect her to do, either for their sake or for the sake of
preserving her own reputation. But this does not entail that trust-
worthiness requires her to act in such ways; I explore related issues in
section 4.6, and in chapter 6.
Moreover, thinking in terms of commitment allows us to build an
account of general trust, not tied to any specific task. We can understand
general trust as reliance on someone to fulfil whatever commitments she
may have, and general distrust as lack of such reliance. Most trust is
intermediate between the specific and the completely general: I may trust
someone to fulfil her financial commitments, without trusting her to
fulfil commitments in her personal life. This kind of differentiation is
entirely normal, especially when we bear in mind that untrustworthiness
can derive from incompetence or misjudgement, not just from ill will:
most of us are incompetent and prone to misjudgement in certain areas
of life, without being all-round hopeless cases.
Understanding trustworthiness in terms of commitment enables us to
give a satisfying account of both trust and distrust, including an account
of what those attitudes target, and when they are appropriate. Thinking
of trustworthiness in terms of commitment allows space for a coherent
picture of trustworthiness as something which can be aspired to in our-
selves or demanded of others.
This somewhat thin, quasi-contractual notion of trustworthiness can
seem inadequate to the complexities of intimate relationships, where we
hope for and expect much more than this sort of scrupulousness about
promise-keeping and caution around commitment. I entirely agree that
often we are required to do much more than merely avoid unfulfilled
commitments, both within intimate relationships and more generally.
However, as I explore below, doing much more can be in tension with
76 Trustworthiness

the goal of avoiding unfulfilled commitments; this may be especially

common when we are in challenging circumstances, cornered into mak-
ing tricky but significant choices about what to prioritize.
It is exactly because I want to explore this tension that it is vital for me
to hold onto the somewhat thin, negative notion of trustworthiness I am
developing here, rather than expanding it to include additional demands.
I think there are plenty of good reasons for using the term ‘trustworthi-
ness’ for the somewhat thin notion, but if that still jars, you are of course
free to think of ‘avoiding unfulfilled commitment’ in its place where
necessary. This is certainly an ethically and socially important notion,
worthy of study even if you doubt whether it is a central notion of
trustworthiness.
What is the role of motive in this account of trustworthiness?
I have already argued that trustworthiness cannot require us to be con-
stantly motivated by others’ needs and desires. But does it require us
to be motivated by our commitments? According to the commitment
account, you can trust someone to do something without expecting her
to be motivated by her commitment. You may trust me to do something
because you believe both that I have a commitment to do it, and that
I will do it, without believing that I will do it because of my commitment.
Maybe I am motivated by pure enthusiasm. Would commitment have
motivated me in the counterfactual absence of enthusiasm? Perhaps
then there would have been no commitment: this needn’t indicate that
I am untrustworthy. One way of becoming more trustworthy is by trying
to restrict one’s commitments—so far as possible—to those which one
can enthusiastically fulfil.
To be trustworthy in some specific respect, on this view, it is enough
to behave in accordance with one’s commitment, regardless of motive.
What about general trustworthiness? In practice, sadly, none of us has
independent reasons to do all the things we are committed to doing. So
general trustworthiness encompasses more than the fair-weather cases
in which we don’t need the motivation of commitment: a generally
trustworthy person will often meet her commitments simply because
they are her commitments, although this is not a requirement of trust-
worthiness in any specific respect. (My neglect of motive is one of several
reasons why this account of trustworthiness does not sit comfortably
within a virtue ethical approach.)
 4.1 Trustworthiness and Commitment 77

So a trustworthy person is good at managing her commitments: she

will take care not to over-commit, to ensure that she can fulfil the com-
mitments she does undertake. But commitments are not always under
our immediate control, and in particular we can find ourselves with
commitments arising from others’ continuing and acknowledged expect-
ations, or indeed from our own prior commitments.
For example, in the context of ongoing relationships—whether these
are in the workplace, within the family, or amongst friends—an earlier
commitment to engaging in a relationship or practice may often involve
an implicit commitment to take on further, more specific commitments
in future. If we are friends, then I am not free to turn down an invitation
to your birthday party without a very good reason. This is not because
I  am already committed to attending your birthday party before you
invite me. After all, it is easier for me to decline the invitation than it is
for me to skip the party once I have accepted the invitation: that’s to say,
I need a smaller excuse in the former case than in the latter. Nevertheless,
as your friend it is harder for me to turn down the invitation than it
would be for a mere acquaintance who could acceptably say, for example,
that she’s just not fond of parties. Likewise in some types of professional
job, an employee is contracted to accept work, take on projects, and so
on, but with a degree of flexibility which allows her some freedom to
choose which projects to adopt, so long as the overall quantity and quality
is acceptable, and high-level goals are met. That is, by signing the initial
contract, the employee is committed to taking on later, more specific
commitments, but she does not thereby immediately take on a particu-
lar set of later commitments rather than some other set. This kind of
flexibility is one of the privileges of much professional work, but it has
its limits.
For ease of discussion, I will sometimes refer to these commitments-
to-take-on-commitments as ‘meta-commitments’: they vary in strength
and explicitness, and disagreements about these can be the source of
deep problems in relationships, around mismatch of expectations. If you
think that a friend needs a very good reason not to accept an invitation
to take a vacation together, and I think that friends are free to choose
whether or not to vacation together, then that will be a source of diffi-
culty for our friendship when I turn down your kind invitation to join
you in Blackpool. Fulfilment of meta-commitments may often be what
78 Trustworthiness

is at stake when we think of simply trusting someone, rather than trusting

someone to do something specific. More generally, loyalty often involves
a kind of meta-commitment, but one which may be understood very
differently by different people; I will return in chapter 5 to discuss ques-
tions around how we identify commitments, in ourselves and others.
In discussing trust (chapter 1), I insisted upon the importance of also
keeping distrust in focus. What about untrustworthiness? In effect, I am
treating trustworthiness as a matter of avoiding untrustworthiness—i.e.
avoiding unfulfilled commitment by whatever means. But we might
wonder whether there are situations in which neither label is appropri-
ate, and not just because a person is hovering around the border between
trustworthiness and untrustworthiness, by being somewhat trustworthy
and somewhat untrustworthy. For example, a hermit who has no com-
mitments whatsoever easily manages to avoid unfulfilled commitments;
we might be reluctant to describe hermits either as trustworthy or as
untrustworthy. Moreover inanimate objects and babies lack unfulfilled
commitments, because they lack commitments. Yet we don’t call them
‘trustworthy’.
Since I want to retain the connection between trust, distrust, trust-
worthiness, and commitment, I have three main options here. The first is
to rule that trustworthiness requires at least a few fulfilled commitments,
alongside a lack of unfulfilled commitments, and to note that hermits,
babies, and inanimate objects do not satisfy this requirement. The sec-
ond is to rule that trustworthiness requires a disposition to fulfil com-
mitments once incurred, then argue that neither babies nor inanimate
objects have such a disposition, whilst a hermit might possess or lack
such a disposition. In practice, these two options blur into one another,
since presumably we can acquire a disposition to fulfil commitments
only through experience of making, breaking, and keeping commitments.
Even the hermit once lived in a family or broader society; if not, he would
be more like a baby or an animal, incapable of undertaking commitment
rather than merely able to avoid doing so.
If we are to choose between these, then the second, dispositional
option seems preferable. It avoids awkward questions about exactly how
few commitments one needs to have fulfilled (and how recently) in
order to count as trustworthy. More importantly, it fits with the ways in
which we attribute trustworthiness when thinking about who to ask for
 4.2 Trustworthiness Beyond Sincerity 79

information, or for a favour. We often want to know whether someone

would fulfil a commitment if she were to take it on; information about
past performance can be good evidence in this regard, but is not the
whole story.
But the third option is to dodge this issue. My main goals are to
explore the ways in which, in the course of our ordinary social existences,
the pursuit of trustworthiness can conflict with other important goals or
values, and to explore how circumstances can help or hinder us in trying
to strike an appropriate balance. These issues arise for all of us who are
not complete hermits; in fact the ‘ornamental’ hermits of eighteenth-
century follies were very much embedded into social structures, even if
they had little direct contact with other people.
In my discussion of trust and distrust I made a great fuss about cases
in which neither trust nor distrust was appropriate, whereas here I am
recommending we make little fuss about cases in which neither trust-
worthiness nor untrustworthiness seems to be a suitable category. Am
I being consistent? I believe so. Recognizing that many interactions fall
outside the scope of trust and distrust is crucial to ordinary social rela-
tions: even in the most intimate relationships, it’s important that not
everything be done through commitment and obligation. We also need
space for self-concern, supererogation, surprises, and casual gestures.
Such situations are central to our thinking about trust and distrust, whilst
hermits and babies are not central to our thinking about trustworthiness
and untrustworthiness.

4.2 Trustworthiness Beyond Sincerity

Once a commitment has been incurred, trustworthiness requires both

good intentions and competence. Correspondingly, untrustworthiness
can arise when commitment is not matched by good intentions, and
it can arise when commitment is not matched by competence; these fail-
ings are often intertwined.
Although there is room for dispute about exactly what intention
(or other mental state) is required in order to make a sincere promise
(chapter 2), for most purposes we can assume that a sincere promise is
one which is backed by an intention to act as promised. Moreover
80 Trustworthiness

I  argued that making an assertion on some matter involves making a

promise to speak truthfully regarding that matter, and either keeping or
breaking that promise. Trustworthiness requires us not to make commit-
ments where we will lack the intention to live up to the commitment—
i.e. to keep the promise by speaking truthfully. This means that mere
lack of appropriate intention is a form of untrustworthiness: one can
be untrustworthy without positively intending to break a promise one
has made. Thus bullshit, in Harry Frankfurt’s sense (2005)—speech
which is unconstrained by regard for either truth or falsity—exemplifies
untrustworthiness, since the speaker doesn’t positively intend to speak
truthfully. Likewise, someone who makes a promise for immediate
gain, without any regard to whether she will keep the promise, displays
untrustworthiness.
Trustworthiness does not require us already to have the intention to
fulfil a commitment before incurring it: often we foresee that promising
to do something will induce in us an intention to do that thing, and
indeed that’s sometimes why we make promises, as a form of indirect
self-control. (Perhaps trustworthiness does require us to have a general
intention to fulfil commitments, whatever they may turn out to be, or a
conditional intention to do things if we are committed to doing them.)
For this reason, the requirement is that we avoid having commitments
which are not matched by appropriate intentions; we can achieve this in
part by predicting whether certain commitments will give rise to the
right intentions.
But even with these details spelt out, it is plain that good intentions
are not enough. I have already made the case for a competence require-
ment both in connection with promising and in connection with asser-
tion or telling (chapters 2 and 3). But it is also possible to see the direct
connection with trustworthiness and the value thereof. Someone who
regularly takes on too much and ends up letting people down, even to
her evident dismay, is an untrustworthy person. She is unreliable, and
where this is a pattern there is no reason to deny that it is a form of
untrustworthiness; it is certainly a form of behaviour that, over time, will
lead her to be distrusted by others, and rightly so. This sort of incompe-
tence can involve taking on commitments which are individually too
challenging, or it can involve taking on commitments which are indi-
vidually quite manageable, but collectively overwhelming.
 4.2 Trustworthiness Beyond Sincerity 81

When I discuss these ideas with others, I find that some are reluctant
to describe this sort of person as ‘untrustworthy’, preferring to reserve
that term for those who are dishonest, insincere, or intentionally manipu-
lative. (Uncoincidentally, most of us regard ourselves as more inclined
to this kind of well-intentioned over-commitment than to outright
deception; I include myself here of course.) Isn’t incompetence in these
respects just a matter of unreliability, rather than untrustworthiness?
As I discussed in chapter 1, ordinary language is not a consistent guide
in this area, and I do not want to linger long over the choice of ter-
minology. But what is important is that untrustworthiness-through-
incompetence can have much of the same ethical and practical character
as does untrustworthiness-through-bad-intentions. Indeed, we often find
it difficult to decide whether someone really isn’t able to fulfil her com-
mitments, or whether she just isn’t willing to do so. This uncertainty can
also arise in the first person, of course, when I wonder whether I am
really trying my best to live up to my commitments.
If this seems a stretch, it may be because we can easily imagine or
remember cases in which someone over-commits without realizing that
she is taking on too much—which may make her seem less blameworthy—
whereas it is perhaps harder to imagine a case in which someone
does not realize she is being insincere in her assertions or promises.
I’ll return later to discuss whether trustworthiness requires just com-
petence or also knowledge of competence, and also to explore the nature
and consequences of commitment without proper competence. But
already it should be clear that not knowing that one is over-committed
will not serve as an all-purpose excuse for failure, nor as a mark of
trustworthiness.
It is a familiar thought that lies and false promises are morally wrong,
exceptional circumstances aside. And it might seem harsh to suggest that
incompetence or ignorance is likewise a moral flaw. It is certainly not in
general a moral flaw to lack competence or be ignorant: we are all inev-
itably multi-incompetent and multi-ignorant. Nor even is it in general a
moral flaw to lack competence which others want or need you to pos-
sess. But recall that, on my view, trustworthiness requires competence
only insofar as we have commitments. And it is morally problematic to
end up in a situation in which you are committed to doing something
you are not competent to do, absent a good excuse at least.
82 Trustworthiness

A misleading shorthand for what I want to say is that trustworthiness

requires competence. It is misleading because one can be trustworthy
even whilst having very little competence or knowledge, so long as one
avoids commitments which would require such competence or
knowledge. The less misleading formulation is to say that trustworthiness
requires us to undertake commitments only where we have the compe-
tence to fulfil those commitments. We sometimes have control over which
commitments we take on. And we sometimes have control over what
competence we have, both in the sense that we can learn new skills but
also in the sense that we can adapt our circumstances, not least through
managing what commitments we take on. Thus there can be more than
one way of achieving trustworthiness in a certain domain, compatible
with greater and lesser degrees of competence and commitment, so long
as the latter is not allowed to outstrip the former.
Still, I haven’t given you an account of what competence really is or
requires, and I am not going to do so. In some contexts, the notion of
competence may seem closer to true belief than to knowledge, closer to
a reliable capacity for successful action than to know-how (for those
who wish to make that distinction). In effect, I was exploring these
possibilities in discussing the various possible competence norms in
chapters 2 and 3. This distances me from others who have written about
epistemic norms for action, for assertion, and the like, since I am not
concerned to make the fine distinctions which preoccupy them. This is
because, as we will see later, the practical issues rarely seem to hang on
those distinctions, even though the distinctions may be of interest in
their own right. The main point about competence that I will carry for-
ward, in addition to its contrast with sincerity, is that what we are com-
petent to do can depend in important, constitutive ways on the material
and social circumstances we find ourselves in, as I will explain below.

4.3 What Trustworthiness Permits

I have emphasized that a trustworthy person must sometimes disappoint

people by refusing to take on commitments which she will not or cannot
fulfil: trustworthiness sometimes requires us to act contrary to other
people’s hopes or wishes. This is in part an issue of demandingness: most
 4.3 What Trustworthiness Permits 83

of us are embedded in such a rich network of people with so many

needs and desires that we cannot consistently respond to all of these.
Trustworthiness does not require us to minimize our social contacts in
the light of human neediness. What is perhaps more surprising is not
just that trustworthiness permits us to avoid unreasonable demands, but
that it permits us to avoid even quite reasonable demands.
Trustworthiness requires that our commitments not outstrip our
actions; it does not require us to extend our commitments as far as possible
within that constraint. A trustworthy person may disappoint people up-
front for no good reason at all, even though she knows that if she took
on the commitment she would be willing and able to follow through. So
one strategy for achieving trustworthiness is to be very reluctant to take
on new commitments: there is a wide range of possible commitment-
levels which are all compatible with trustworthiness. You will recognize
this variety if you think about your friends, colleagues, family members,
and neighbours, and about yourself. After all, being trustworthy isn’t
everything: some people are highly trustworthy whilst being rather
ungenerous. Conversely, generous, charitable, or simply enthusiastic
impulses easily coexist with untrustworthiness, at least where untrust-
worthiness arises from lack of competence rather than lack of goodwill.
Why do we sometimes resist taking on commitments even when we
could easily fulfil them? Often of course it’s because we just don’t want to
do the thing in question, and realize that if we take on the commitment
we will face an unhappy choice between doing what we prefer to avoid,
or else violating norms, with foreseeable social consequences. But some-
times we may be indifferent to the action, or positively intend to do it,
yet prefer to act outside the framework of commitment and duty. Why
have this preference?
One reason is that avoiding commitment allows us flexibility, in case
we change our minds or something else comes up. In the case of speech,
where there is no time delay between incurring the commitment and
fulfilling (or failing to fulfil) it, the corresponding urge is to absolve one-
self from responsibility for the truth of what is said, even whilst saying
it; often we’d like to maintain plausible deniability.
Sometimes there are less sinister reasons for preferring to act outside
of commitment and duty: for example, there can be good, altruistic
reasons for not wanting to offer someone an epistemic assurance of your
84 Trustworthiness

future action (or the truth of what you say), even when you yourself
possess such assurance. You may be trying to teach someone how to be
independent, to wean someone off a habit of relying upon you; parents
are often in this situation. Moreover, there is no point promising some-
one that you will throw them a surprise party on their birthday. And,
more self-servingly, we may like the fact that people are often more
grateful, or express their gratitude differently, when we act without being
obliged to do so. On the other hand, people are often grateful for assur-
ance, so this isn’t a straightforward calculation.
Doesn’t trustworthiness require us to take on new commitments? As
I  discussed above, often we incur meta-commitments, whereby we
undertake to be open to future additional commitments without actu-
ally incurring them ahead of time. This means that on occasion trust-
worthiness will indeed require us to take on new commitments, as we
have undertaken to do. But where meta-commitments do not bind us,
attention to trustworthiness leaves us free to reduce our burden of com-
mitment quite substantially. This is another reason why I have tried not
to refer to trustworthiness as a ‘virtue’: on one standard philosophical
account of the virtues, they are mutually reinforcing, and indeed cannot
be fully achieved independently. The valuable trait of trustworthiness
which I am exploring here does not have that kind of relationship to
other valuable traits such as generosity or kindness.

4.4 What Attention to Trustworthiness Can Require

I have argued that trustworthiness is compatible with a wide range of

degrees of commitment and that, even though the pursuit of other
positive traits, values, and goals may require us to take on commit-
ments sometimes, one can be trustworthy without doing so. Indeed,
this was built into the way I set things up in chapter 1, when I argued
that we should not identify the attitude of trust with relying upon
others to meet their obligations, exactly because trustworthiness is a
somewhat richer trait than the all-purpose virtue of meeting one’s
obligations. Being trustworthy is compatible with falling short in other
ways, both with respect to other people and with respect to our own
personal flourishing.
 4.4 What Attention to Trustworthiness Can Require 85

We are now in a position to recognize something a little stronger and

stranger. Concern with our own trustworthiness permits us to neglect
other important goals. But in addition it can sometimes require us to
neglect other important goals. A concern for trustworthiness can be
in tension with values such as generosity or enthusiasm, and it can be in
tension with the aspiration to gain new competences. It can lead us to
miss out on important opportunities by making us cautious about
taking on commitments, even when we positively value traits like gener-
osity and kindness, or the practical and intrinsic advantages of collabor-
ating with others socially.
There is a weaker and a stronger version of this point. The weaker
version is that we can’t do everything we would like to do for ourselves
or others, and so we shouldn’t commit to doing everything we would
like to do. In particular, it is unsurprising if a generous impulse or a flash
of enthusiasm tempts us to make a commitment we would not be com-
petent to fulfil, and unsurprising that we can feel disappointed when we
realize that the trustworthy response is to resist this temptation, even in
the face of others’ wishes. This is another way of seeing that untrust-
worthiness can sometimes flow from admirable motives: often we want
to commit to helping others, or to doing things which would be intrin-
sically valuable, even though taking on such a commitment would violate
the competence norm.
In itself, this doesn’t generate a genuine conflict between what trust-
worthiness demands and what, for example, generosity requires, even
though in such cases we may feel a generous urge pulling us in one dir-
ection, and an urge to trustworthiness pulling in the opposite direction.
This isn’t yet a genuine conflict because, I take it, it’s not genuinely
generous to make a commitment we’re not competent to keep, even
when the temptation to do so flows from a generous nature.
The stronger version of the point relies on the fact that often we cannot
easily tell what competencies we possess, for all sorts of reasons. What
we are competent to do depends on complex facts about the future, and
about our physical and social environment, as well as our intrinsic abil-
ities or strengths. We don’t always know what we can do, and we don’t
always know what a given commitment will demand of us. (It’s also true
that we don’t always know whether we have a certain commitment,
and that we don’t always know whether we are sincere: I discuss this in
86 Trustworthiness

chapter 5.) There are plenty of situations in which we are in fact competent

to keep a certain commitment, but do not know that we are; likewise,
there are situations in which we justifiably believe that we are compe-
tent, though in fact we are not.
This means that if I make commitments only when I know that I am
competent to fulfil them, then I will miss out on a range of commitments
I might otherwise have made, for the sake of others or myself, and which
I am in fact competent to fulfil. In such situations, concern with my own
trustworthiness is in direct tension with other values. That’s because, when
caution prevents me from making a commitment to act generously, one
that I am in fact competent to fulfil, it doesn’t seem that I am being gen-
erous all things considered. This is the key contrast between the weaker
version of the point and the stronger version I am now considering.
For most norms, we can distinguish between satisfying the norm and
knowing (or reasonably believing) that you are satisfying the norm: you
can follow a rule without knowing that you are doing so, and you can
break a rule without knowing that you are doing so. Typically we rely
upon this sort of distinction in thinking about blame for norm viola-
tions. But I want to avoid engaging too much with general considerations
about norms, blame, and transparency. Instead, I’m trying to outline a
framework which will help us understand a range of problems, dilem-
mas, misunderstandings, and injustices we encounter in everyday life
when judging trustworthiness in ourselves and others. So here are some
points intended to be useful for that purpose; these provide a first
take on some issues I explore more carefully in chapter 5 and 6.
One common situation is this: I lack perfect insight into my own com-
petence (of course), but am nevertheless considering taking on a new
commitment which would require a particular competence. I wonder
whether I will be able to manage this commitment properly. People han-
dle such decisions with varying degrees of caution, and both extremes
seem problematic.
Suppose I am very reluctant to take on the commitment, because of a
small degree of uncertainty about my ability to fulfil it. Such extreme
caution can look very much like self-centredness masquerading as
heartfelt concern not to let other people down. If the preservation of my
own honour and clean hands is always foremost in my mind, then I have
things out of balance, to put it mildly. This is the kind of situation
 4.4 What Attention to Trustworthiness Can Require 87

invoked by pejorative terms such as ‘fastidious’, ‘fussy’, ‘over-concern’, or

even ‘caution’, and it is the kind of situation in which it is difficult to
develop good working or personal relationships.
This is an unsympathetic portrayal of the reasons for being over-
cautious about taking on new commitments. But some people may be
exceptionally cautious in this way for more sympathetic reasons, including
a quasi-pathological lack of self-confidence, or an awareness of the high
personal costs they will have to pay if they erroneously become over-
committed. Moreover, the language of fussiness can be used to bully
others into taking on what are in fact genuinely unwise commitments.
But this reinforces my point that it’s possible to be over-cautious in tak-
ing on commitment: this is why even a false accusation of over-caution
has some bite.
There is a risk of undermining relationships by saying ‘no’ to other
people too often. Indeed, people usually want us to say ‘yes’, not just ‘I’ll
do my best’. In the context of testimony or information-provision,
people like us to assert outright, rather than constantly hedging with ‘as
far as I know . . .’, ‘well it seems quite likely that . . .’ and so on. If we focus
upon trustworthiness alone, this can seem puzzling: why not admire
such caution? The reason is that we collectively value other traits in
addition to trustworthiness, and paying undue special attention to trust-
worthiness can pull against the development of those other values.
Contrasting with over-caution, the other extreme is a kind of reck-
lessness in commitment-making. This occurs when people take on
commitments despite having very little evidence that they are compe-
tent to fulfil the commitment, or perhaps without having properly
considered whatever evidence may be available. Imagine that I barely
pause to think about whether I’ll be able to act in line with a commit-
ment, and just jump straight in. Exactly how we characterize what’s
wrong here may depend on our broader views in ethics and epistemology.
There are a range of distinctions we can make, using terminology such
as ‘knowledge’, ‘reasonable’, ‘justification’, and so on. But not much will
depend on this in the chapters to come, so although these distinctions
are interesting in their own right, I will not pause over them here. What’s
essential is only that we recognize that trustworthiness is sometimes
incompatible with rushing thoughtlessly into taking on demanding
commitments.
88 Trustworthiness

Between these two extremes, there is a range of approaches and

seemingly no single most appropriate degree of epistemic caution to
exercise in taking on commitments. This means that in many ordinary
situations involving uncertainty we will be pulled one way by attention
to trustworthiness, and simultaneously pulled another way by attention to
other values and goals; there will be no mechanical way of resolving
such tensions.
As I discussed briefly above, there can be other reasons for withholding
commitment, not just careful attention to the demands of trustworthiness.
In particular, we can be over-committed even when we are capable of
meeting all our commitments, in the sense that we may have so many
commitments to others that we are left unable to pursue those projects
which make our own lives meaningful. And even in the closest of rela-
tionships it is important to carve out areas of thought, speech, and action
which are not governed by commitment and obligation. Nevertheless,
my focus will be on the ways in which diligence about trustworthiness,
and consequent caution about commitment, can point away from other
valuable features of life. This is a useful lens through which to see a variety
of practical problems in self-management and interaction with others.

4.5 Assertion and Telling

As explained in chapter 3, I am treating telling or asserting as involving

promise-like commitment to speak truthfully there and then. I think
that this treatment has many merits, but of particular importance to
my  overall project is that it makes possible a unified account of trust,
distrust, trustworthiness, and untrustworthiness across the domains of
action and speech. In this chapter so far I have focused on trustworthiness
in connection with commitments to practical action; but the issues I have
discussed have direct analogues when we think about trustworthiness
in testimony.
Trustworthiness requires us not to over-reach in terms of our assertions;
this point, in somewhat different guise, is familiar from debates around
epistemic norms for assertion. Competence in this realm is competence
to speak truthfully on the matter at hand. However, trustworthiness is
compatible with saying relatively little, or at least asserting relatively
 4.5 Assertion and Telling 89

little, either by remaining silent or by speaking in a hedging or speculative

fashion which tries to evade responsibility for the truth of what is said.
That is, we may avoid any attempt to speak truthfully, or we may attempt
to speak truthfully but without framing this as fulfilment of a commitment
to do so. This reflects my understanding of trustworthiness as a primarily
negative requirement to avoid unfulfilled commitments, rather than a
positive requirement to seek out new commitments and fulfil them.
In the case of practical action, there can be many reasons to take on
new commitments: generosity, kindness, enthusiasm, self-promotion, or
a sense of duty. Likewise, there can be many reasons to make an assertion,
to volunteer information: it’s often helpful to others, it can be fun, it can
be rude not to, it can deepen relationships, promote the speaker’s interests,
and so on. But these are not in general reasons which directly derive
from the pursuit of trustworthiness, as distinct from the desire to dem-
onstrate trustworthiness. An exception concerns ‘meta-commitments’,
where we incur commitments to be open to later, non-specific commit-
ments. There are meta-commitments with respect to assertion: things
we say, roles we accept, or relationships we enter into may commit us to
later volunteering whatever information we may have, or to speaking
out in various situations.
So, setting these meta-commitments aside, trustworthiness often
permits us to be sparing with our assertions. Moreover, a concern with
trustworthiness can drive us towards caution in this respect, and some-
times to go too far with our caution. Just as we can become overly
fastidious with regard to practical commitment, over-concern with
trustworthiness can turn us into unhelpful speakers, thereby damaging
ourselves and others. Unhelpfulness here needn’t involve remaining
silent, but can include hedging formulations such as ‘I believe that . . . ’,
‘last time I checked . . . ’ or ‘it seems pretty likely that . . . ’. Hedging is in
some sense a safer option for those who are concerned to maintain their
own trustworthiness, even at the cost of other values.
Why don’t we always take this safer option? After all, if I believe
something, typically I can be more certain that I have this belief than
that the belief itself is true. So why not just say that I believe it, rather
than committing to the truth of the claim itself? In practice, such
hedged assertions are not merely weaker than they could be, they are
often actively misleading for exactly this reason, as explained by Paul
90 Trustworthiness

Grice’s Co-operative Principle. The Principle enjoins you to ‘Make your

conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it
occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which
you are engaged.’ (1989: 26) A further maxim, that of informativeness,
means if we make a hedged claim we imply that this is the strongest,
most informative claim available to us, which is misleading if we are
simply being overcautious.
Beyond this specific issue about hedging, the theme of conversational
cooperation raises numerous questions in connection with commitment
and trustworthiness. Does becoming engaged in conversation generate
a kind of meta-commitment, pushing us to take on later commitments
that would be useful to our interlocutor or which would otherwise
advance the conversation? At the very least, many of us can recognize a
feeling of reluctance to engage someone in conversation unless either
we’re happy to continue indefinitely or else we know that some external
event will soon bring the conversation to an end. (Or perhaps that’s a
peculiarly British problem.)
Conversational cooperativeness can pull in the opposite direction to
trustworthiness, making us over-eager to contribute in potentially
unsafe ways. But it’s not hard to see that if we focus on resisting this
temptation, becoming overcautious about our commitments, then we
risk irritating those around us. In leaving the audience to make up its
own mind, instead of providing assurance for them, we may seem con-
cerned primarily to avoid recrimination. Clean hands and plausible
deniability again spring to mind. Focused concern on trustworthiness
can lead people to become unhelpfully cautious testifiers, and indeed
bad teachers. But undue lack of concern about trustworthiness also
makes us bad testifiers, liable to assert what is not true. As in the practical
realm, there is no mechanical method for deciding what policy to adopt,
or what to say (or not) in any particular situation.

4.6 Trustworthiness and Perceived Trustworthiness

I have argued that the pursuit of trustworthiness permits, indeed some-

times requires, turning away from other important values and goals (or
 4.6 Trustworthiness and Perceived Trustworthiness 91

at least that there is an important, central notion of trustworthiness for

which this is true). This is supported by the claim that trustworthiness
does not direct us to take on specific commitments, except where we
already possess relevant meta-commitments. Instead, it directs us away
from taking on commitments of certain kinds—i.e. those we are not
competent to fulfil. Since we confront inevitable uncertainty about
what we will be able to do, the safest option from the point of view of
trustworthiness is always to avoid commitment. But this strategy has
significant costs of its own.
In chapters 5 and 6, I will discuss in more detail the extent to which
any of us can individually control our commitments, or even know
what these are. I will also explore the many obstacles which stand in
the way of our becoming and remaining trustworthy, especially under
difficult circumstances. But before moving on, I will briefly compare
trustworthiness with perceived trustworthiness, and the ways in which
these may make different demands upon us.
There is a difference between being trustworthy and appearing to be
trustworthy. In one direction, this is obvious: con artists are adept at
appearing to be trustworthy without actually being trustworthy. When
we trust a con artist, we may be acting entirely reasonably, in line with
the evidence we possess, but nevertheless we are making a mistake. The
other direction may seem less obvious, but there are plenty of circum-
stances in which misleading evidence means that a trustworthy person
might reasonably be regarded as untrustworthy. To invoke an epistemo-
logical cliché, I might be a paragon of trustworthiness who is constantly
mistaken for my fraudster identical twin. People around me do not
realize that I have a twin, and so reasonably, but inaccurately, attribute
my twin’s dastardly behaviour to me and thus do not trust me. More
subtly, even if I lack an evil twin, people may take me to have commit-
ments I do not really have, and thus judge me to be untrustworthy when
I do not act in line with those imagined ‘commitments’. We can make
reasonable mistakes about one another’s trustworthiness, just as we can
make reasonable mistakes about kindness, diligence, courage, tastes in
music, and so on.
It is tempting to regard trustworthiness as a kind of accuracy condi-
tion for trust, analogous to a truth condition for belief: beliefs can be
92 Trustworthiness

false yet justified or true yet unjustified, and similarly trust may be
inaccurate yet justified or accurate yet unjustified. But it is not evident
that trustworthiness stands to trust as a constitutive aim, as many think
that truth stands to belief as a constitutive aim. Trust may aim at encour-
aging trustworthiness, for example, rather than aiming to recognize or
detect existing trust.
Even setting this complication aside, the relationship between per-
ceived trustworthiness and trustworthiness is more complex than the
relationship between, for example, perceived kindness and kindness, or
perceived courage and courage. There are a number of causal and con-
stitutive mechanisms which complicate the picture. For example, when
others regard us as untrustworthy, they may give us fewer opportunities to
take on commitments; this makes it more difficult for us to develop good
judgement in commitment management, to learn what our capabilities
are, and to demonstrate whatever trustworthiness we do have.
Even if we are able to incur commitments, lack of trust from other
people can make it more difficult for us to fulfil those commitments,
especially where we need cooperation and support. More generally,
being trusted helps us to acquire and develop new capabilities to act—it
can be difficult to learn new skills or acquire new capacities if others do
not trust us to learn through trial and error, for example.
When faced with a potential new commitment, how should these
complications inform our thinking? Trustworthiness, as I have argued
above, by default points towards caution. If you don’t take anything on,
you run no risk of letting other people down. But as we can now appre-
ciate, lack of commitment also means lack of opportunity to demon-
strate our capacity to live up to a commitment, and lack of opportunity
to test oneself and learn for the future. Avoiding commitment may be
the best guarantee of avoiding untrustworthiness in the short term, but
this is a limited strategy in the longer term even as regards trustworthiness
itself, not to mention other important goals.
More generally, we should expect at least a fallible connection between
being trustworthy and appearing to be trustworthy: trustworthiness
could not perform its social role if it were widely undetectable. The
same is true of commitments. In chapter 5, I will try to show how often
our circumstances—including circumstances beyond our control—can
 Additional Sources 93

make a difference to our ability to safely take on commitments, or

to  refuse commitments without penalty. To a surprising extent, our
trustworthiness—or untrustworthiness—is not fully under our personal
control.

Additional Sources

4.1 Trustworthiness and Commitment. On the importance of trust-

worthiness: (Hardin 2002; Potter 2002; Putnam 2000, 136). Potter (2002)
develops a virtue account of trustworthiness, whilst McLeod  (2015)
outlines the range of options here. Onora O’Neill often emphasizes the
importance of understanding trustworthiness, not just trust (2002a, b).
Jones  (2012) explores both trustworthiness and what she calls ‘rich
trustworthiness’, which includes an ability to signal one’s trustworthiness.
4.2 Trustworthiness Beyond Sincerity. This discussion connects with
literature on knowledge, blame, and moral responsibility, e.g. Zimmerman
(2014).
4.3 What Trustworthiness Permits. The notion of plausible deniability
connects to Saul  (2012)’s explorations of the distinction between out-
right lying and ‘merely’ misleading.
4.4 What Attention to Trustworthiness Can Require. Ideas around
margins for error and safety draw on Williamson (2000) and the large
literature inspired by Williamson’s work. Our lack of a ‘cognitive home’
relates to work on blame, insight, norms, and excuses, e.g. Srinivasan
(2015). My emphasis on the dangers of cautiously over-emphasizing
trustworthiness echoes Owens  (2012) on normative powers: there is
value in possessing normative power, but there is also value in exercising
it. The point that there is no single best way of striking a balance in
this  area relates to debates around ‘uniqueness’ in epistemology, e.g.
White (2005). Hawley (2014b) connects trust and uniqueness in a some-
what different way.
4.5 Assertion and Telling. Connections to literature on epistemic
injustice and silencing are taken up in later chapters, most explicitly in
section 6.5. More specifically, Maitra (2010) has fruitfully explored our
94 Trustworthiness

duties as listeners to continuing conversation, in ways which mirror

some of what I say here about our responsibilities as speakers. The issues
in this section can be seen through the lens of debate about norms for
assertion, as I explored in chapter 3 (see references there). My somewhat
different aim here is to portray the pursuit of trustworthiness as one
consideration in thinking what to say, just as satisfying the epistemic-
alethic norms of assertion is one consideration in thinking what to say.
4.6 Trustworthiness and Perceived Trustworthiness. Jones  (2012) is
very useful here, and Gambetta (2011) is a fascinating read.
 5
Obstacles to Being Trustworthy

To be trustworthy, we need to avoid unfulfilled commitments. But that

is easier said than done. How, in practice, can we become and remain
trustworthy? The main purpose of this chapter is to show how our prac-
tical circumstances can make it more difficult for us to be trustworthy.
Sometimes circumstances directly make trustworthiness harder to achieve,
even when we make trustworthiness an absolute priority. Sometimes
circumstances raise the cost of trustworthiness, making it more difficult
to prioritize trustworthiness ahead of other goals or values. Whilst I will
discuss practical action and trustworthiness in general, these points
about circumstantial obstacles also apply to the special case of trust-
worthiness in speech, and I shall mention some issues specific to assertion
along the way.
‘Circumstances’ here takes in our physical environment, including
where we’re located; our social environment, including how much sup-
port we have from others, or conversely the obstacles they may place in
our paths; and our material resources, including money or lack thereof.
This is not intended to be an exhaustive list. Circumstances are not just
things ‘outside’ of us, but also include our mental and physical health or
ill-health. Sometimes our circumstances are at least partially within our
direct control, but sometimes they are not.
Such a wide notion may seem useless as a theoretical tool, or seem to
presuppose some implausible complementary notion of the inner self, a
core which remains constant across circumstances. But my main concern
will be with aspects of our circumstances which are not inevitably
obvious to others, or sometimes even to ourselves, and with aspects of
our circumstances which may vary between different people, or for the
same person over time. This combination of opacity and variation
creates a number of opportunities for us to misjudge both ourselves and
others, with respect to both competence and commitment, and therefore

How To Be Trustworthy. Katherine Hawley, Oxford University Press (2019). © Katherine Hawley.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843900.001.0001
96 Obstacles to Being Trustworthy

with respect to trustworthiness. I will explore some of the misjudgements

in chapter  6: the aim is not to provide a complete catalogue of all the
ways in which we get things wrong, but to capture some key problems.
So how do our circumstances bear on our trustworthiness? In previous
chapters I have developed accounts of trust, distrust, and trustworthiness
which centrally involve the idea of living up to one’s commitments, or,
more negatively, avoiding unfulfilled commitment. Trustworthiness does
not in general require us to take on specific commitments, except where
these flow from earlier meta-commitments. Instead, it requires us to
ensure that our commitments do not outstrip our actions. This means that
in principle we have two levers at our disposal in pursuing trustworthi-
ness: we can try to adjust our commitments, and we can try to adjust our
actions. Obstacles to using these levers effectively are therefore obstacles
to managing our own trustworthiness.
It is useful to distinguish two perspectives on this process of adjust-
ment, nominally corresponding to different points in time. First, we have
the opportunity to adjust our commitments—i.e. to incur or to avoid a
potential new commitment. Later, we have the opportunity to act, or not,
in the light of our existing commitments. From both perspectives, we
need both insight and control. Someone considering whether to incur a
certain commitment needs insight into what she will be able to do, insight
into her competences; in addition, she needs control over whether she
incurs a new commitment. If she lacks insight into her own competences,
then even perfect control over her commitments will not guarantee
trustworthiness, since she will not know which commitments she can
safely select. If, on the other hand, she lacks control over her commitments,
then even perfect insight into her own competences will not guarantee
trustworthiness, since she will be unable to avoid incurring unfulfillable
commitments.
The later perspective is that of someone considering action in the light
of her existing commitments. This person needs insight into what her
commitments (and thus trustworthiness) require of her; in addition, she
needs control over her actions. If she lacks insight into her commitments,
then even perfect control over her actions will not guarantee trustworthi-
ness, since she will not know which of various incompatible actions
trustworthiness requires. If, on the other hand, she lacks control over
her actions for whatever reason, then even perfect insight into her
 5.1 Obstacles to Controlling New Commitment 97

commitments will not guarantee trustworthiness, since she may be unable

to act as she knows her commitments require her to.
So beforehand we need insight into our competence, and control over
our commitments; afterwards we need insight into our commitments,
and control over our actions. This four-way distinction is much too tidy,
for lots of reasons. We are constantly both facing the prospect of new
commitments and trying to act in the light of existing commitments,
and these tasks may interfere with one another. This interference is par-
ticularly direct when we are trying to work out whether we already have
a meta-commitment which means that trustworthiness requires us to
take on some new commitment. More generally, there are complex rela-
tionships between insight and control in any domain. Control is often
enhanced by insight, and conversely we may gain insight into things
we control, not least by experimenting through trial and error. Finally,
I argued in chapter 3 that assertion involves simultaneously undertaking
to speak truthfully, and speaking truthfully (or not, as the case may be):
there is no time-lag involved, thus no dual temporal perspective.
Nevertheless, the four-way distinction provides a useful framework for
this chapter. I aim to give some practical examples of situations which
can make it difficult to be trustworthy, or force us into unappealing choices
between trustworthiness and other goals, by reducing our insight or
control from either the ‘earlier’ or the ‘later’ perspective. A recurring
theme is the important role of our environments, material and social.
Another theme is the inevitability of uncertainty, and the question of how
to respond to uncertainty: possible responses to the various obstacles
will be discussed in chapter 6. A third is, again, the way in which the
pursuit of trustworthiness can sometimes direct us away from other
important goals, values, and relationships, including sometimes the goal
of communicating our own trustworthiness.

5.1 Obstacles to Controlling New Commitment

What obstacles do we encounter when trying to control what new com-

mitments we incur? It is relatively clear how circumstances could make
it more difficult for us to incur new commitments. In particular, we typ-
ically cannot commit through assertion, through promising, or through
98 Obstacles to Being Trustworthy

less explicit mechanisms, unless someone is willing to take us seriously.

If I offer to promise, I am not bound to act unless you take me up on the
offer: I need your cooperation if I am to put my trustworthiness on
the line. This doesn’t mean that you must believe that I will keep my
promise: you might accept my promise, whilst believing that I will break
it, even whilst believing that I intend to break it, indeed even whilst
hoping that I will break it and thus demonstrate my untrustworthiness.
Nevertheless, you need to hear and accept my offer. (I discuss related
issues in chapters 2 and 3.)
Incurring commitment typically requires certain sorts of attitudes
from other people. More mundanely, it often also requires the right
material resources, or being in the right place at the right time. You can’t
take on the commitments involved in mortgage repayment unless you
can first produce an initial deposit (a down payment). To take on profes-
sional commitments, you need a job, customers, or clients. More abstractly,
it often takes conceptual resources and imagination to be able to make a
certain commitment: someone who has never heard of Madrid cannot
undertake to go there, at least not in those terms.
These are all obstacles which literally prevent people from taking on
commitments; they do not merely make it inappropriate to take on a
commitment because it will be too difficult to fulfil. Such obstacles have
an indirect impact on how trustworthy a person can be, partly because
people who lack opportunities to take on new commitments find it
more difficult to develop the skills and self-knowledge required for good
commitment-management. However, in terms of trustworthiness, the
commitment control which matters most is not this ability to take on
new commitments at will. Instead, it is our veto power, the extent to
which we are able to refuse or avoid new commitments when we have
doubts about whether we will be able to fulfil them. Given my account
of trustworthiness in terms of avoiding unfulfilled commitments, ability
to avoid commitment is crucial.
How could circumstances make this difficult? It might seem obvious
that we all have the ability to refuse new commitments as we see fit,
because involuntary commitment is conceptually impossible: after all,
coerced promises are often regarded as non-binding, and as such not really
promises at all. Maybe that’s right—I won’t try to argue that there can be
coerced commitments, or commitments which are entirely non-voluntary,
whatever that would amount to.
 5.1 Obstacles to Controlling New Commitment 99

Even setting aside the possibility of involuntary commitment, however,

there is plenty to think about in this vicinity, and plenty of opportunities
for practical difficulties. First, there are certainly situations in which
other people regard us as having a commitment, and yet we ourselves do
not endorse that commitment. For example, suppose that I am coerced
into saying ‘I promise’, and suppose that the coercion means that I have
not genuinely made a promise. The coercion may not be visible to people
around me, who therefore regard me as having freely undertaken a new
commitment to act. In such situations my trustworthiness is not really at
stake, given the assumption that my apparent ‘promise’ is not really
binding. But my reputation for trustworthiness is at stake, because of
other people’s mistaken apprehension. We each have an interest in
engaging with and trying to control other people’s opinions about our
commitments, and this may not be a straightforward task.
Second, practical circumstances can make it more difficult for us to be
trustworthy even though our commitments are uncoerced and in a good
sense still voluntary. This is because circumstances can increase the
personal or social cost of refusing certain new commitments. For example,
someone who has very few employment opportunities and little access
to welfare benefits in some sense still has the option of turning down
a demanding or degrading job, but it is much harder for her to refuse the
job than it would be for someone who has other options, or an independ-
ent income. Someone working or living in a context where advancement
relies upon a network of favours and reciprocity pays a high personal
price if she does not take on commitments to other people when they
ask her to do so, even though she could in principle decline these. More
positively, it can be much harder to turn down a friend’s request to
commit than to turn down a stranger’s request. These examples focus on
practical action, but similarly our circumstances often generate various
kinds of pressure or incentive to speak up rather than remain silent, and
to speak assertorically rather than speculate tentatively. These pressures
can be very significant, without rendering the resultant speech involun-
tary or coerced and thus not genuinely committing.
Different people pay different prices for refusing commitment. For
example, there can be gendered differences in our expectations of who
will volunteer for certain sorts of responsibilities: a woman who does
not offer to bake for co-workers’ birthdays (or to bring cookies to class)
may be judged more harshly than a man, pressurizing her to make
100 Obstacles to Being Trustworthy

commitments she may find it difficult to fulfil. Small communities with

high expectations of neighbourliness may disapprove of those who
attempt to avoid commitment to communal activities. This sort of pres-
sure may be invisible to outsiders: an urbanite may simply be puzzled
about why the village-dweller feels pressure to undertake commitments
she would prefer to avoid, and indeed may not be competent to fulfil.
The varying costs of avoiding commitment can be obscure; I return to
this in chapter 6 as a factor in our first-person response to such costs,
and as a factor in how we evaluate others’ decisions around trustworthi-
ness and commitment.
There are many sources of pressure to take on more than just those
commitments we prefer, or more than just those commitments we can
easily fulfil. Such pressures are significant because they can explain why
someone may become untrustworthy despite setting out with good
intentions, and because some people are much more vulnerable to this
pressure than are others. This isn’t always a bad thing: it is a mistake to
think that our lives would automatically be richer, more free, or otherwise
more valuable if we were always able to pick and choose our commitments
without feeling pressure from others, from their needs and desires. After
all, friendship and other valuable relationships inevitably involve such
constraints, and this is not a mere side effect or downside of having
friends. Nor is it an unfortunate reciprocal price we must pay for being
able to pressure friends to take our needs and desires into account.
Instead, it is one of the ways in which friendship can shape our lives for
the better. Nevertheless, depending on its sources and scale, this sort of
pressure can be damaging, as I will explore in chapter 6.
Pressures to commit can arise where the person concerned knows full
well what options are available to her, and what the costs and penalties
of incurring or refusing commitment will be. But in practice we are
often uncertain: about our options, about how our action and speech
may or may not commit us, and about the consequences of all this. What
does this mean for our control over commitment? It is easy to think of
control and insight as closely linked, both because knowledge can be
empowering, and because control facilitates learning: if I am able to
adjust my behaviour and circumstances, then observe the consequences,
I will better understand what commitments I have. But, as standpoint
epistemologists emphasize, people who lack power may be only too
aware of the nature and consequences of their own disempowerment, in
 5.1 Obstacles to Controlling New Commitment 101

ways which remain obscure to other people who occupy different, more
empowered standpoints.
Indeed, Charles  W.  Mills  (2007) has shown how those who possess
power may rely upon on their own lack of insight as a means of perpetu-
ating this possession. Mills’s chief concern is with white ignorance in the
context of racism, but the point generalizes. Someone employed under
exploitative conditions may have an excellent understanding of how the
employer’s whims generate commitments for the employee, a better
understanding than the employer possesses or even wants to possess;
the same goes for people who are ‘self-employed’ in the gig economy. So
for all sorts of reasons we should bear in mind that there is an important
difference between having control over one’s commitments and having
insight into what they are; likewise, there is an important difference
between lacking control over one’s commitments and lacking insight
into them.
Nevertheless, insight is often helpful in achieving control of our com-
mitments. And even in relatively egalitarian company we may struggle
to grasp how our speech and actions will be interpreted by others. In
earlier chapters I dwelt upon explicit means of incurring commitment,
through promising and assertion. But there is a host of ways in which
subtle social conventions and defaults govern the incurring of less explicit
commitments. In many contexts, to accept a gift, hospitality or invitation
is to incur a commitment to reciprocate appropriately, whatever appro-
priateness turns out to require. To take a different example, often we can
become committed not just by actively claiming a commitment, but also
by failing to object or actively push back against others’ expectations of
us on this front. But it may not be clear how this opt-out works, when it
is happening, and when it is already too late to protest.
It is in the nature of these conventions that they are rarely made expli-
cit, except when we want to complain about people who violate our
expectations. And they easily vary between different families, groups of
friends, or workplaces, as well as across more obvious cultural divides
between nations or generations. This opens up the possibility of mutual
misunderstanding about what commitments different people carry, and
about what it takes for those commitments to be discharged.
How does all of this confusion place obstacles in the way of our
becoming trustworthy? First, suppose that you are fully aware of the
social conventions governing gifts, and realize that if you accept a gift, then
102 Obstacles to Being Trustworthy

you will be treated as having undertaken to reciprocate with a gift at a

later date: if you don’t reciprocate, you will be regarded as untrust-
worthy. In such a situation, by accepting a gift you incur a commitment,
even if you would prefer that not to be the case: we typically do not have
full control over the normative significance of our actions. You can accept
the gift and then say that you refuse to recognize any responsibility to
reciprocate, but merely saying so does not automatically release you from
commitment, any more than you are freed of promissory obligations
merely by declaring that you will break an existing promise. (Things
might be different if you say up-front that you will only accept the gift
on condition of not being committed to reciprocate, and if the giver
accepts these non-standard conditions, But such negotiations are not
always binding, or even possible.)
What if you are not aware of the local convention that accepting a gift
generates a commitment to reciprocate? We are often unsure of local
social conventions, especially when we are outsiders for one reason or
another. In such a situation, once you have accepted a gift, for example,
others will think you are thereby committed to reciprocate. Is this
enough to make you genuinely committed? Is your trustworthiness now
on the line?
There is a theoretical dilemma here. We can insist that it is possible to
incur commitment unknowingly, that sometimes we don’t know that
we’re putting our trustworthiness on the line. Or we can insist that this
is not possible, that we cannot have commitments we are unaware of.
In such circumstances, other people may regard us as committed, and
therefore judge our trustworthiness by our subsequent actions, but they
will be mistaken. These mistakes may make it sensible for us to act as
they expect, even though our trustworthiness is not genuinely on the
line. But this doesn’t mean that we really are committed.
Which way to jump? The dilemma invokes wider, deeper philosophical
questions about norms, reasons, obligations, and first-person awareness;
I am not attempting to engage those wider, deeper questions here. Instead,
we can make some progress by thinking more specifically about what
we need from our concepts of commitment, undertaking, trust, and
trustworthiness, although this will not lead us to a precise account of
exactly when commitments are incurred. In fact, I think we feel ambiva-
lent about this in real-life situations: we feel unsure whether to judge
people’s trustworthiness on the basis of commitments they seem unaware
 5.1 Obstacles to Controlling New Commitment 103

of, and we feel unsure whether we must act in line with commitments
others unexpectedly—mistakenly?—take us to have. This creates oppor-
tunities for guilt and for guilt-tripping, for anxiety and exploitation of
different kinds.
In thinking about how far commitment can exceed the scope of first-
personal grasp, we should at least agree that two extreme positions are
both unappealing. It cannot be that a person is never bound by commit-
ment unless she knows exactly what she is undertaking to do. Amongst
their other roles, commitment, trust, and trustworthiness are devices for
social coordination, and for reducing the so-called ‘transaction costs’ of
trying to work together. Much of this would be impossible if lack of full
transparency always voided commitments. It would also be exception-
ally burdensome if we constantly had to check on each other’s grasp of
exactly what commitments have been incurred in order to reasonably
hold people to account. Some flexibility here is a benefit to all of us, both
as it enables us to trust others without detailed investigation, and as it
lures us into commitments which we do not fully understand yet will
ultimately value. To think otherwise is to adopt a superficially attractive
but unachievable cold ideal of utterly transparent autonomy.
On the other hand, it cannot be that we have no first-person advantage
whatsoever in understanding what commitments we have undertaken.
Commitments can play their social role only insofar as they are available
to guide our actions, at least where we are intrinsically or instrumentally
motivated to be trustworthy. Indeed, we need a grasp of our existing
commitments in order to judge which new commitments we can safely
incur. To the extent that commitments lie beyond an individual’s control
or insight, they are entangled with the behaviour, attitudes, and expect-
ations of other people. But one of the guiding themes of earlier chapters
was that trustworthiness does not require us to respond to each and every
demand which is placed upon us. Sometimes when people think that we
are untrustworthy for not doing as they wish, those people are mistaken.
Sometimes when others think we have an obligation-generating com-
mitment to do something for them, they are mistaken. For these sorts of
reasons, we need to recognize that we are not just third-party observers
of our own commitments.
My remarks here blur various senses of epistemic and practical
authority, without properly pinning down the relationships between these.
But a concept of commitment which can underpin a useful concept of
104 Obstacles to Being Trustworthy

trustworthiness must picture commitments neither as wholly within the

grasp of the committed person, nor as wholly beyond her. Being trust-
worthy is a norm, and norms often behave like this: they inhabit a space
between us whereby we can each typically get some grip on how to
follow the norm, but have neither a guarantee of infallibility in such
matters nor complete control over whether we follow the norm. Even
once we rule out the two extremes of complete first-personal veto, and
assimilation of the first-personal to the third-personal perspective, there
remains a lot of flexibility in how to think about commitments and
trustworthiness, both as theorists and as socially embedded people.
Correspondingly our everyday practices of holding one another
responsible for our apparent commitments, and thus our expectations
of one another on these counts, seem somewhat shifty. Different cultural
contexts, different groups of friends or workmates, can handle these
issues in somewhat differing ways, allowing the individual greater or
less control and insight with regard to her own commitments. This is
problematic insofar as it makes life difficult for people who move between
groups, and may find it difficult to work out what local practice is, or to
understand their own role in local practice. These problems are most
significant for people who have the most to lose from being regarded as
untrustworthy; I return to these challenges in chapter 6.
Moreover social power can provide control even without insight. For
example, in a high-pressure workplace, the convention could in effect be
that everyone’s commitments—including the boss’s commitments—are
whatever the boss thinks that they are. It is often an aspect of social
privilege to be able to control one’s commitments to a greater extent,
even if we do not appreciate this. Consider the meta-commitments—
commitments-to-take-on-commitments—that we often incur when
entering friendships or employment. A stringent employment contract
can commit you to taking on whatever commitments you are asked to
take on in future; ‘zero-hours’ contracts make employees commit to being
available at short notice, even where there is no guarantee of paid work.
Some of us are more likely to suffer under such contracts than others:
professional jobs typically allow much greater autonomy in choice of
commitment, as compared to jobs lower down the socio-economic
hierarchy. Beyond the workplace, people living in impoverished material
circumstances have to impose more demanding friendships upon one
 5.2 Obstacles to Knowing One ’ s Competence 105

another, because without social support they have no other safety net.
All of these complications further illustrate that ability to control one’s
commitments is not uniformly or equitably distributed.
In this section I have investigated obstacles to controlling our com-
mitments, and thus obstacles to being trustworthy. Even if we accept
that there is no such thing as an involuntary commitment, practical
circumstances of many kinds can make it much more difficult for people
to avoid commitments, even when they are fully aware of what is going
on; the price of avoiding commitment may be unaffordably high. In
addition, there are many situations in which we are unsure of how our
actions and speech will be understood by other people as resulting in
our having incurred new commitment. Often the mere fact of others
seeing us as committed gives us strong reason to act as they anticipate.
But it seems that at least on occasion we do have commitments we are
unaware of, generated by the social significance of our actions and words.
In chapter 6 I discuss how we can or should respond to these various
situations, but before doing so I will review other types of obstacle to
trustworthiness.

5.2 Obstacles to Knowing One’s Competence

Trustworthiness requires us to avoid unfulfilled commitments. Suppose

that we have the option to incur or avoid some new commitment, that
we have overcome the obstacles to control which I discussed in the pre-
vious section. What then does trustworthiness require of us? At base,
the requirement is to avoid commitments that we are not competent to
fulfil, given all the other demands on our time, resources, and will-
power. As I discussed in chapter 4, trustworthiness does not require us
to take on absolutely every commitment we can safely manage.
Trustworthiness requires us to avoid commitments we are not com-
petent to fulfil. It does not directly impose a stricter requirement to
avoid commitments unless we know that we are competent to fulfil them.
Someone who blundered about at random, or took on exceptionally few
commitments for selfish reasons, could through luck or parsimony
reliably obey the letter of the law in terms of trustworthiness. She would
incur commitments even whilst not knowing whether she was competent
106 Obstacles to Being Trustworthy

to fulfil them, yet luckily avoid commitments she is in fact not competent
to fulfil. If she lacked insight into her own competence—and lacked insight
into her own lack of competence—this would not automatically render
her untrustworthy.
Nevertheless, on the assumption that we do not want to keep our
commitments to the bare minimum, and do not want to rely on mere luck
to render us trustworthy, we will need some insight into what we are
capable of doing. So obstacles to gaining that insight are for all practical
purposes obstacles to being trustworthy. Here we encounter in somewhat
different guise the debates around norms for assertion and promising
which I discussed in chapters 2 and 3. My strategy there was not to advo-
cate for any particular norm, but rather to show how the existence of a
range of possible norms in either case could be explained by understand-
ing assertion as involving a promise-like commitment (and simultaneous
keeping or breaking of that promise). Moreover, although norms on
promise-making cannot simply be reduced to the norm of avoiding
promises that will be broken, they must ultimately be understood in terms
of that goal.
Given that trustworthiness prompts us to confine our commitments
within the boundaries of our competence, what obstacles might get in
our way? In this section, I focus on obstacles to being competent, and
then on obstacles to knowing what competences we have. But first I need
to clarify the conception of competence which is at stake here: what is it
to be competent to fulfil a commitment? The conception which matters
for trustworthiness is one which renders competence highly sensitive to
the circumstances of action: what counts is successful action (including
truthful speech in the context of assertion), rather than underlying skills
or qualities which may be frustrated by environmental conditions before
they result in successful action. This is not because successful action is
all that matters in life. Nor do I imagine that success is usually possible
without underlying skill or capability. It is because I have tied trust-
worthiness to the avoidance of unfulfilled commitment, not just to good
intentions, not just to attempts to avoid unfulfilled commitment, and not
just to being poised to avoid unfulfilled commitment if all goes well.
The fewer skills and capacities you have which are actionable in your
environment, the fewer safe but substantive commitments you can
make. Conversely, the better the match between your skills and the
 5.2 Obstacles to Knowing One ’ s Competence 107

situations in which you act, the less often you will be forced to choose
between trustworthiness and commitment, because you can have both.
This is one reason why skill is valuable: it enables us to be trustworthy
without sacrificing generosity, adventure, or the opportunity to learn.
This is also a reason why it is valuable to live in circumstances which
make it easy to act on whatever skills we possess. I will review some ways
in which circumstances help determine what we can do, before discussing
how circumstances also play a role in determining what we can know
about what we can do.
Circumstances can be relevant to what we can do either through
causal influences or more directly by constituting the circumstances
under which we need to act. Causal influences here include all the very
many widely recognized factors such as education, family support in
childhood, physical training, inheritances, and past purchases or savings,
which make each of us who we are today, with all of our skills, knowledge,
material and social resources, strengths, and weaknesses.
Even granted all that history, each of us now faces different opportun-
ities and obstacles in trying to act successfully in the world. Imagine two
parents, living in different parts of the same city, both trying to get their
kids to school on time every day. The first person is financially comfort-
able, and lives within walking distance of the school; her kids have no
special medical needs or behavioural problems, and mostly enjoy school.
The second person lives in cramped temporary accommodation, and
can’t always afford to provide breakfast; her kids have a variety of special
needs, and are very reluctant to attend school. Obviously, it is easier for
the first parent to get her kids to school punctually than it is for the
second parent; if they switched places, as in an exploitative TV show,
then their ‘success rates’ would change.
Let’s imagine that these parents are in some intrinsic sense equally
as talented and capable as each other, whatever that might mean.
Nevertheless, it is much harder for one of them to act successfully in this
respect than it is for the other, since they face very different challenges
from the circumstances in which they must act. How should we describe
this difference in terms of competence? It is politically and ethically
attractive to think of both parents in my story as equally competent,
noting that whilst this level of competence is sufficient for success in the
easy environment, it is far from sufficient for success in the challenging
108 Obstacles to Being Trustworthy

environment. We might add that a parent living in difficult circumstances

who does regularly get her kids to school on time thereby displays much
higher levels of competence than does a parent who achieves superfi-
cially similar success whilst facing fewer obstacles.
This way of talking seems respectful of the capacities and achievements
of people who must live and act in challenging environments, whether
financially, socially, health-wise, or geographically. It also provides us with
a way of explicating some of what is harmful about such environments:
they make it much harder to turn underlying competence into concrete
success. But what consequences does it have for trustworthiness and the
legitimacy of taking on new commitments?
Trustworthiness requires us to be more cautious in taking on commit-
ments where we face greater challenges to successful action. Conversely,
since trust involves relying upon someone to act successfully, trust can
be made appropriate or inappropriate by features of someone’s circum-
stances, not just by her character or underlying skills: it matters where
and when she is required to act. To hold all this together, I will take it
that, for example, there is a competence of getting kids to school on time
in an ‘easy’ environment, and there is a different competence of getting
kids to school on time in a ‘challenging’ environment (in practice of course
there will many more fine-grained competences even in this particular
area of life). Both parents in my story have the first competence, and
both lack the second one, which is much harder to develop and retain.
The first parent is fortunate to live in circumstances where the first com-
petence is all that’s needed for success, and thus she can appropriately
undertake to get her kids to school on time. The second parent is not,
and so she risks becoming untrustworthy if she makes the analogous
commitment. On this picture, a person’s competences do not automatically
vary with the environment, but acting in different environments requires
us to use different competences, some more difficult to acquire and retain
than others.
Part of what is tough about the situation of someone in difficult
circumstances is precisely that she needs much more complex, high-level
competences in order to succeed. This means she will more often have
to choose between trustworthiness on the one hand and undertaking
commitments as directed by ambition, generosity or others’ demands
on the other; she will more often fall into untrustworthiness even
 5.2 Obstacles to Knowing One ’ s Competence 109

despite her best efforts. Conversely, those of us who enjoy a richly

supported comfortable life should not be over-hasty to take credit for
our capacity to remain trustworthy whilst simultaneously pursuing other
goals and values.
So the circumstances in which we will be required to act make a dif-
ference to what competences we need to have in order to safely make a
commitment without risk of becoming untrustworthy. Moreover, via
different mechanisms, our past, present, and future circumstances can
help or hinder us in coming to know whether we have the right compe-
tence to match a prospective commitment. I have tied trustworthiness
to successful action, and thus to having the appropriate competence,
and I have not tied it directly to knowing one’s own competence. So in
theory someone could be trustworthy without knowing what she is cap-
able of, if through luck, isolation, or someone else’s paternalistic interven-
tion she manages to acquire only those commitments she is competent
to fulfil. But, as I noted above, in practice if we are concerned to pursue
trustworthiness, then knowing what we can and can’t do will be crucial.
What can get in the way of obtaining that knowledge?
In knowing whether we’ll be able to live up to a given commitment, it
helps to know the circumstances in which we will be required to act, and
to know what competences we possess. There is a complex set of rela-
tionships between knowledge, uncertainty, and competence here. For
example, the more competent we are, then the more confident we can be
that we will live up to our commitments, whatever that turns out to mean:
we can handle uncertainty about the circumstances under which we will
be required to act, since our competence will serve us well across a whole
range of situations. Yet if we don’t know that we are highly competent, it
may seem irresponsible to commit unless we are sure of what will be
required of us, and sure that we can match that requirement. If we know
little of what we are capable of, then knowing the circumstances in
which we will need to act does not enable us to commit safely. With
these interrelations in mind, I will review some obstacles to obtaining
such knowledge.
The harder it is to know the circumstances under which we will be
required to act, the harder it is to know whether we will succeed, to
know what competence will be demanded of us in order to fulfil a given
commitment. This kind of uncertainty is often generated by a combination
110 Obstacles to Being Trustworthy

of instability and lack of resources to compensate for unexpected setbacks.

For example, suppose I wonder whether I can safely commit to giving a
co-worker a lift home every evening. The more unreliable my car is,
the less confident I can be; but if I have a friend who will give us both a
lift on my request, or if I have enough money to pay for a taxi when my
car breaks down, then I can be more confident. Suppose I  wonder
whether I can babysit for my sister’s kids next weekend. The more unre-
liable my mental or physical health is, the harder it is for me to commit
to babysitting.
For similar reasons, more open-ended or vague commitments are
harder to incur safely, at least when we are required to surrender authority
over how to make such commitments more determinate. It’s easier for
me to promise to come to your birthday party next weekend than it is
for me to promise to come to your party whenever you decide to hold it.
In general, stability or at least predictability of circumstances helps us make
better judgements about likely future success. Conversely, people who
have fluctuating health, who depend upon unreliable others (including
unreliable authorities) for support and resources, or who deal with
precarious employment or housing situations, will find it more difficult
to extrapolate from their past success or failures to their ability to act
successfully in the future.
Even when we know the circumstances under which we will be required
to act, our past or present circumstances can make it difficult to know
whether we have the competence we will need. Self-knowledge of this
kind is not typically a matter of introspection. Instead, in trying to under-
stand what actions we will successfully perform in the future, we may
draw on evidence regarding the success or failure of our own past or
present actions, upon evidence about the circumstances in which we
have previously acted, and about our range of experience, education, and
levels of motivation. There is no single recipe for coming to know what
we will be able to do. Nevertheless, it is useful to pull apart different
elements of the evidence available to us, and thus the different obstacles
we may face in working out what commitments we will be able to meet.
Some of us have had plenty of opportunities to test our skills and learn
through experience; others have had fewer. Such opportunities can help
us become more competent, but the point here is that they can also
help us learn what we are competent to do. Many factors are relevant: as
 5.2 Obstacles to Knowing One ’ s Competence 111

we become older and more experienced then, so long as we are paying

attention, we can learn more about our strengths and weaknesses, about
what we find challenging or impossible, and about what comes easily to
us. Moreover, opportunities to test our skills often require the cooper-
ation of others: I can’t practise badminton alone, or try out my latest
philosophy ideas if no one will listen to me. Other times this sort of
opportunity requires relatively scarce material resources, or a sufficient
degree of self-confidence. Finding and exploiting such opportunities can
also require us to gauge the likely consequences of failure: an important
dimension of privilege is the freedom to make mistakes without being
heavily penalized. It matters whether you will be given a second chance,
the opportunity to change direction if early attempts at some activity are
unsuccessful, or alternatively the opportunity to try again, and fail again,
until you succeed.
Supposing that we have been able to act in the past, how can we judge
how effective we have been? For many complex tasks, and for some less
complex but intangible tasks, we lack objective measures of success or
failure, or indeed a common understanding of what success amounts to.
(It is no surprise that creative pursuits are especially tricky to evaluate.)
Even where there is some agreement about what a successful perform-
ance looks like, we may be more concerned with relative success: in
competitive situations, we don’t just need to be good at performing the
action in question, we need to be better than others. Sometimes the
comparative judgement is easier to make than the relative judgement:
perhaps I don’t really know how good I am at this task, but I know at least
that I’m as good as my peers. Sometimes, in contrast, we have good insight
into our own capacities, whilst lacking knowledge of what others can do.
Some of us have confidence in our judgements. Some of us lack that
easy confidence, but are lucky enough to be in environments where we
get ready and accurate feedback on our own performances, in ways
which are constructive rather than damaging. Good feedback helps us
improve our future performance, but it can also give us insight into what
we are doing, and the degree of success with which we are achieving it.
Lots of factors can help or hinder self-knowledge in this area, and
I am not attempting to survey them all. But consideration of impostor
syndrome reveals some intriguing ways in which environmental obstacles
to self-knowledge can be mistakenly assimilated to mere lack of
112 Obstacles to Being Trustworthy

self-confidence. Impostor syndrome comes in different forms, but it

can involve an inability to accept the reality of one’s successes, or a ten-
dency to attribute success to hard work, help from others, or sheer luck
rather than to ability. It often also involves fear of being found out as not
really deserving of accolades and opportunities one has been offered.
Trustworthiness requires us to make sensible judgements about our
ability to act successfully in the future. The less well we understand
our past actions, including whether and why they succeeded or failed,
the harder it will be to get know what we can achieve in the future.
Impostor syndrome can generate doubt about past successes, but it can
also involve misunderstanding about the extent to which those successes
are replicable, as opposed to mere lucky flukes. Self-regarding ‘impos-
tors’ often feel that they have to make much more effort than other people.
But there are many reasons why such comparative judgements may be
difficult to make, especially in cultures which value effortless superiority,
where trying hard is not cool.
Moreover, what we may think of as intrinsic talent or skill may be no
more important to future success than are sustained effort or social
support. On the one hand, skills often include the ability to adapt to chan-
ging circumstances, creatively overcoming obstacles. On the other hand,
the ability to motivate oneself to great efforts is itself a transferable skill
that can enable us to face new challenges. In anticipating our future suc-
cess we also need to have a grasp on how far our past successes have
been helped or hindered by the environments we were in. The more one
identifies one’s past success as a consequence of one’s intrinsic abilities
or skills, the more likely one is to expect future success across a range of
environments. How accurate this inference is depends upon the facts
of one’s situation, past and future. And we don’t always know how far we
will control the circumstances in which we must act: supposing that our
past successes have been largely due to the support of others, can we
arrange for such social support in the future?
Finally, I turn to these questions of grasping our own competence
as they apply to the special case of competence to speak truthfully, as
required for trustworthy assertion. I have portrayed trustworthiness as a
speaker as a special case of trustworthiness as a practical actor: it requires
us to avoid unfulfilled commitment, which in this case means avoiding
untruthful assertions. How do we judge whether we can safely commit
to speaking truthfully? This requires us to assess the state of our own
 5.2 Obstacles to Knowing One ’ s Competence 113

knowledge, to judge whether we are well-informed enough to speak up,

and of course there is no general recipe for this process. Nevertheless,
it is worth considering whether the challenges to assessing one’s practical
competence have analogues in this domain.
Is there a challenge equivalent to knowing the circumstances under
which we will be required to act? Not exactly equivalent perhaps, but
it is often the case that, as speakers, we are somewhat unsure what is
expected of us. Is it my turn to speak? Does this person want informa-
tion from me, or is she merely making small talk? Does my audience
already know this fact, or is it my job to tell them? Is this a high-stakes
situation in which I should be absolutely certain of what I say, or is it
okay to pass along gossip or speculation?
Something like impostor syndrome can affect us as asserters, especially
when we consider a slightly wider task of making a valuable, informative
contribution to conversation, rather than the specific task of uttering the
truth with respect to p, whatever p may be. For example, it is easy to
misjudge the significance of what one has to contribute, even whilst
correctly judging that the contribution would be truthful. Significance
in conversation, especially group conversation, is often a relative matter,
so misjudging here may also involve overestimating the significance of
what others have said, or might say, and thus not realizing that it’s appro-
priate for you to speak up rather than wait for others to contribute.
Suppose for example that women experts are less willing to pronounce
about issues beyond their primary expertise than are men: Sarsons and
Xu (2015) found this effect in a study of economists. Let’s assume that
the economists are all making good-faith efforts to be trustworthy. What
then might explain these differences in willingness to take a stand? In my
terms, we can understand this either as an absolute difference in econo-
mists’ evaluations of how well established their own beliefs are, or else as
a difference in their evaluations of how well established a belief must be
in order to be made public in some context. If audiences at large respond
less critically to male as opposed to female economists, then it may well
be that neither group is making an error either about the grounds for
their beliefs, or about the acceptability of their speaking beyond their
primary expertise.
In summary, there are very many ways in which our circumstances
can help or hinder us in our capacity to fulfil a given commitment, and
moreover there are very many ways in which our circumstances can
114 Obstacles to Being Trustworthy

help or hinder our attempts to know what capacities we have. I have tied
trustworthiness to the fulfilment of commitment, in other words to suc-
cessful action. Obeying epistemic norms of commitment-undertaking is
in that sense a derivative requirement: this is a good means of ensuring
that one is trustworthy. There are many ways in which our circumstances
can create obstacles both to having the competence which is required in
order to fulfil a given commitment, and to knowing what competence
we have.

5.3 Knowing What Commitments We Already Have

So far in this chapter I have reviewed the obstacles we face in attempting

to avoid new commitments which we are not competent to fulfil.
Trustworthiness also demands that we pay attention in situations where
we are attempting to act in light of our existing commitments; schemat-
ically, these situations are temporally later than the ones I have been
discussing so far. As I noted above, in such situations we need both
insight into what our commitments require of us and the ability to align
our actions (including our speech) to those requirements. In this section
and the next, I look at these challenges in turn; these sections are much
shorter than the ones above, since I can draw on those earlier discussions.
Often we lack insight into the significance of our speech and actions
because we are unfamiliar with local conventions and expectations
governing commitment. Sometimes those difficulties are resolved once
we have incurred the commitment—other people’s reactions may make
it abundantly clear what our normative situation now is, even if that was
difficult to anticipate in advance. But sometimes we just don’t know what
commitments we have already incurred, either because we do not know
what the local conventions and defaults are or because we misremember
or misunderstand our situation. Earlier, I focused on our uncertainty
about how to avoid unwanted commitments, since this kind of veto
power is central to trustworthiness in that context. But when taking this
later perspective, we may also wonder whether we successfully managed
to incur the commitments we hoped for, not just to avoid the ones we
didn’t want.
 5.3 Knowing What Commitments We Already Have 115

Incurring a commitment often requires that other people take us

seriously in this regard, for example by accepting our offer to commit;
taking us seriously needn’t mean relying upon us to fulfil the commitment,
merely regarding us as having made a commitment. But we do not always
know how our words and actions have been received by others; sometimes
we do not even know whether our speech has been heard, or our writing
read. We sometimes come away from conversations, meetings, or email
exchanges unsure of whether we managed to have our offers accepted,
whether we managed to incur the commitments we hoped to incur.
Does this kind of uncertainty create an obstacle to trustworthiness?
After all, trustworthiness does not require us to act only as commitment
dictates: there is plenty of scope for acting beyond the scope of commit-
ment without rendering oneself untrustworthy. So can’t we accommodate
this kind of uncertainty by acting as if we are committed, just to be on
the safe side? I will discuss responses to uncertainty at greater length
in chapter 6. But for now I note that even if we wanted to incur a com-
mitment at some earlier time we may later prefer to be free of that
commitment, perhaps because we now understand more about what it
mean for us, or because a better option has come along. If we want to
avoid untrustworthiness, yet prefer to act as if we are not committed,
we need to know whether we really incurred a commitment earlier on,
or whether we are now free to act as we choose.
This schematic temporal framing is less useful for the special case of
commitment to speaking truthfully through assertion: once you know
whether you have managed to make an assertion, as opposed to mere
speculation, it is too late to change the content of what you say, although
you might try backtracking where necessary. But it is often possible to
know that you have undertaken to do or say something or other, without
fully realizing the extent of what you have undertaken, and without being
sure of exactly when you are being called upon to act on this commitment.
One reason for this is that our commitments are often conditional:
I might have offered to help you with your project ‘if I have time’, or ‘if you
can’t find anyone else’, or ‘if you are really stuck’. If you now call on my
help, I have to judge whether those conditions are satisfied. This can
involve trust in both directions. For example, you may have to trust my
judgement that I genuinely don’t have time; I may need to examine
116 Obstacles to Being Trustworthy

my own conscience on this matter. Or I may have to take your word for it
that my commitment is genuinely triggered because you really are stuck,
and no one else is available to help. In general, social circumstances help
determine whether I can trust you when you assure me that the condi-
tions have been satisfied, so that trustworthiness now requires me to act.
As before, in such situations we can distinguish the question of whether
someone is committed to action from the question of whether other
people sincerely regard her as committed to action. I have already
discussed the theoretical and practical uncertainty which surrounds the
role of other people’s attitudes in generating commitment for us; trust-
worthiness is at stake only where commitment has genuinely been
incurred. Depending on the framework we adopt, such uncertainties may
be understood as uncertainties about what trustworthiness demands of
us, or else as uncertainties about whether other people have an accurate
view of what trustworthiness demands of us.
How do we know what actions are demanded by our existing com-
mitments? Earlier, I discussed how epistemic obstacles can be generated
by varying local conventions of commitment. Such obstacles are also
relevant to this later temporal perspective, when we are trying to estab-
lish what commitments we have already incurred. In particular, cultural
dislocation can make it more difficult to know whether our offers to
commit have been taken seriously: if I suggest a lunch meeting, and you
don’t demur, have you thereby accepted my offer to commit to showing
up, or have you merely evaded the issue? These interactions can be a little
confusing at the best of times, but we are all the more prone to misunder-
standings when we are new to a country, a workplace, or a social circle.
As I will discuss in chapter 6, the flexibility with which we can choose
to respond to such uncertainties may depend a great deal upon our social
power, our ability to access alternative options, and the importance to us
of maintaining a reputation for trustworthiness. Some of us, some of the
time, can get away with simply blundering on through our hazy grasp of
existing commitments; some of us certainly cannot.

5.4 Controlling Our Actions

Finally, following my four-way taxonomy of obstacles to trustworthiness,

I should consider obstacles to acting in line with our commitments,
 5.4 Controlling Our Actions 117

even once we know what our existing commitments are. This may be the
broadest category of obstacles—obstacles to action in general. As such,
it does not require special efforts to demonstrate that challenging cir-
cumstances can generate difficulties on this front: it is obvious that our
circumstances affect how we can act. By definition, challenging circum-
stances make it more difficult to act as we would like to do.
Correspondingly, this is the category where I have found least scope
for saying something which is distinctively relevant to trustworthiness.
This may be because it follows the preceding three sections: if we could
successfully overcome obstacles in all of the other three categories, then
there would be no special problem here. Obstacles to action are obstacles
to trustworthiness only when we have acquired a commitment which
demands that action of us. But if we already knew that a given commit-
ment would require us to act in a way which we would find difficult, and
if we had the freedom to decline that commitment without much cost,
then we could simply avoid getting into a situation where that obstacle
to action made it harder for us to be trustworthy. This might be a matter
of great regret, of course, if we have other reasons to want to act in that
way, with or without a commitment to doing so. But in itself it would
not diminish our trustworthiness.
Are there obstacles to appropriate action in the special case of
assertion—i.e. fulfilment of commitment to speak truthfully regarding
the matter at hand? Of course it is often not easy to have the knowledge
required for appropriate assertion. This is not a direct obstacle to trust-
worthiness: one can be trustworthy without having much knowledge or
competence, provided one can avoid becoming overcommitted. But
as we will see in the following chapter, lack of competence, and thus an
increased requirement to choose between trustworthiness and new
commitment, brings troubles of its own.
More direct challenges are faced by those who must communicate in
languages they have not mastered, those with speech or literacy difficul-
ties, or those who face other practical challenges to self-expression.
Treating assertion as simultaneous incurring and discharging (or not)
or commitment generates some complications here. For more ordinary
commitments to future action, there is a clear difference between con-
trolling what I am committed to doing (as discussed in section 5.1) and
controlling what I in fact do (the topic of this section). But with assertion,
control and lack of control over various different matters is entangled.
118 Obstacles to Being Trustworthy

I need control over whether I am making an assertion, as opposed to

remaining silent or else performing some other speech act. I need control
over the content of what I say, in the sense of controlling whether I am
making an assertion as to whether p or an assertion as to whether q.
Finally, I need control over whether or not I speak truthfully, whether
I get it right as between saying that p and saying that not-p. These different
demands are obscured by the more standard philosophical habit of
discussing assertion that p as opposed to assertion as to whether p. But
it is important to see that I may have more or less control on each of
these various fronts. Thus anything which limits my control in one of these
respects may make it more difficult for me to be trustworthy.
I began this chapter by setting up a four-way taxonomy: before versus
after, commitment versus competent action. I conceded immediately
that in thinking about obstacles to control and insight on these various
fronts, it’s often not easy to fit challenges into just one quadrant of that
four-way taxonomy. Nevertheless, it should now be clear that there are
many ways in which our circumstances of all kinds can generate obstacles
to our pursuit of trustworthiness; correspondingly, that circumstances can
also make it easier for us to pursue trustworthiness. These challenges
and choices may or may not be apparent to us in the first person, and
they may or may not be apparent to interested onlookers who are
tempted to make judgements about our trustworthiness, and even about
our character.
In the next chapter, I will examine the dilemmas and double binds
which can confront us in responding to the inevitable obstacles we face
to pursuing trustworthiness, especially when others are likely to misun-
derstand the constraints we are working within.

Additional Sources

5.1 Obstacles to Controlling New Commitment. Relevant literature

includes debates around coerced promises, and the nature of promises
more generally: see sources listed in chapter 2, and in particular Shiffrin
(2014). Hawley (2018a) discusses coerced speech. There are also connec-
tions between the themes of this section and debates around illocutionary
force and silencing, e.g. Langton (1992), Hornsby and Langton (1998).
 Additional Sources 119

Kukla (2014) is also important here, and I discuss connections with Kukla’s

paper more explicitly in section 6.5. Peet (2015) explores other respects
in which it may be difficult to control what we commit to through speech.
See also Bird (2002), Dougherty (2015), and E.Fricker (2012). The issues
discussed in this section around control bear some relation to feminist
theorizing about autonomy, as reviewed by Stoljar (2013).
5.2 Obstacles to Knowing One’s Competence. The relationship between
competence and circumstances outlined here owes something to Hawley
(2003). More broadly, the vexed question of how competence relates to
success echoes debates about virtue, dispositions, reliabilism, and gener-
ics elsewhere in philosophy. Sakulku and Alexander  (2011) is a useful
overview of psychological research on impostor syndrome, and I explore
these issues at greater length in Hawley (2019). Intemann (2010) provides
a good entry point into feminist standpoint epistemology.
5.3 Knowing What Commitments We Already Have. Sources listed
under 5.1 are relevant here.
5.4 Controlling Our Actions. Just as this is the section where there seems
least scope for raising issues distinctive to trustworthiness, it is also the
section where it seems least feasible to pick out individual sources for
the idea that we cannot always act as we would like.
 5
Obstacles to Being Trustworthy

To be trustworthy, we need to avoid unfulfilled commitments. But that

is easier said than done. How, in practice, can we become and remain
trustworthy? The main purpose of this chapter is to show how our prac-
tical circumstances can make it more difficult for us to be trustworthy.
Sometimes circumstances directly make trustworthiness harder to achieve,
even when we make trustworthiness an absolute priority. Sometimes
circumstances raise the cost of trustworthiness, making it more difficult
to prioritize trustworthiness ahead of other goals or values. Whilst I will
discuss practical action and trustworthiness in general, these points
about circumstantial obstacles also apply to the special case of trust-
worthiness in speech, and I shall mention some issues specific to assertion
along the way.
‘Circumstances’ here takes in our physical environment, including
where we’re located; our social environment, including how much sup-
port we have from others, or conversely the obstacles they may place in
our paths; and our material resources, including money or lack thereof.
This is not intended to be an exhaustive list. Circumstances are not just
things ‘outside’ of us, but also include our mental and physical health or
ill-health. Sometimes our circumstances are at least partially within our
direct control, but sometimes they are not.
Such a wide notion may seem useless as a theoretical tool, or seem to
presuppose some implausible complementary notion of the inner self, a
core which remains constant across circumstances. But my main concern
will be with aspects of our circumstances which are not inevitably
obvious to others, or sometimes even to ourselves, and with aspects of
our circumstances which may vary between different people, or for the
same person over time. This combination of opacity and variation
creates a number of opportunities for us to misjudge both ourselves and
others, with respect to both competence and commitment, and therefore

How To Be Trustworthy. Katherine Hawley, Oxford University Press (2019). © Katherine Hawley.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843900.001.0001
96 Obstacles to Being Trustworthy

with respect to trustworthiness. I will explore some of the misjudgements

in chapter  6: the aim is not to provide a complete catalogue of all the
ways in which we get things wrong, but to capture some key problems.
So how do our circumstances bear on our trustworthiness? In previous
chapters I have developed accounts of trust, distrust, and trustworthiness
which centrally involve the idea of living up to one’s commitments, or,
more negatively, avoiding unfulfilled commitment. Trustworthiness does
not in general require us to take on specific commitments, except where
these flow from earlier meta-commitments. Instead, it requires us to
ensure that our commitments do not outstrip our actions. This means that
in principle we have two levers at our disposal in pursuing trustworthi-
ness: we can try to adjust our commitments, and we can try to adjust our
actions. Obstacles to using these levers effectively are therefore obstacles
to managing our own trustworthiness.
It is useful to distinguish two perspectives on this process of adjust-
ment, nominally corresponding to different points in time. First, we have
the opportunity to adjust our commitments—i.e. to incur or to avoid a
potential new commitment. Later, we have the opportunity to act, or not,
in the light of our existing commitments. From both perspectives, we
need both insight and control. Someone considering whether to incur a
certain commitment needs insight into what she will be able to do, insight
into her competences; in addition, she needs control over whether she
incurs a new commitment. If she lacks insight into her own competences,
then even perfect control over her commitments will not guarantee
trustworthiness, since she will not know which commitments she can
safely select. If, on the other hand, she lacks control over her commitments,
then even perfect insight into her own competences will not guarantee
trustworthiness, since she will be unable to avoid incurring unfulfillable
commitments.
The later perspective is that of someone considering action in the light
of her existing commitments. This person needs insight into what her
commitments (and thus trustworthiness) require of her; in addition, she
needs control over her actions. If she lacks insight into her commitments,
then even perfect control over her actions will not guarantee trustworthi-
ness, since she will not know which of various incompatible actions
trustworthiness requires. If, on the other hand, she lacks control over
her actions for whatever reason, then even perfect insight into her
 5.1 Obstacles to Controlling New Commitment 97

commitments will not guarantee trustworthiness, since she may be unable

to act as she knows her commitments require her to.
So beforehand we need insight into our competence, and control over
our commitments; afterwards we need insight into our commitments,
and control over our actions. This four-way distinction is much too tidy,
for lots of reasons. We are constantly both facing the prospect of new
commitments and trying to act in the light of existing commitments,
and these tasks may interfere with one another. This interference is par-
ticularly direct when we are trying to work out whether we already have
a meta-commitment which means that trustworthiness requires us to
take on some new commitment. More generally, there are complex rela-
tionships between insight and control in any domain. Control is often
enhanced by insight, and conversely we may gain insight into things
we control, not least by experimenting through trial and error. Finally,
I argued in chapter 3 that assertion involves simultaneously undertaking
to speak truthfully, and speaking truthfully (or not, as the case may be):
there is no time-lag involved, thus no dual temporal perspective.
Nevertheless, the four-way distinction provides a useful framework for
this chapter. I aim to give some practical examples of situations which
can make it difficult to be trustworthy, or force us into unappealing choices
between trustworthiness and other goals, by reducing our insight or
control from either the ‘earlier’ or the ‘later’ perspective. A recurring
theme is the important role of our environments, material and social.
Another theme is the inevitability of uncertainty, and the question of how
to respond to uncertainty: possible responses to the various obstacles
will be discussed in chapter 6. A third is, again, the way in which the
pursuit of trustworthiness can sometimes direct us away from other
important goals, values, and relationships, including sometimes the goal
of communicating our own trustworthiness.

5.1 Obstacles to Controlling New Commitment

What obstacles do we encounter when trying to control what new com-

mitments we incur? It is relatively clear how circumstances could make
it more difficult for us to incur new commitments. In particular, we typ-
ically cannot commit through assertion, through promising, or through
98 Obstacles to Being Trustworthy

less explicit mechanisms, unless someone is willing to take us seriously.

If I offer to promise, I am not bound to act unless you take me up on the
offer: I need your cooperation if I am to put my trustworthiness on
the line. This doesn’t mean that you must believe that I will keep my
promise: you might accept my promise, whilst believing that I will break
it, even whilst believing that I intend to break it, indeed even whilst
hoping that I will break it and thus demonstrate my untrustworthiness.
Nevertheless, you need to hear and accept my offer. (I discuss related
issues in chapters 2 and 3.)
Incurring commitment typically requires certain sorts of attitudes
from other people. More mundanely, it often also requires the right
material resources, or being in the right place at the right time. You can’t
take on the commitments involved in mortgage repayment unless you
can first produce an initial deposit (a down payment). To take on profes-
sional commitments, you need a job, customers, or clients. More abstractly,
it often takes conceptual resources and imagination to be able to make a
certain commitment: someone who has never heard of Madrid cannot
undertake to go there, at least not in those terms.
These are all obstacles which literally prevent people from taking on
commitments; they do not merely make it inappropriate to take on a
commitment because it will be too difficult to fulfil. Such obstacles have
an indirect impact on how trustworthy a person can be, partly because
people who lack opportunities to take on new commitments find it
more difficult to develop the skills and self-knowledge required for good
commitment-management. However, in terms of trustworthiness, the
commitment control which matters most is not this ability to take on
new commitments at will. Instead, it is our veto power, the extent to
which we are able to refuse or avoid new commitments when we have
doubts about whether we will be able to fulfil them. Given my account
of trustworthiness in terms of avoiding unfulfilled commitments, ability
to avoid commitment is crucial.
How could circumstances make this difficult? It might seem obvious
that we all have the ability to refuse new commitments as we see fit,
because involuntary commitment is conceptually impossible: after all,
coerced promises are often regarded as non-binding, and as such not really
promises at all. Maybe that’s right—I won’t try to argue that there can be
coerced commitments, or commitments which are entirely non-voluntary,
whatever that would amount to.
 5.1 Obstacles to Controlling New Commitment 99

Even setting aside the possibility of involuntary commitment, however,

there is plenty to think about in this vicinity, and plenty of opportunities
for practical difficulties. First, there are certainly situations in which
other people regard us as having a commitment, and yet we ourselves do
not endorse that commitment. For example, suppose that I am coerced
into saying ‘I promise’, and suppose that the coercion means that I have
not genuinely made a promise. The coercion may not be visible to people
around me, who therefore regard me as having freely undertaken a new
commitment to act. In such situations my trustworthiness is not really at
stake, given the assumption that my apparent ‘promise’ is not really
binding. But my reputation for trustworthiness is at stake, because of
other people’s mistaken apprehension. We each have an interest in
engaging with and trying to control other people’s opinions about our
commitments, and this may not be a straightforward task.
Second, practical circumstances can make it more difficult for us to be
trustworthy even though our commitments are uncoerced and in a good
sense still voluntary. This is because circumstances can increase the
personal or social cost of refusing certain new commitments. For example,
someone who has very few employment opportunities and little access
to welfare benefits in some sense still has the option of turning down
a demanding or degrading job, but it is much harder for her to refuse the
job than it would be for someone who has other options, or an independ-
ent income. Someone working or living in a context where advancement
relies upon a network of favours and reciprocity pays a high personal
price if she does not take on commitments to other people when they
ask her to do so, even though she could in principle decline these. More
positively, it can be much harder to turn down a friend’s request to
commit than to turn down a stranger’s request. These examples focus on
practical action, but similarly our circumstances often generate various
kinds of pressure or incentive to speak up rather than remain silent, and
to speak assertorically rather than speculate tentatively. These pressures
can be very significant, without rendering the resultant speech involun-
tary or coerced and thus not genuinely committing.
Different people pay different prices for refusing commitment. For
example, there can be gendered differences in our expectations of who
will volunteer for certain sorts of responsibilities: a woman who does
not offer to bake for co-workers’ birthdays (or to bring cookies to class)
may be judged more harshly than a man, pressurizing her to make
100 Obstacles to Being Trustworthy

commitments she may find it difficult to fulfil. Small communities with

high expectations of neighbourliness may disapprove of those who
attempt to avoid commitment to communal activities. This sort of pres-
sure may be invisible to outsiders: an urbanite may simply be puzzled
about why the village-dweller feels pressure to undertake commitments
she would prefer to avoid, and indeed may not be competent to fulfil.
The varying costs of avoiding commitment can be obscure; I return to
this in chapter 6 as a factor in our first-person response to such costs,
and as a factor in how we evaluate others’ decisions around trustworthi-
ness and commitment.
There are many sources of pressure to take on more than just those
commitments we prefer, or more than just those commitments we can
easily fulfil. Such pressures are significant because they can explain why
someone may become untrustworthy despite setting out with good
intentions, and because some people are much more vulnerable to this
pressure than are others. This isn’t always a bad thing: it is a mistake to
think that our lives would automatically be richer, more free, or otherwise
more valuable if we were always able to pick and choose our commitments
without feeling pressure from others, from their needs and desires. After
all, friendship and other valuable relationships inevitably involve such
constraints, and this is not a mere side effect or downside of having
friends. Nor is it an unfortunate reciprocal price we must pay for being
able to pressure friends to take our needs and desires into account.
Instead, it is one of the ways in which friendship can shape our lives for
the better. Nevertheless, depending on its sources and scale, this sort of
pressure can be damaging, as I will explore in chapter 6.
Pressures to commit can arise where the person concerned knows full
well what options are available to her, and what the costs and penalties
of incurring or refusing commitment will be. But in practice we are
often uncertain: about our options, about how our action and speech
may or may not commit us, and about the consequences of all this. What
does this mean for our control over commitment? It is easy to think of
control and insight as closely linked, both because knowledge can be
empowering, and because control facilitates learning: if I am able to
adjust my behaviour and circumstances, then observe the consequences,
I will better understand what commitments I have. But, as standpoint
epistemologists emphasize, people who lack power may be only too
aware of the nature and consequences of their own disempowerment, in
 5.1 Obstacles to Controlling New Commitment 101

ways which remain obscure to other people who occupy different, more
empowered standpoints.
Indeed, Charles  W.  Mills  (2007) has shown how those who possess
power may rely upon on their own lack of insight as a means of perpetu-
ating this possession. Mills’s chief concern is with white ignorance in the
context of racism, but the point generalizes. Someone employed under
exploitative conditions may have an excellent understanding of how the
employer’s whims generate commitments for the employee, a better
understanding than the employer possesses or even wants to possess;
the same goes for people who are ‘self-employed’ in the gig economy. So
for all sorts of reasons we should bear in mind that there is an important
difference between having control over one’s commitments and having
insight into what they are; likewise, there is an important difference
between lacking control over one’s commitments and lacking insight
into them.
Nevertheless, insight is often helpful in achieving control of our com-
mitments. And even in relatively egalitarian company we may struggle
to grasp how our speech and actions will be interpreted by others. In
earlier chapters I dwelt upon explicit means of incurring commitment,
through promising and assertion. But there is a host of ways in which
subtle social conventions and defaults govern the incurring of less explicit
commitments. In many contexts, to accept a gift, hospitality or invitation
is to incur a commitment to reciprocate appropriately, whatever appro-
priateness turns out to require. To take a different example, often we can
become committed not just by actively claiming a commitment, but also
by failing to object or actively push back against others’ expectations of
us on this front. But it may not be clear how this opt-out works, when it
is happening, and when it is already too late to protest.
It is in the nature of these conventions that they are rarely made expli-
cit, except when we want to complain about people who violate our
expectations. And they easily vary between different families, groups of
friends, or workplaces, as well as across more obvious cultural divides
between nations or generations. This opens up the possibility of mutual
misunderstanding about what commitments different people carry, and
about what it takes for those commitments to be discharged.
How does all of this confusion place obstacles in the way of our
becoming trustworthy? First, suppose that you are fully aware of the
social conventions governing gifts, and realize that if you accept a gift, then
102 Obstacles to Being Trustworthy

you will be treated as having undertaken to reciprocate with a gift at a

later date: if you don’t reciprocate, you will be regarded as untrust-
worthy. In such a situation, by accepting a gift you incur a commitment,
even if you would prefer that not to be the case: we typically do not have
full control over the normative significance of our actions. You can accept
the gift and then say that you refuse to recognize any responsibility to
reciprocate, but merely saying so does not automatically release you from
commitment, any more than you are freed of promissory obligations
merely by declaring that you will break an existing promise. (Things
might be different if you say up-front that you will only accept the gift
on condition of not being committed to reciprocate, and if the giver
accepts these non-standard conditions, But such negotiations are not
always binding, or even possible.)
What if you are not aware of the local convention that accepting a gift
generates a commitment to reciprocate? We are often unsure of local
social conventions, especially when we are outsiders for one reason or
another. In such a situation, once you have accepted a gift, for example,
others will think you are thereby committed to reciprocate. Is this
enough to make you genuinely committed? Is your trustworthiness now
on the line?
There is a theoretical dilemma here. We can insist that it is possible to
incur commitment unknowingly, that sometimes we don’t know that
we’re putting our trustworthiness on the line. Or we can insist that this
is not possible, that we cannot have commitments we are unaware of.
In such circumstances, other people may regard us as committed, and
therefore judge our trustworthiness by our subsequent actions, but they
will be mistaken. These mistakes may make it sensible for us to act as
they expect, even though our trustworthiness is not genuinely on the
line. But this doesn’t mean that we really are committed.
Which way to jump? The dilemma invokes wider, deeper philosophical
questions about norms, reasons, obligations, and first-person awareness;
I am not attempting to engage those wider, deeper questions here. Instead,
we can make some progress by thinking more specifically about what
we need from our concepts of commitment, undertaking, trust, and
trustworthiness, although this will not lead us to a precise account of
exactly when commitments are incurred. In fact, I think we feel ambiva-
lent about this in real-life situations: we feel unsure whether to judge
people’s trustworthiness on the basis of commitments they seem unaware
 5.1 Obstacles to Controlling New Commitment 103

of, and we feel unsure whether we must act in line with commitments
others unexpectedly—mistakenly?—take us to have. This creates oppor-
tunities for guilt and for guilt-tripping, for anxiety and exploitation of
different kinds.
In thinking about how far commitment can exceed the scope of first-
personal grasp, we should at least agree that two extreme positions are
both unappealing. It cannot be that a person is never bound by commit-
ment unless she knows exactly what she is undertaking to do. Amongst
their other roles, commitment, trust, and trustworthiness are devices for
social coordination, and for reducing the so-called ‘transaction costs’ of
trying to work together. Much of this would be impossible if lack of full
transparency always voided commitments. It would also be exception-
ally burdensome if we constantly had to check on each other’s grasp of
exactly what commitments have been incurred in order to reasonably
hold people to account. Some flexibility here is a benefit to all of us, both
as it enables us to trust others without detailed investigation, and as it
lures us into commitments which we do not fully understand yet will
ultimately value. To think otherwise is to adopt a superficially attractive
but unachievable cold ideal of utterly transparent autonomy.
On the other hand, it cannot be that we have no first-person advantage
whatsoever in understanding what commitments we have undertaken.
Commitments can play their social role only insofar as they are available
to guide our actions, at least where we are intrinsically or instrumentally
motivated to be trustworthy. Indeed, we need a grasp of our existing
commitments in order to judge which new commitments we can safely
incur. To the extent that commitments lie beyond an individual’s control
or insight, they are entangled with the behaviour, attitudes, and expect-
ations of other people. But one of the guiding themes of earlier chapters
was that trustworthiness does not require us to respond to each and every
demand which is placed upon us. Sometimes when people think that we
are untrustworthy for not doing as they wish, those people are mistaken.
Sometimes when others think we have an obligation-generating com-
mitment to do something for them, they are mistaken. For these sorts of
reasons, we need to recognize that we are not just third-party observers
of our own commitments.
My remarks here blur various senses of epistemic and practical
authority, without properly pinning down the relationships between these.
But a concept of commitment which can underpin a useful concept of
104 Obstacles to Being Trustworthy

trustworthiness must picture commitments neither as wholly within the

grasp of the committed person, nor as wholly beyond her. Being trust-
worthy is a norm, and norms often behave like this: they inhabit a space
between us whereby we can each typically get some grip on how to
follow the norm, but have neither a guarantee of infallibility in such
matters nor complete control over whether we follow the norm. Even
once we rule out the two extremes of complete first-personal veto, and
assimilation of the first-personal to the third-personal perspective, there
remains a lot of flexibility in how to think about commitments and
trustworthiness, both as theorists and as socially embedded people.
Correspondingly our everyday practices of holding one another
responsible for our apparent commitments, and thus our expectations
of one another on these counts, seem somewhat shifty. Different cultural
contexts, different groups of friends or workmates, can handle these
issues in somewhat differing ways, allowing the individual greater or
less control and insight with regard to her own commitments. This is
problematic insofar as it makes life difficult for people who move between
groups, and may find it difficult to work out what local practice is, or to
understand their own role in local practice. These problems are most
significant for people who have the most to lose from being regarded as
untrustworthy; I return to these challenges in chapter 6.
Moreover social power can provide control even without insight. For
example, in a high-pressure workplace, the convention could in effect be
that everyone’s commitments—including the boss’s commitments—are
whatever the boss thinks that they are. It is often an aspect of social
privilege to be able to control one’s commitments to a greater extent,
even if we do not appreciate this. Consider the meta-commitments—
commitments-to-take-on-commitments—that we often incur when
entering friendships or employment. A stringent employment contract
can commit you to taking on whatever commitments you are asked to
take on in future; ‘zero-hours’ contracts make employees commit to being
available at short notice, even where there is no guarantee of paid work.
Some of us are more likely to suffer under such contracts than others:
professional jobs typically allow much greater autonomy in choice of
commitment, as compared to jobs lower down the socio-economic
hierarchy. Beyond the workplace, people living in impoverished material
circumstances have to impose more demanding friendships upon one
 5.2 Obstacles to Knowing One ’ s Competence 105

another, because without social support they have no other safety net.
All of these complications further illustrate that ability to control one’s
commitments is not uniformly or equitably distributed.
In this section I have investigated obstacles to controlling our com-
mitments, and thus obstacles to being trustworthy. Even if we accept
that there is no such thing as an involuntary commitment, practical
circumstances of many kinds can make it much more difficult for people
to avoid commitments, even when they are fully aware of what is going
on; the price of avoiding commitment may be unaffordably high. In
addition, there are many situations in which we are unsure of how our
actions and speech will be understood by other people as resulting in
our having incurred new commitment. Often the mere fact of others
seeing us as committed gives us strong reason to act as they anticipate.
But it seems that at least on occasion we do have commitments we are
unaware of, generated by the social significance of our actions and words.
In chapter 6 I discuss how we can or should respond to these various
situations, but before doing so I will review other types of obstacle to
trustworthiness.

5.2 Obstacles to Knowing One’s Competence

Trustworthiness requires us to avoid unfulfilled commitments. Suppose

that we have the option to incur or avoid some new commitment, that
we have overcome the obstacles to control which I discussed in the pre-
vious section. What then does trustworthiness require of us? At base,
the requirement is to avoid commitments that we are not competent to
fulfil, given all the other demands on our time, resources, and will-
power. As I discussed in chapter 4, trustworthiness does not require us
to take on absolutely every commitment we can safely manage.
Trustworthiness requires us to avoid commitments we are not com-
petent to fulfil. It does not directly impose a stricter requirement to
avoid commitments unless we know that we are competent to fulfil them.
Someone who blundered about at random, or took on exceptionally few
commitments for selfish reasons, could through luck or parsimony
reliably obey the letter of the law in terms of trustworthiness. She would
incur commitments even whilst not knowing whether she was competent
106 Obstacles to Being Trustworthy

to fulfil them, yet luckily avoid commitments she is in fact not competent
to fulfil. If she lacked insight into her own competence—and lacked insight
into her own lack of competence—this would not automatically render
her untrustworthy.
Nevertheless, on the assumption that we do not want to keep our
commitments to the bare minimum, and do not want to rely on mere luck
to render us trustworthy, we will need some insight into what we are
capable of doing. So obstacles to gaining that insight are for all practical
purposes obstacles to being trustworthy. Here we encounter in somewhat
different guise the debates around norms for assertion and promising
which I discussed in chapters 2 and 3. My strategy there was not to advo-
cate for any particular norm, but rather to show how the existence of a
range of possible norms in either case could be explained by understand-
ing assertion as involving a promise-like commitment (and simultaneous
keeping or breaking of that promise). Moreover, although norms on
promise-making cannot simply be reduced to the norm of avoiding
promises that will be broken, they must ultimately be understood in terms
of that goal.
Given that trustworthiness prompts us to confine our commitments
within the boundaries of our competence, what obstacles might get in
our way? In this section, I focus on obstacles to being competent, and
then on obstacles to knowing what competences we have. But first I need
to clarify the conception of competence which is at stake here: what is it
to be competent to fulfil a commitment? The conception which matters
for trustworthiness is one which renders competence highly sensitive to
the circumstances of action: what counts is successful action (including
truthful speech in the context of assertion), rather than underlying skills
or qualities which may be frustrated by environmental conditions before
they result in successful action. This is not because successful action is
all that matters in life. Nor do I imagine that success is usually possible
without underlying skill or capability. It is because I have tied trust-
worthiness to the avoidance of unfulfilled commitment, not just to good
intentions, not just to attempts to avoid unfulfilled commitment, and not
just to being poised to avoid unfulfilled commitment if all goes well.
The fewer skills and capacities you have which are actionable in your
environment, the fewer safe but substantive commitments you can
make. Conversely, the better the match between your skills and the
 5.2 Obstacles to Knowing One ’ s Competence 107

situations in which you act, the less often you will be forced to choose
between trustworthiness and commitment, because you can have both.
This is one reason why skill is valuable: it enables us to be trustworthy
without sacrificing generosity, adventure, or the opportunity to learn.
This is also a reason why it is valuable to live in circumstances which
make it easy to act on whatever skills we possess. I will review some ways
in which circumstances help determine what we can do, before discussing
how circumstances also play a role in determining what we can know
about what we can do.
Circumstances can be relevant to what we can do either through
causal influences or more directly by constituting the circumstances
under which we need to act. Causal influences here include all the very
many widely recognized factors such as education, family support in
childhood, physical training, inheritances, and past purchases or savings,
which make each of us who we are today, with all of our skills, knowledge,
material and social resources, strengths, and weaknesses.
Even granted all that history, each of us now faces different opportun-
ities and obstacles in trying to act successfully in the world. Imagine two
parents, living in different parts of the same city, both trying to get their
kids to school on time every day. The first person is financially comfort-
able, and lives within walking distance of the school; her kids have no
special medical needs or behavioural problems, and mostly enjoy school.
The second person lives in cramped temporary accommodation, and
can’t always afford to provide breakfast; her kids have a variety of special
needs, and are very reluctant to attend school. Obviously, it is easier for
the first parent to get her kids to school punctually than it is for the
second parent; if they switched places, as in an exploitative TV show,
then their ‘success rates’ would change.
Let’s imagine that these parents are in some intrinsic sense equally
as talented and capable as each other, whatever that might mean.
Nevertheless, it is much harder for one of them to act successfully in this
respect than it is for the other, since they face very different challenges
from the circumstances in which they must act. How should we describe
this difference in terms of competence? It is politically and ethically
attractive to think of both parents in my story as equally competent,
noting that whilst this level of competence is sufficient for success in the
easy environment, it is far from sufficient for success in the challenging
108 Obstacles to Being Trustworthy

environment. We might add that a parent living in difficult circumstances

who does regularly get her kids to school on time thereby displays much
higher levels of competence than does a parent who achieves superfi-
cially similar success whilst facing fewer obstacles.
This way of talking seems respectful of the capacities and achievements
of people who must live and act in challenging environments, whether
financially, socially, health-wise, or geographically. It also provides us with
a way of explicating some of what is harmful about such environments:
they make it much harder to turn underlying competence into concrete
success. But what consequences does it have for trustworthiness and the
legitimacy of taking on new commitments?
Trustworthiness requires us to be more cautious in taking on commit-
ments where we face greater challenges to successful action. Conversely,
since trust involves relying upon someone to act successfully, trust can
be made appropriate or inappropriate by features of someone’s circum-
stances, not just by her character or underlying skills: it matters where
and when she is required to act. To hold all this together, I will take it
that, for example, there is a competence of getting kids to school on time
in an ‘easy’ environment, and there is a different competence of getting
kids to school on time in a ‘challenging’ environment (in practice of course
there will many more fine-grained competences even in this particular
area of life). Both parents in my story have the first competence, and
both lack the second one, which is much harder to develop and retain.
The first parent is fortunate to live in circumstances where the first com-
petence is all that’s needed for success, and thus she can appropriately
undertake to get her kids to school on time. The second parent is not,
and so she risks becoming untrustworthy if she makes the analogous
commitment. On this picture, a person’s competences do not automatically
vary with the environment, but acting in different environments requires
us to use different competences, some more difficult to acquire and retain
than others.
Part of what is tough about the situation of someone in difficult
circumstances is precisely that she needs much more complex, high-level
competences in order to succeed. This means she will more often have
to choose between trustworthiness on the one hand and undertaking
commitments as directed by ambition, generosity or others’ demands
on the other; she will more often fall into untrustworthiness even
 5.2 Obstacles to Knowing One ’ s Competence 109

despite her best efforts. Conversely, those of us who enjoy a richly

supported comfortable life should not be over-hasty to take credit for
our capacity to remain trustworthy whilst simultaneously pursuing other
goals and values.
So the circumstances in which we will be required to act make a dif-
ference to what competences we need to have in order to safely make a
commitment without risk of becoming untrustworthy. Moreover, via
different mechanisms, our past, present, and future circumstances can
help or hinder us in coming to know whether we have the right compe-
tence to match a prospective commitment. I have tied trustworthiness
to successful action, and thus to having the appropriate competence,
and I have not tied it directly to knowing one’s own competence. So in
theory someone could be trustworthy without knowing what she is cap-
able of, if through luck, isolation, or someone else’s paternalistic interven-
tion she manages to acquire only those commitments she is competent
to fulfil. But, as I noted above, in practice if we are concerned to pursue
trustworthiness, then knowing what we can and can’t do will be crucial.
What can get in the way of obtaining that knowledge?
In knowing whether we’ll be able to live up to a given commitment, it
helps to know the circumstances in which we will be required to act, and
to know what competences we possess. There is a complex set of rela-
tionships between knowledge, uncertainty, and competence here. For
example, the more competent we are, then the more confident we can be
that we will live up to our commitments, whatever that turns out to mean:
we can handle uncertainty about the circumstances under which we will
be required to act, since our competence will serve us well across a whole
range of situations. Yet if we don’t know that we are highly competent, it
may seem irresponsible to commit unless we are sure of what will be
required of us, and sure that we can match that requirement. If we know
little of what we are capable of, then knowing the circumstances in
which we will need to act does not enable us to commit safely. With
these interrelations in mind, I will review some obstacles to obtaining
such knowledge.
The harder it is to know the circumstances under which we will be
required to act, the harder it is to know whether we will succeed, to
know what competence will be demanded of us in order to fulfil a given
commitment. This kind of uncertainty is often generated by a combination
110 Obstacles to Being Trustworthy

of instability and lack of resources to compensate for unexpected setbacks.

For example, suppose I wonder whether I can safely commit to giving a
co-worker a lift home every evening. The more unreliable my car is,
the less confident I can be; but if I have a friend who will give us both a
lift on my request, or if I have enough money to pay for a taxi when my
car breaks down, then I can be more confident. Suppose I  wonder
whether I can babysit for my sister’s kids next weekend. The more unre-
liable my mental or physical health is, the harder it is for me to commit
to babysitting.
For similar reasons, more open-ended or vague commitments are
harder to incur safely, at least when we are required to surrender authority
over how to make such commitments more determinate. It’s easier for
me to promise to come to your birthday party next weekend than it is
for me to promise to come to your party whenever you decide to hold it.
In general, stability or at least predictability of circumstances helps us make
better judgements about likely future success. Conversely, people who
have fluctuating health, who depend upon unreliable others (including
unreliable authorities) for support and resources, or who deal with
precarious employment or housing situations, will find it more difficult
to extrapolate from their past success or failures to their ability to act
successfully in the future.
Even when we know the circumstances under which we will be required
to act, our past or present circumstances can make it difficult to know
whether we have the competence we will need. Self-knowledge of this
kind is not typically a matter of introspection. Instead, in trying to under-
stand what actions we will successfully perform in the future, we may
draw on evidence regarding the success or failure of our own past or
present actions, upon evidence about the circumstances in which we
have previously acted, and about our range of experience, education, and
levels of motivation. There is no single recipe for coming to know what
we will be able to do. Nevertheless, it is useful to pull apart different
elements of the evidence available to us, and thus the different obstacles
we may face in working out what commitments we will be able to meet.
Some of us have had plenty of opportunities to test our skills and learn
through experience; others have had fewer. Such opportunities can help
us become more competent, but the point here is that they can also
help us learn what we are competent to do. Many factors are relevant: as
 5.2 Obstacles to Knowing One ’ s Competence 111

we become older and more experienced then, so long as we are paying

attention, we can learn more about our strengths and weaknesses, about
what we find challenging or impossible, and about what comes easily to
us. Moreover, opportunities to test our skills often require the cooper-
ation of others: I can’t practise badminton alone, or try out my latest
philosophy ideas if no one will listen to me. Other times this sort of
opportunity requires relatively scarce material resources, or a sufficient
degree of self-confidence. Finding and exploiting such opportunities can
also require us to gauge the likely consequences of failure: an important
dimension of privilege is the freedom to make mistakes without being
heavily penalized. It matters whether you will be given a second chance,
the opportunity to change direction if early attempts at some activity are
unsuccessful, or alternatively the opportunity to try again, and fail again,
until you succeed.
Supposing that we have been able to act in the past, how can we judge
how effective we have been? For many complex tasks, and for some less
complex but intangible tasks, we lack objective measures of success or
failure, or indeed a common understanding of what success amounts to.
(It is no surprise that creative pursuits are especially tricky to evaluate.)
Even where there is some agreement about what a successful perform-
ance looks like, we may be more concerned with relative success: in
competitive situations, we don’t just need to be good at performing the
action in question, we need to be better than others. Sometimes the
comparative judgement is easier to make than the relative judgement:
perhaps I don’t really know how good I am at this task, but I know at least
that I’m as good as my peers. Sometimes, in contrast, we have good insight
into our own capacities, whilst lacking knowledge of what others can do.
Some of us have confidence in our judgements. Some of us lack that
easy confidence, but are lucky enough to be in environments where we
get ready and accurate feedback on our own performances, in ways
which are constructive rather than damaging. Good feedback helps us
improve our future performance, but it can also give us insight into what
we are doing, and the degree of success with which we are achieving it.
Lots of factors can help or hinder self-knowledge in this area, and
I am not attempting to survey them all. But consideration of impostor
syndrome reveals some intriguing ways in which environmental obstacles
to self-knowledge can be mistakenly assimilated to mere lack of
112 Obstacles to Being Trustworthy

self-confidence. Impostor syndrome comes in different forms, but it

can involve an inability to accept the reality of one’s successes, or a ten-
dency to attribute success to hard work, help from others, or sheer luck
rather than to ability. It often also involves fear of being found out as not
really deserving of accolades and opportunities one has been offered.
Trustworthiness requires us to make sensible judgements about our
ability to act successfully in the future. The less well we understand
our past actions, including whether and why they succeeded or failed,
the harder it will be to get know what we can achieve in the future.
Impostor syndrome can generate doubt about past successes, but it can
also involve misunderstanding about the extent to which those successes
are replicable, as opposed to mere lucky flukes. Self-regarding ‘impos-
tors’ often feel that they have to make much more effort than other people.
But there are many reasons why such comparative judgements may be
difficult to make, especially in cultures which value effortless superiority,
where trying hard is not cool.
Moreover, what we may think of as intrinsic talent or skill may be no
more important to future success than are sustained effort or social
support. On the one hand, skills often include the ability to adapt to chan-
ging circumstances, creatively overcoming obstacles. On the other hand,
the ability to motivate oneself to great efforts is itself a transferable skill
that can enable us to face new challenges. In anticipating our future suc-
cess we also need to have a grasp on how far our past successes have
been helped or hindered by the environments we were in. The more one
identifies one’s past success as a consequence of one’s intrinsic abilities
or skills, the more likely one is to expect future success across a range of
environments. How accurate this inference is depends upon the facts
of one’s situation, past and future. And we don’t always know how far we
will control the circumstances in which we must act: supposing that our
past successes have been largely due to the support of others, can we
arrange for such social support in the future?
Finally, I turn to these questions of grasping our own competence
as they apply to the special case of competence to speak truthfully, as
required for trustworthy assertion. I have portrayed trustworthiness as a
speaker as a special case of trustworthiness as a practical actor: it requires
us to avoid unfulfilled commitment, which in this case means avoiding
untruthful assertions. How do we judge whether we can safely commit
to speaking truthfully? This requires us to assess the state of our own
 5.2 Obstacles to Knowing One ’ s Competence 113

knowledge, to judge whether we are well-informed enough to speak up,

and of course there is no general recipe for this process. Nevertheless,
it is worth considering whether the challenges to assessing one’s practical
competence have analogues in this domain.
Is there a challenge equivalent to knowing the circumstances under
which we will be required to act? Not exactly equivalent perhaps, but
it is often the case that, as speakers, we are somewhat unsure what is
expected of us. Is it my turn to speak? Does this person want informa-
tion from me, or is she merely making small talk? Does my audience
already know this fact, or is it my job to tell them? Is this a high-stakes
situation in which I should be absolutely certain of what I say, or is it
okay to pass along gossip or speculation?
Something like impostor syndrome can affect us as asserters, especially
when we consider a slightly wider task of making a valuable, informative
contribution to conversation, rather than the specific task of uttering the
truth with respect to p, whatever p may be. For example, it is easy to
misjudge the significance of what one has to contribute, even whilst
correctly judging that the contribution would be truthful. Significance
in conversation, especially group conversation, is often a relative matter,
so misjudging here may also involve overestimating the significance of
what others have said, or might say, and thus not realizing that it’s appro-
priate for you to speak up rather than wait for others to contribute.
Suppose for example that women experts are less willing to pronounce
about issues beyond their primary expertise than are men: Sarsons and
Xu (2015) found this effect in a study of economists. Let’s assume that
the economists are all making good-faith efforts to be trustworthy. What
then might explain these differences in willingness to take a stand? In my
terms, we can understand this either as an absolute difference in econo-
mists’ evaluations of how well established their own beliefs are, or else as
a difference in their evaluations of how well established a belief must be
in order to be made public in some context. If audiences at large respond
less critically to male as opposed to female economists, then it may well
be that neither group is making an error either about the grounds for
their beliefs, or about the acceptability of their speaking beyond their
primary expertise.
In summary, there are very many ways in which our circumstances
can help or hinder us in our capacity to fulfil a given commitment, and
moreover there are very many ways in which our circumstances can
114 Obstacles to Being Trustworthy

help or hinder our attempts to know what capacities we have. I have tied
trustworthiness to the fulfilment of commitment, in other words to suc-
cessful action. Obeying epistemic norms of commitment-undertaking is
in that sense a derivative requirement: this is a good means of ensuring
that one is trustworthy. There are many ways in which our circumstances
can create obstacles both to having the competence which is required in
order to fulfil a given commitment, and to knowing what competence
we have.

5.3 Knowing What Commitments We Already Have

So far in this chapter I have reviewed the obstacles we face in attempting

to avoid new commitments which we are not competent to fulfil.
Trustworthiness also demands that we pay attention in situations where
we are attempting to act in light of our existing commitments; schemat-
ically, these situations are temporally later than the ones I have been
discussing so far. As I noted above, in such situations we need both
insight into what our commitments require of us and the ability to align
our actions (including our speech) to those requirements. In this section
and the next, I look at these challenges in turn; these sections are much
shorter than the ones above, since I can draw on those earlier discussions.
Often we lack insight into the significance of our speech and actions
because we are unfamiliar with local conventions and expectations
governing commitment. Sometimes those difficulties are resolved once
we have incurred the commitment—other people’s reactions may make
it abundantly clear what our normative situation now is, even if that was
difficult to anticipate in advance. But sometimes we just don’t know what
commitments we have already incurred, either because we do not know
what the local conventions and defaults are or because we misremember
or misunderstand our situation. Earlier, I focused on our uncertainty
about how to avoid unwanted commitments, since this kind of veto
power is central to trustworthiness in that context. But when taking this
later perspective, we may also wonder whether we successfully managed
to incur the commitments we hoped for, not just to avoid the ones we
didn’t want.
 5.3 Knowing What Commitments We Already Have 115

Incurring a commitment often requires that other people take us

seriously in this regard, for example by accepting our offer to commit;
taking us seriously needn’t mean relying upon us to fulfil the commitment,
merely regarding us as having made a commitment. But we do not always
know how our words and actions have been received by others; sometimes
we do not even know whether our speech has been heard, or our writing
read. We sometimes come away from conversations, meetings, or email
exchanges unsure of whether we managed to have our offers accepted,
whether we managed to incur the commitments we hoped to incur.
Does this kind of uncertainty create an obstacle to trustworthiness?
After all, trustworthiness does not require us to act only as commitment
dictates: there is plenty of scope for acting beyond the scope of commit-
ment without rendering oneself untrustworthy. So can’t we accommodate
this kind of uncertainty by acting as if we are committed, just to be on
the safe side? I will discuss responses to uncertainty at greater length
in chapter 6. But for now I note that even if we wanted to incur a com-
mitment at some earlier time we may later prefer to be free of that
commitment, perhaps because we now understand more about what it
mean for us, or because a better option has come along. If we want to
avoid untrustworthiness, yet prefer to act as if we are not committed,
we need to know whether we really incurred a commitment earlier on,
or whether we are now free to act as we choose.
This schematic temporal framing is less useful for the special case of
commitment to speaking truthfully through assertion: once you know
whether you have managed to make an assertion, as opposed to mere
speculation, it is too late to change the content of what you say, although
you might try backtracking where necessary. But it is often possible to
know that you have undertaken to do or say something or other, without
fully realizing the extent of what you have undertaken, and without being
sure of exactly when you are being called upon to act on this commitment.
One reason for this is that our commitments are often conditional:
I might have offered to help you with your project ‘if I have time’, or ‘if you
can’t find anyone else’, or ‘if you are really stuck’. If you now call on my
help, I have to judge whether those conditions are satisfied. This can
involve trust in both directions. For example, you may have to trust my
judgement that I genuinely don’t have time; I may need to examine
116 Obstacles to Being Trustworthy

my own conscience on this matter. Or I may have to take your word for it
that my commitment is genuinely triggered because you really are stuck,
and no one else is available to help. In general, social circumstances help
determine whether I can trust you when you assure me that the condi-
tions have been satisfied, so that trustworthiness now requires me to act.
As before, in such situations we can distinguish the question of whether
someone is committed to action from the question of whether other
people sincerely regard her as committed to action. I have already
discussed the theoretical and practical uncertainty which surrounds the
role of other people’s attitudes in generating commitment for us; trust-
worthiness is at stake only where commitment has genuinely been
incurred. Depending on the framework we adopt, such uncertainties may
be understood as uncertainties about what trustworthiness demands of
us, or else as uncertainties about whether other people have an accurate
view of what trustworthiness demands of us.
How do we know what actions are demanded by our existing com-
mitments? Earlier, I discussed how epistemic obstacles can be generated
by varying local conventions of commitment. Such obstacles are also
relevant to this later temporal perspective, when we are trying to estab-
lish what commitments we have already incurred. In particular, cultural
dislocation can make it more difficult to know whether our offers to
commit have been taken seriously: if I suggest a lunch meeting, and you
don’t demur, have you thereby accepted my offer to commit to showing
up, or have you merely evaded the issue? These interactions can be a little
confusing at the best of times, but we are all the more prone to misunder-
standings when we are new to a country, a workplace, or a social circle.
As I will discuss in chapter 6, the flexibility with which we can choose
to respond to such uncertainties may depend a great deal upon our social
power, our ability to access alternative options, and the importance to us
of maintaining a reputation for trustworthiness. Some of us, some of the
time, can get away with simply blundering on through our hazy grasp of
existing commitments; some of us certainly cannot.

5.4 Controlling Our Actions

Finally, following my four-way taxonomy of obstacles to trustworthiness,

I should consider obstacles to acting in line with our commitments,
 5.4 Controlling Our Actions 117

even once we know what our existing commitments are. This may be the
broadest category of obstacles—obstacles to action in general. As such,
it does not require special efforts to demonstrate that challenging cir-
cumstances can generate difficulties on this front: it is obvious that our
circumstances affect how we can act. By definition, challenging circum-
stances make it more difficult to act as we would like to do.
Correspondingly, this is the category where I have found least scope
for saying something which is distinctively relevant to trustworthiness.
This may be because it follows the preceding three sections: if we could
successfully overcome obstacles in all of the other three categories, then
there would be no special problem here. Obstacles to action are obstacles
to trustworthiness only when we have acquired a commitment which
demands that action of us. But if we already knew that a given commit-
ment would require us to act in a way which we would find difficult, and
if we had the freedom to decline that commitment without much cost,
then we could simply avoid getting into a situation where that obstacle
to action made it harder for us to be trustworthy. This might be a matter
of great regret, of course, if we have other reasons to want to act in that
way, with or without a commitment to doing so. But in itself it would
not diminish our trustworthiness.
Are there obstacles to appropriate action in the special case of
assertion—i.e. fulfilment of commitment to speak truthfully regarding
the matter at hand? Of course it is often not easy to have the knowledge
required for appropriate assertion. This is not a direct obstacle to trust-
worthiness: one can be trustworthy without having much knowledge or
competence, provided one can avoid becoming overcommitted. But
as we will see in the following chapter, lack of competence, and thus an
increased requirement to choose between trustworthiness and new
commitment, brings troubles of its own.
More direct challenges are faced by those who must communicate in
languages they have not mastered, those with speech or literacy difficul-
ties, or those who face other practical challenges to self-expression.
Treating assertion as simultaneous incurring and discharging (or not)
or commitment generates some complications here. For more ordinary
commitments to future action, there is a clear difference between con-
trolling what I am committed to doing (as discussed in section 5.1) and
controlling what I in fact do (the topic of this section). But with assertion,
control and lack of control over various different matters is entangled.
118 Obstacles to Being Trustworthy

I need control over whether I am making an assertion, as opposed to

remaining silent or else performing some other speech act. I need control
over the content of what I say, in the sense of controlling whether I am
making an assertion as to whether p or an assertion as to whether q.
Finally, I need control over whether or not I speak truthfully, whether
I get it right as between saying that p and saying that not-p. These different
demands are obscured by the more standard philosophical habit of
discussing assertion that p as opposed to assertion as to whether p. But
it is important to see that I may have more or less control on each of
these various fronts. Thus anything which limits my control in one of these
respects may make it more difficult for me to be trustworthy.
I began this chapter by setting up a four-way taxonomy: before versus
after, commitment versus competent action. I conceded immediately
that in thinking about obstacles to control and insight on these various
fronts, it’s often not easy to fit challenges into just one quadrant of that
four-way taxonomy. Nevertheless, it should now be clear that there are
many ways in which our circumstances of all kinds can generate obstacles
to our pursuit of trustworthiness; correspondingly, that circumstances can
also make it easier for us to pursue trustworthiness. These challenges
and choices may or may not be apparent to us in the first person, and
they may or may not be apparent to interested onlookers who are
tempted to make judgements about our trustworthiness, and even about
our character.
In the next chapter, I will examine the dilemmas and double binds
which can confront us in responding to the inevitable obstacles we face
to pursuing trustworthiness, especially when others are likely to misun-
derstand the constraints we are working within.

Additional Sources

5.1 Obstacles to Controlling New Commitment. Relevant literature

includes debates around coerced promises, and the nature of promises
more generally: see sources listed in chapter 2, and in particular Shiffrin
(2014). Hawley (2018a) discusses coerced speech. There are also connec-
tions between the themes of this section and debates around illocutionary
force and silencing, e.g. Langton (1992), Hornsby and Langton (1998).
 Additional Sources 119

Kukla (2014) is also important here, and I discuss connections with Kukla’s

paper more explicitly in section 6.5. Peet (2015) explores other respects
in which it may be difficult to control what we commit to through speech.
See also Bird (2002), Dougherty (2015), and E.Fricker (2012). The issues
discussed in this section around control bear some relation to feminist
theorizing about autonomy, as reviewed by Stoljar (2013).
5.2 Obstacles to Knowing One’s Competence. The relationship between
competence and circumstances outlined here owes something to Hawley
(2003). More broadly, the vexed question of how competence relates to
success echoes debates about virtue, dispositions, reliabilism, and gener-
ics elsewhere in philosophy. Sakulku and Alexander  (2011) is a useful
overview of psychological research on impostor syndrome, and I explore
these issues at greater length in Hawley (2019). Intemann (2010) provides
a good entry point into feminist standpoint epistemology.
5.3 Knowing What Commitments We Already Have. Sources listed
under 5.1 are relevant here.
5.4 Controlling Our Actions. Just as this is the section where there seems
least scope for raising issues distinctive to trustworthiness, it is also the
section where it seems least feasible to pick out individual sources for
the idea that we cannot always act as we would like.
 6
Consequences

In chapter  5, I explored a variety of ways in which our circumstances

can make it more difficult for us to avoid unfulfilled commitment, and
thus more difficult for us to be trustworthy. I discussed in turn (i) obstacles
to controlling commitment (some but not all of which arise from
epistemic obstacles); (ii) obstacles to knowing our competences;
(iii) obstacles to knowing what commitments we have already incurred;
(iv) obstacles to acting as commitment requires us to do. There is no
sensible way of generalizing about these obstacles, except to note that
they often arise from our social and material situations, not just our
internal or mental states, and that they are not always clearly visible
either to ourselves or to others. Many of these obstacles can be understood
not as making trustworthiness impossible, but instead as raising the cost
of trustworthiness, either by making it harder to avoid unfulfillable
new commitments or by making it harder to act in line with existing
commitments.
Given that all of us face these obstacles to some degree or other, how
should we respond if we care about trustworthiness? In reacting to
or  anticipating these obstacles, we often face uncomfortable choices
between prioritizing trustworthiness and prioritizing other important
goals and values. For example, from the narrow perspective of preserving
trustworthiness, it is usually safer to avoid commitment wherever
possible. But followed to the letter this is a recipe for a lonely, unrewarding
life, one which benefits neither the recipe-follower nor the people
around her. I touched upon this sort of dilemma in chapter 4, and will
explore a range of similar issues in this chapter: the pursuit of trust-
worthiness can come into conflict with any number of other goals.
I have found no completely systematic way of reviewing the ways in
which we may respond to challenges, nor the kinds of goals or values
which may conflict with the pursuit of trustworthiness. So instead of

How To Be Trustworthy. Katherine Hawley, Oxford University Press (2019). © Katherine Hawley.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843900.001.0001
 6.1 How We See Each Other 121

trying to discuss every possibility, I will focus on interactions between

our responses to such challenges on the one hand, and other people’s
interpretations or misinterpretations of our speech and actions on the
other. These interactions take several forms. For example, the way in
which we respond to obstacles may be guided by our expectations of
what others already think of us, or what they will think of us if we take a
certain action. Indeed, some of the obstacles are generated by our need
to take other people’s opinions into account, and by our difficulties in
doing so. Moreover, our reactions to certain obstacles raise the chances
of our being misinterpreted by other people. This is especially likely when
our circumstances, or the ways in which our circumstances make trust-
worthiness more difficult, are not transparent to the people around us.

6.1 How We See Each Other

Much of my discussion is framed from the perspective of someone who

is struggling to be trustworthy whilst pursuing other important goals
and values, someone who is evaluated by other people around her. But I
also need to consider the perspective of those other people, for two
reasons. First, of course, each of us is also ‘other people’. That is, we make
judgements and interpretations of people’s words and actions, in the
light of what those words and actions suggest about commitment,
competence, and trustworthiness. It’s crucial that we do this well, since
poor judgement in this area can be damaging both for the person who
makes a mistake, and for the person who is on the receiving end of
the misjudgement or misinterpretation. This book focuses on how to be
trustworthy, but it is also important that we understand how to evaluate
other people’s trustworthiness.
Second, when we are thinking about how to act, about how to balance
the pursuit of trustworthiness with other goals, in light of whatever obs-
tacles we encounter, then we often need to anticipate and accommodate
other people’s opinions of us. Sometimes the most trustworthy course of
action is not the course of action which will appear most trustworthy to
those around us, and in such situations we face some tricky decisions.
My account of trustworthiness in terms of avoiding unfulfilled
commitment provides a distinctive framework for understanding these
122 Consequences

issues, though as ever it does not provide neat and tidy resolutions.
Commitment and competence are logically separate: one can behave
competently whilst free of commitment, and of course one can have
commitments one is not competent to fulfil, even though that makes for
untrustworthiness. In chapter 5 I treated commitment and competence
(as linked to successful action) as independent levers which we control
imperfectly, trying to bring our commitments in line with our competence
to act, and our actions in line with our existing commitments.
But from the observer’s perspective, there are inferential links around
the triad of trustworthiness, competence, and commitment, links which
rely upon the conceptual connections between these. Perhaps most
obviously, we can base judgements about other people’s trustworthiness
on our judgements (or misjudgements) of their competence and
commitments. If you regard someone as having undertaken a commit-
ment, yet fail to recognize that her actions are in line with that
commitment, then you will mistakenly infer that she is untrustworthy.
Someone who finds it difficult to get others to recognize her successful
actions therefore has an incentive not to take on such commitments
in  the first place. Otherwise she risks being unfairly regarded as
untrustworthy.
Conversely, if you mistakenly think that someone has undertaken a
commitment, and accurately recognize that her actions are not line with
that purported commitment, then you will mistakenly infer that she is
untrustworthy. Someone who is often misunderstood in this way therefore
has an incentive to behave as other people think that she should, even if
her commitments do not really require her to act in that way. In the special
case of speech, this is the situation of someone who is inadvertently
taken to be making assertions when she intends only to speculate or
question, and so must be cautious about what she says.
But these inferences can also run from trustworthiness to competence
or commitment. If you regard someone as trustworthy, then you can
draw conclusions about her competence from what you take her
commitments to be, and vice versa. After all, a trustworthy person will
avoid commitments which are unmatched by competence. For example
if your friend offers to drive you to the station, and you regard her as
trustworthy, then you simply assume that she has access to a car and
knows how to drive: she would not have offered otherwise. You infer
from commitment and trustworthiness to competence.
 6.1 How We See Each Other 123

To take another example, suppose that you are chatting with your
wheelchair-using friend, someone you regard as trustworthy. You talk
about your plans for a group hike and picnic, and your friend says ‘that
sounds great, I’d love to come along’. If you assume that your friend’s
wheelchair means that she can’t participate in a hike, you may assume
that she is politely or wistfully endorsing your plans, which don’t include
her. You infer from trustworthiness and lack of competence to lack of
commitment; after all, she would not undertake to do something she
cannot manage. If instead you are open to the idea that your friend is
competent to participate in a hike (if you choose an accessible route),
then you can hear your friend’s words as a commitment to come along,
indeed as an expression of her trust in you to make this feasible.
Dropping the assumption that she lacks competence on this front blocks
the inference to a lack of commitment.
When we take people to be trustworthy, and regard them as lacking
competence in some respect, we can infer that they do not have a
commitment which requires that competence. Moreover we can also
infer that they would not take on such a commitment even if we invited
them to do so. After all, trustworthiness involves an effort to avoid
commitments unmatched by competence. Such inferences colour our
interpretation of what others say, as in the case of the (in)accessible hike.
But they also affect the way in which we think prospectively about issuing
invitations or offers, and about asking for help or expertise. There is no
point asking a trustworthy yet incompetent person, since she will have
to decline any potential commitment. Mistakes and misjudgements on
this front seem compatible with at least superficial well-meaningness,
and a positive outlook on the other person’s moral character: it’s exactly
because we admire the other person’s trustworthiness that we infer
from our low opinion of her competence to a low expectation of her
commitments.
As a special case of this inferential pattern, when we take a speaker to
be trustworthy we may use the content of what she says as a guide to the
force with which it is being expressed. For example if someone says
something which appears ludicrously implausible, we may infer that she
is joking, or being sarcastic, or speaking metaphorically. Such an infer-
ence seems to depend upon an assumption about what the speaker is
likely to know: she must know how implausible this claim is, and she’s a
sensible (trustworthy) person, so surely she can’t seriously be asserting
124 Consequences

it? Likewise, it is disconcerting when someone appears to be asking a

question to which we believe she already knows the answer: in such
situations, we cast about for alternative explanations, perhaps wondering
whether the speaker is in fact asserting the proposition via a merely
rhetorical question. In such cases, we’re making a judgement about
competence and then basing a judgement about commitment upon it,
again mediated by a positive view of the speaker’s trustworthiness.
So when we take somebody to be trustworthy we use this premise to
make inferences between her competence (or lack of competence) and
commitment (or lack of commitment). This is one reason why it is useful
for us to have well-grounded views about others’ trustworthiness. It also
highlights a mechanism via which misjudgements on any of these three
points—trustworthiness, competence, commitment—can ramify.
Imagine a senior professional who manages and is supported by an
administrator. The administrator’s explicit job description includes
duties such as handling appointments, drafting documents, and keeping
track of information. Making coffee for the manager is not part of the
job description, yet the manager expects the administrator to make coffee,
and is disposed to regard her as violating a job-related commitment if
she does not.
If the administrator doesn’t make coffee, she regards herself as
meeting all her commitments, but the manager will regard her as not
fully trustworthy. If the administrator tries to bypass the issue, for
example nudging someone else into making the coffee, she risks looking
even more untrustworthy in the manager’s eyes. But if she conforms to
expectations and makes coffee, this can create other problems. First, it
may in time generate a real commitment: ongoing silent conformity to
unreasonable expectations can make them reasonable. Second, she does
not get credit for going beyond the call of duty to be generous or hospitable,
only for doing what her job requires. In these ways the administrator is
worse off than someone who ‘volunteers’ to make coffee. Third, the
administrator has less time to fulfil her other commitments at work,
which has potential consequences for her trustworthiness.
We can multiply the complications. Suppose that administrators often
end up making coffee for male managers and not female ones, either
because the different managers have different expectations or because
the expectations of female managers carry less weight. Then female
 6.1 How We See Each Other 125

managers either have to insist on the coffee, conforming to a ‘bitch’

stereotype, or else lose face by making their own coffee. In a workplace
where ‘real’ bosses have someone to make coffee for them, this has
further negative consequences.
There are multiple layers of error and misjudgement available to
everyone involved in such situations. Most obviously, it can be difficult
for someone entering a new context to appreciate what the local conven-
tions and practices are, and so to appreciate what commitments she may
be taken to have incurred by certain actions—this is an obstacle that
I discussed in chapter 5. But in addition, such difficulties can themselves
be obscure: people already embedded in their practices often underesti-
mate how hard it can be for newcomers to get a grip on what’s going on.
Then old hands may tend to see unfulfilled commitment as a consequence
of intentional neglect or carelessness, rather than as a consequence of an
easy misunderstanding. Finally, the fact that expectations may be informal
or implicit makes it more difficult to challenge them without seeming
picky or unreasonable.
Again, I am not attempting to impose rigorous order onto all the
many expectations, inferences, judgements, and misjudgements we
encounter in our various social roles. But it should be clear that our
beliefs and assumptions about other people’s competence, commitments,
and trustworthiness are mutually reinforcing. When someone says or
does something we find surprising, we often have a choice about how to
adjust our beliefs. If someone expresses a claim we find initially
implausible, do we take it more seriously because of our respect for the
person saying it, or do we take this implausibility to suggest either that
the speaker is not really being serious or else that she is less knowledge-
able than we had imagined? Similarly, when someone acts in a way
which we find surprising given our assumptions about her commit-
ments and trustworthiness, we again have a choice about how to adjust
our beliefs. Taking care over such choices, assumptions, and inferences
is an important element of trying to treat other people fairly.
Shifting back to our perspective as agents trying to decide how to act,
speak, and incur commitment: we must take into account the ways in
which others are likely to judge or misjudge us, especially when we are
faced with various obstacles to being trustworthy. There are self-
interested reasons for being able to communicate one’s trustworthiness,
126 Consequences

but this is also a service to others, especially when we’re trying to be

trustworthy as sources of information in particular. When we fulfil our
practical commitments to other people, they can benefit even before
they know that we have fulfilled those commitments. If I keep my promise
to take care of your garden whilst you’re away, then I help you even
before you know that I have done so. In contrast, if I commit to speaking
truthfully, and I do speak truthfully, my audience cannot profit from
this if they do not trust me. The social value of trustworthiness in speech
is tied very closely to its being recognized as such.

6.2 Responding to Limited Control

of Our Commitments

Although trustworthiness requires us to avoid unfulfilled commitments,

it is not always straightforward for us to avoid tricky commitments in
the first place, as I explored in section  5.1. Often we do not fully
understand the significance of our speech or actions, so we blunder into
incurring new commitments. And it is sometimes difficult to avoid
commitment even when we know exactly what is going on. For example,
when we have already incurred a meta-commitment—a commitment to
take on certain types of new commitment as they arise—then trust-
worthiness requires us to follow through even when we have doubts
about our ability to fulfil the proposed new commitment. In other
situations, pressure to take on new commitments can arise from a lack
of attractive alternatives.
Suppose then that we encounter circumstances in which we find it
difficult or costly to avoid incurring a new commitment, whether we
like it or not, and whether or not we feel competent to fulfil that com-
mitment. How to respond? We could choose to bite the bullet, and pay
the high price of prioritizing trustworthiness by avoiding new commit-
ment. For the most part, the cases I discussed in chapter 5 do not involve
a complete lack of control over commitment, and indeed there is reason
to think that coerced commitments do not genuinely bind us. Instead, I
focused on situations in which our circumstances mean that avoiding
commitment is a very unattractive option.
 6.2 Limited Control of Our Commitments 127

For example, someone who has only one friend, a person who makes
unreasonable demands upon her, may be forced to choose between
accepting unsafe commitments (thus risking untrustworthiness) and
losing her only social contact. Someone who needs to see a doctor, and
will struggle to make it to the appointment on time because she relies
upon poor public transport, must choose between a risky commitment
to show up on time and a certainty of not seeing the doctor at all.
People living in challenging circumstances, with few material or social
resources, will more often pay a very high price if they prioritize
trustworthiness—the avoidance of unfulfilled commitment—over other
needs or desires. Some such costs must be imposed on others: imagine
that it is a child who needs medical attention, but the parent who must
undertake to get them to the doctor’s. It is broadly possible to decide
not to make a commitment in such circumstances, but the practical,
personal, and social cost is high.
In other situations, we cannot simply decide not to accept commitment,
even if we are willing to pay the price of this choice. Whether or not we
incur a new commitment is often not a matter of direct choice. For
example, when we are unclear about how our actions or speech may
commit us, it is hard to know how to implement a decision not to take
on a new commitment. Both the demanding friend and the distant doctor
cases can be understood as epistemically transparent to the person
concerned: she knows what it would take to incur, or not to incur, this
commitment, and she understands the costs and risks associated with
each option. But in other situations we have difficulties in understand-
ing what sorts of words or actions will land us with new commitments,
ones we may be reluctant or unwilling to fulfil.
How can we handle such situations? One strategy is to try to create a
margin of safety, to avoid doing anything with even a hint of possible
commitment attached. In practical terms this would mean not accepting
any kind of favours, not doing anything which might call for reciprocation,
not showing interest in possible commitments, and so on. For the
special case of potentially informative speech, this strategy might appeal
to someone who struggles to control the force of her speech, and
cannot reliably prevent it from becoming an assertion: she might try to
speak as little as possible since she cannot be sure of making her speech
128 Consequences

suitably tentative. (The opposite problem—difficulty in getting taken

seriously—is also significant, but not such a direct obstacle to trust-
worthiness.) People in such situations pay a double price: they avoid the
commitment they are concerned to avoid, but as collateral damage they
also avoid commitments they would happily incur, if they could be
safely chosen without thereby also incurring unsafe commitments.
A related strategy is to try to take back control by making exagger-
atedly explicit efforts to communicate about what commitments one
is willing to incur. Often we are liable to incur commitments by fail-
ing to push back against others’ expectations, or by failing to expli-
citly specify which commitments we reject. We can’t always tell
exactly when and where such defaults and implicit expectations apply,
so this strategy recommends being as explicit as possible wherever
there is potential doubt.
For example, suppose you have an idea or information which you
would like to raise for consideration, but without giving your full assur-
ance of its truth. The safest option, short of remaining silent, is to say
explicitly that this is just a guess, that you shouldn’t be relied upon, that
you’re just suggesting or speculating, and so on. Or suppose that you
would like to accept an invitation to dinner, but do not want to commit
to reciprocating. You can try saying that you would love to come to dinner
but you won’t be able to return the favour. Or suppose that you would
like to have an appointment kept open for you at the doctor’s office, yet
don’t want to commit to showing up on time. You could try saying just
that. In general, you might do something whilst disavowing its standard
social significance, or else conditionally offer to do something so long
as it does not involve you in unwanted commitment. Under the right
circumstances, this can be a smart strategy for pursuing trustworthiness:
it puts the ball in the other person’s court, and, if successful, allows us to
regain control over the incurring of commitment.
As ever, there are complications. Such moves often invoke some kind
of excuse for not incurring the commitment in question. Lack of com-
petence here seems a better excuse than lack of willingness, at least
amongst friends. For example, if you are trying to accept a dinner invita-
tion without undertaking to reciprocate, then it is acceptable to cite your
health problems, your over-crowded house share, or your limited cooking
 6.2 Limited Control of Our Commitments 129

skills. It is not so nice to say simply that you don’t like entertaining, or
can’t be bothered to cook—it takes nerve to request commitment-free
dinner on those grounds.
But we may struggle to know which excuses for avoiding commit-
ment will be accepted without social cost, and which will not, leaving us
with the commitment plus the negative consequences of having tried to
avoid it. A hard-pressed doctor’s receptionist, for example, is unlikely to
give us permission to just try to show up, especially if appointments are
over-subscribed. If there is a formal or informal penalty for missing
appointments, we can’t easily ask to be excused, no matter how tough
our circumstances, and asking for special consideration may itself
attract censure. Similarly, it’s not always possible to avoid the perceived
commitments associated with assertion even when we include hedging
terms—under such circumstances the safer option is not to speak at all.
How might all of this manoeuvring look to observers who are not
fully aware of the challenges posed by circumstances? From this outside
perspective, imagine someone who opts to pay the high social cost of
avoiding a particular commitment. Suppose we do not realize how difficult
it will be for that person to fulfil that commitment, or at least how
difficult it is for her to know what she can do; perhaps it’s the kind of
thing that would be easy for us to manage. Then the refusal to become
committed looks perversely unmotivated: we may simply assume that
she is antisocial, lacking confidence, or not a ‘team player’.
Or imagine someone who makes what seem to be absurdly cautious
attempts to specify exactly what she can and can’t commit to doing,
offering up conditions and potential excuses. Again, imagine that we do
not appreciate how difficult it is for this person to know whether she will
be able to act as required, perhaps because she knows how unstable or
hostile her circumstances are likely to be. To us, the person will appear
to be simply a fusspot, or self-centred, or unreliable: we won’t see these
superficially irritating behaviours as evidence of her admirable under-
lying motive.
I argued in chapter 5 that people are more likely to face obstacles to
controlling their commitments if they are living in difficult circumstances—
different types of difficulty generate different types of obstacle. My point
in the present section is that such difficulties can be compounded by
130 Consequences

attempts to compensate for or overcome these obstacles: all the more so

when someone is struggling to control her commitments, and struggling
to compensate for this, all whilst dependent on the opinions of people
around her who do not appreciate the dilemmas and challenges she
is grappling with. The pursuit of trustworthiness requires greater sacrifices
from some people than from others, and, what is worse, those sacrifices
may be mistaken for fussiness or flakiness.
So far in this section, I have pictured cases in which a relatively
powerless person tries to protect herself both from becoming untrust-
worthy and from paying other costs, and cannot achieve these simultan-
eously. But there are parallel issues which affect relatively powerful
people, and not always to their advantage. Sometimes an individual has
special responsibility to foresee and either forestall or accommodate
possible misapprehensions of the intended force of her words. For
example, distinctions between informing, warning, and threatening
may be very subtle. Suppose that an employer faced with workers
striking to retain their pensions says to them that if the strike succeeds
then other important benefits will be lost, in order to balance the books
financially. This could be understood as providing a piece of information,
or as a helpful warning, or as a sinister threat; let us suppose it is
intended merely to be informative. Given the power of the employer,
and the heightened atmosphere of a strike, it is not enough for the
speaker to take ordinary measures to communicate her intention merely
to inform; she has a responsibility to exercise extraordinary care in this
matter, perhaps even to recognize that in such circumstances there is no
possibility for her merely to inform without threatening, or at least with-
out being widely understood as threatening. Not every speech act is
available under every circumstance.
There are many other situations—for example, as an expert witness in
the courtroom, or when electioneering—in which the speaker’s respon-
sibility is not limited to incurring only those commitments she is com-
petent to fulfil. In such situations speakers also have responsibilities to
communicate clearly, to avoid misunderstandings and unwanted impli-
catures in terms of both force and content, to ensure that others have an
accurate grasp of what commitments she has incurred. Sometimes in
such heightened circumstances there is no way for a speaker to ask an
‘innocent question’ or merely to speculate; one form of disingenuousness
 6.3 Obstacles to Grasping Our Competence 131

is to insist on the non-committal nature of one’s words when one knows

how easily they can be misconstrued.

6.3 Responding to Obstacles to Grasping

Our Competence

When we are struggling to avoid new commitments we are not competent

to fulfil, we can focus on avoiding commitments, as I explored in the
previous section. Alternatively or additionally, we can try to become
more competent, or at least become more knowledgeable about our
strengths and weaknesses. We can try to become more competent by
developing skills, knowledge, and resources. But recall that I have
pinned competence to the circumstances of action: to fulfil a certain
commitment, one needs to be competent to act successfully wherever,
whenever, and however that commitment calls for action. So another
way of attempting to improve one’s competence is by adjusting the
circumstances in which one will need to act, in the hope of creating a
situation in which one is capable of acting successfully.
This will mean different things for different people, depending on the
resources they have available and the types of unwanted or uncertain
commitment they are liable to incur. But it will often mean avoiding
risks, avoiding situations which overstretch one’s capabilities, and trying
to stay close to existing networks of support. This can feel like a positive
integration into the community. But it is also a way in which perceived
lack of control over one’s commitments, together with a potential high
penalty for untrustworthiness, push us to stay close to home, both
literally and metaphorically.
Managing the circumstances in which you will need to act can
sometimes mean managing other commitments. For example, suppose
that you know how difficult it is for you to avoid unwanted commitments,
yet you want to retain the capacity to fulfil such commitments if you do
end up landed with them. One strategy is to decline as many commitments
as you can, even commitments which you would value, and which you
could comfortably fulfil so long as nothing else came up. That way you
keep yourself relatively flexible, in order to try to cope with those com-
mitments you cannot avoid. For example, if you have a demanding boss,
132 Consequences

and know you will be unable to turn down ‘requests’ for late working,
then you may choose not to make social arrangements with friends and
family, so that you don’t end up having to let them down when new
work commitments are imposed upon you. This sort of behaviour may
seem especially puzzling to onlookers who don’t realize your vulner-
ability to your boss: your efforts to remain trustworthy look like a
self-centred unwillingness to socialize.
Looking beyond the strategy of becoming more competent, what
about trying to become more knowledgeable of one’s existing competence?
We can try to reduce the relevant uncertainties. For example, we may
pursue cautious enquiry, attempting to make things more explicit,
investigating and questioning before we take on new commitments;
such investigation may be directed towards the expectations of the
person asking us to take on a commitment, towards the circumstances
in which we will need to act, or towards our own strengths and weak-
nesses. The more successful we are in such enquiries, the more we will
understand what we may be undertaking to do, and the more we
will understand our chances of being able to fulfil such a commitment.
This kind of caution is not cost-free. In itself it uses up time, energy,
and other resources; by assumption this challenge often affects people
who don’t have a lot of time, energy, or resources to spare. But in
addition such caution can either improve or damage our image in
the  eyes of people around us. Careful examination and weighing of
potential commitments may be seen—often rightly—as a sign of
trustworthiness, of being the kind of person who takes commitments
seriously and is anxious not to incur debts that cannot be repaid. On
the other hand, if this is read as ostentatious or excessive caution it
can prompt impatience in those around us, who wish we’d just make
up our minds.
To some extent, different reactions to such caution may be linked to
disagreements about what I earlier called ‘meta-commitments’. In the
context of an ongoing relationship, whether professional or personal,
one person may view another as having already committed to taking on
new commitments, to accepting new requests or tasks, for example. If
that’s the expectation, then overscrupulousness about new commit-
ments can itself be seen as a form of untrustworthiness, a violation of
previous commitment.
 6.3 Obstacles to Grasping Our Competence 133

In our wider lives, we can afford to take different attitudes to different

people: you’d like an accountant, an electrician, or a car mechanic to be
cautious, whilst that’s not necessarily what you want from the assistant at
the local shop, the restaurant waiter, or indeed your friends. Different
people may want different things from their doctors, whether that be
caution or quick reassurance; likewise we are sometimes conflicted about
what we want from the politicians who are supposed to represent us.
A different tactic for trying to reduce uncertainty about future capacity
to act involves attempting to stabilize one’s circumstances. Stable cir-
cumstances do not necessarily make it easier to act, but they at least
make us more knowledgeable about whether we will be able to act.
There are situations in which we might be forced to choose just one of
these. That is, we may need to choose between stabilizing a situation in
such a way that it makes it foreseeably difficult for us to act, or instead
allowing less stability but with the possibility of easier action. This is yet
another way in which the pursuit of trustworthiness can conflict with
other goals. Stable situations make it easier for us to be trustworthy (we
can know what we will and won’t be able to do), but unstable situations
leave open at least the possibility that we will be able to act as we would
like to do.
In many ways, the discussion here echoes my discussion in earlier
sections of this chapter. Our responses to lack of control over commit-
ments and our responses to lack of insight into our competence overlap
and interact. This is because in both cases the most cautious response is
to try to avoid becoming committed in the first place. Where we act
cautiously in regard of commitment, either because we know we will
find it difficult to fulfil a commitment or because we are unclear what we
will manage, then we pay a price both in terms of sacrificing our own
personal goals and in terms of our public reputation.
How might any of these strategies be misinterpreted? Where others
do not realize that we lack competence for certain tasks—perhaps
because they don’t realize how few resources we have, how many other
demands we encounter, or the precariousness of our health—they may
fail to understand why we are turning down commitments we could
fulfil, or why we are being so cautious about throwing ourselves into
new circumstances of action. Moreover, if others don’t realize how
difficult it is for us to know what we are capable of—for example because
134 Consequences

they don’t know what evidence is available to us, or because they don’t
appreciate our lack of self-confidence—then they may struggle to
understand other aspects of our behaviour.
We use these strategies in an attempt to preserve our trustworthiness,
and our reputation for trustworthiness. But they are easily misunder-
stood by people who think we could preserve our trustworthiness
without taking these measures; such misunderstanding can lead them to
reach for other, less flattering explanations of our behaviour.

6.4 Retrospective Perspectives

I turn now to situations in which we are trying to act in the light of

whatever existing commitments we have. In chapter 5 I briefly discussed
difficulties in knowing what commitments we already have, and diffi-
culties in acting appropriately. How can we respond when we are unclear
about what commitments we have already incurred? In a narrow sense,
it is always safer to bring my actions in line with a ‘commitment’ I think
I might have incurred. After all, trustworthiness does not require us to
avoid actions we have not undertaken to do: we are free to act beyond
our commitments. But there is always a risk of becoming untrustworthy
by failing to do something I have in fact committed to doing.
This strategy of trying to accommodate all epistemically possible
commitments cannot be turned into a viable general policy, for two
types of reason. First, my various for-all-I-know commitments may
demand conflicting actions, and so there may be no way of living up to
all of these ‘commitments’. These sorts of conflicts can arise even with
genuine commitments, even for people who are scrupulously careful
about what they take on: it is not always feasible to predict whether
different commitments will make incompatible demands upon us. But
the more difficult it is to know whether one has a commitment, the more
likely that it is impossible to accommodate all epistemically possible
commitments.
Second, trying to live by my for-all-I-know commitments even where
these do not conflict will make it difficult for me to pursue other goals
and values, including personal relationships, and to follow other-oriented
impulses to generosity, or spontaneity. Imagine what it would be like to
 6.4 Retrospective Perspectives 135

live this way: like having a manipulative boss or emotionally abusive

partner, someone who imposes upon you by leaving you uncertain
what you are supposed to do, yet sure of being penalized if you don’t
do the ‘right’ thing. We cannot be required to impose this kind of
stress upon ourselves.
None of us can avoid all risk of becoming somewhat untrustworthy,
because we all have some uncertainty about what we have committed to
doing, and it is not feasible to accommodate this uncertainty by doing
things ‘just in case’. However the severity of this risk depends upon
several factors. It matters how many obstacles there are to knowing our
commitments, for example how difficult it is for us to understand our
local social environment. It matters what penalties there are for having
unfulfilled commitment. And it matters what skills, time, and resources
we have available to try to act ‘just in case’.
How does this look to other people? If it seems clear to other people
that we know what our commitments are, then of course they will regard
us as knowingly violating trust when we do not act in line with those
commitments. And there are lots of reasons why other people’s ignorance
of our circumstances, and of the significance of our circumstances,
makes it hard for them to appreciate that we may not know what our
commitments are. For example, people who have never lived outside of
their original class background, or national culture, or local neighbour-
hood, may underestimate how hard it is for other people to acclimatise
when entering that situation. It is easy to underestimate the ways in
which newcomers may be mystified about what is expected.
If we find it difficult to know what commitments other people will
take us to have, then we need to be extra cautious if we want to develop
a reputation for trustworthiness. But other people may not realize that
this is the reason for our caution, generating resentments of different
kinds. Such misunderstandings are more likely to occur when people
from different cultures or backgrounds meet. Controversial empirical
studies of levels of ‘generalized trust’ in multicultural neighbourhoods
have suggested that trust levels in such areas are low. One potential
explanation of this finding is that levels of generalized trust are lower in
lower-income areas; the less you have, the less you can afford to take
risks in trusting other people, and when you know that other people
have little, you may well think that they cannot afford to be trustworthy
136 Consequences

at their own expense. However a complementary factor may be mutual

misunderstandings, or differences of opinion, about what actions and
behaviours trustworthiness requires. This may be as mundane as expect-
ations about what to do with household rubbish, noise levels at different
times of the day, or responsibilities to children out playing in the street.
I argued in section 6.1 that conceptual connections between trust-
worthiness, commitment, and competence support inferences between
these three. Sympathetic observers who mistakenly think that we know
what our commitments are may assume that we are incompetent if we
do not act as those supposed commitments require. After all, the alter-
native is for them to regard us as intentionally violating trust. This is
true when others don’t appreciate our difficulties in understanding what
commitments we have, and it is also true when others don’t realize how
hard it is for us to act in the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

6.5 Testimony and Testimonials

Throughout this book I have treated speech as a special case of action:

being trustworthy as an informant is a special case of being trustworthy
as a practical agent. This builds upon a picture of assertion as involving
commitment to speak truthfully (chapter 3). I have drawn on examples
from speech as well as other types of action in discussing the demands
which trustworthiness places upon us, the practical obstacles we
encounter, and the tricky choices we must sometimes make in the face
of those obstacles. In my view, this integrated treatment helps us towards
a better understanding of a range of philosophical issues arising both
from testimony and from other practical actions, whether or not the
reader agrees with me on the details of that understanding.
How does this project relate to philosophical work which is focused
more narrowly on testimony? I see my work as complementing and
extending that literature, rather than attempting to replace or undermine
it, since there are some significant issues which I have not tried to
address. In particular, I have neglected a key question which motivates
much literature on the epistemology of testimony: under what circum-
stances can we gain new knowledge from what other people say? This is
in part because I have mostly taken up the perspective of someone
 6.5 Testimony and Testimonials 137

attempting to be trustworthy, rather than that of someone seeking to

assess others’ trustworthiness. But it is also because there is no
straightforward route from an account of trustworthiness to an account
of testimonial knowledge-acquisition. In my view, encountering a trust-
worthy speaker is neither necessary or sufficient for learning something
via testimony, although I will not try to vindicate that claim here.
A pragmatic disadvantage of my approach to this project is that it has
obscured the ways in which my themes articulate with the work of some
creative and significant philosophers who focus more specifically on
injustice in the context of speech, assertion, and testimony. Yet the ideas
of Miranda Fricker, Kristie Dotson, Rebecca Kukla, and their interlocutors
have preoccupied me during the thinking and writing of my later
chapters especially. In various ways, I have been trying to adapt and
extend their insights so as to accommodate practical action more
generally. So in this final section I will bring a few connections and con-
trasts to the surface, thereby gesturing towards an acknowledgement of
these influences.
Much recent discussion of errors in trust or distrust has been framed
by Fricker’s very fruitful writings on epistemic injustice and the role of
prejudices about social identities in generating such errors (2007).
Fricker’s main concern is situations in which we underestimate other
people’s expertise or honesty due to our systematic identity prejudices.
I have mentioned a number of examples where identity prejudice and
stereotyping generate obstacles to trustworthiness or, at least, obstacles
to being perceived as trustworthy. But I have treated such prejudice as
just one source of obstacles amongst many, and have not focused on ethical
or epistemic faults as opposed to blameless use of stereotypes. In prac-
tical terms, when attempting both to be trustworthy and to maintain a
reputation for trustworthiness, we need to anticipate and accommodate
such reactions from others, regardless of their normative status.
For Fricker, it is important that such cases can involve distinctively
epistemic harm, where someone is harmed in their capacity as a knower.
There is a loose sense in which I too have been concerned with epistemic
harms, since I have discussed cases in which people’s knowledge and
competence are unfairly underestimated, and harms are associated with
that. But these have not been a special focus for me, and I have also
emphasized that we can easily underestimate how difficult it is for
138 Consequences

anyone to be competent enough to successfully act in a given situation.

This is a consequence of the decision to understand and individuate
competence in such a way that, for example, getting kids to school on
time in the face of major challenges requires much greater competence
than getting kids to school on time when life is straightforward. When
outsiders judge someone who lives in difficult circumstances, they may
correctly assess her as lacking the competences she requires—but they
fail to appreciate just how much competence is required to succeed
against such odds.
I have argued elsewhere (Hawley 2011) that the framework of epistemic
harms does not easily accommodate the reality of systematic identity-
based underestimations of other people’s practical competence, as
opposed to their testimonial worth. Given my concern to unify treat-
ments of the practical and testimonial spheres, I have sought to find
ways of discussing phenomena related to epistemic injustice without
committing to this particular framework. Compared to Fricker, I am
also more concerned to retain conceptual space between being a knower
and being recognized as a knower, much as I tried to retain conceptual
space between being trustworthy and being regarded as trustworthy. Of
course, not being taken seriously as a knower can be enormously
damaging, perhaps especially when this flows from systematic prejudice.
But often when we suffer from testimonial injustice one reason this is
unfair is that we really do know what we are talking about.
So in various ways I depart from Fricker’s theoretical framework.
Despite this, the phenomena she discusses provide key examples of
situations in which trustworthiness becomes difficult to manage and
communicate, and in which the social stakes are high. Importantly, the
accessibility, influence, and impact of Fricker’s book has made it
immeasurably easier to pursue this sort of project as philosophy without
flagrantly violating disciplinary norms.
Kristie Dotson’s rich work on types of silencing has also expanded the
range of phenomena which now seem amenable to ‘respectable’ philo-
sophical exploration. Moreover she demonstrates the importance of
black feminists’ varied discussions of testimony and of obstacles to
testimonial exchange; thus she widens intellectual horizons for most of
her philosophical readers. For my own purposes, Dotson’s theorization
of ‘testimonial smothering’ has been especially suggestive, although her
 6.5 Testimony and Testimonials 139

treatment of ‘testimonial quieting’ is also relevant (Dotson 2011).

Testimonial smothering can occur when a potential speaker decides to
withhold her testimony, in anticipation of a poor audience response.
More specifically, Dotson focuses on situations in which the content of
what could be said is unsafe or risky, for example because it is personally
or politically sensitive, or not routinely voiced by ‘someone like that’.
Such speech makes demands on its audience, which may or may not be
competent to receive such testimony; an incompetent reception could
involve puzzled misunderstanding or resentful rejection, for example.
When the audience’s incompetence is due to its own pernicious ignorance,
and a potential speaker avoids testifying because of this, then we have a
case of testimonial smothering.
Although I do not use every element of Dotson’s analysis, her insights
have informed my discussions of social obstacles to trustworthiness and
to appearing trustworthy, and in particular the ways in which a difficult
situation can generate some hard choices between the pursuit of
trustworthiness and other important goals or values. Someone who
faces a testimonially incompetent audience—especially where it is
perniciously ignorant in Dotson’s sense—knows that her attempts to
make her commitment precise or else to avoid commitment altogether
will likely be misconstrued, perhaps with consequences for her physical
or social safety. Retreating to silence, or to polite murmurings, may be
the safest option and the one most likely to be counted as trustworthy.
But silence closes off other important possibilities, including the possi-
bility of proving one’s trustworthiness to people who depend upon us;
where we already have a meta-commitment to speaking out, an incom-
petent audience may leave us with no trustworthy course of action, since
neither speaking nor remaining silent can fulfil our responsibilities.
In chapter 4, I touched upon the idea that engaging in conversation
generates some kind of meta-commitment to continue an exchange, to
cooperate in taking on new commitments as appropriate. Where the
interlocutor’s testimonial incompetence becomes evident only as conver-
sation progresses, this places the speaker in an especially difficult situ-
ation: unable easily to cut the conversation short yet unable to say what
would truly be appropriate, were the audience able to receive it properly.
Finally, Kukla  (2014) at one point provided the framework for an
entire chapter of the present book, before I reluctantly realized, with the
140 Consequences

assistance of Heal (2013), that this did not play nicely with my overall
approach. Nevertheless, the traces of Kukla’s arguments and examples
lie just below the surface at various points. And, like Fricker and Dotson,
she demonstrates how philosophical concepts and distinctions can
illuminate untidy but vitally important practical situations.
Kukla is concerned with the interplay of social power and the force of
speech acts. She takes a speech act to be something which requires
substantive contribution from both speaker and audience: a speaker’s
intentions are insufficient to determine the force of what she says, even
when those intentions are recognized. Thus people sometimes try but
fail to commit themselves through speech because of their social context,
not least because of their social identities.
In one of Kukla’s fascinating examples, a woman manager works in a
male-dominated environment: she issues orders to her team using
phrasing which would mark them as orders if given by a man in that
context. Nevertheless, because of the unfamiliarity of female authority
in this environment, the woman’s utterances are heard as mere requests
rather than as orders. They get relatively low compliance, which rein-
forces the idea that the woman lacks authority. Moreover because the
woman does not see herself as merely making requests, she does not
display gratitude when the workers do comply, and so they resent her
for this ingratitude. There is no easy way out of this difficulty for the
woman manager: if she further emphasizes that she is giving orders,
she will be further resented, and if she displays gratitude, this reinforces
the idea that she is merely making requests which the workers are free to
grant or deny. (Recall the situation of an employer speaking to striking
workers, discussed in section 6.2.)
On this picture, an audience can quash the speaker’s intended force,
or transform it into a different, unintended force. If I intend to assert,
yet others hear me as merely questioning, then I am questioning.
Moreover we can extend the picture to understand how people may end
up more committed than they would like to be, rather than less commit-
ted. For example, in a committee setting, suggesting that something
should be done may be treated as offering to do that thing, especially if
the speaker is already regarded as being the kind of person who takes on
such tasks. If such a person makes a suggestion (as she sees it) then fails
to follow through with action, this will be seen as untrustworthy
 6.5 Testimony and Testimonials 141

behaviour, because others understand her not merely to be suggesting a

course of action but as committing to make it happen.
In my terms, Kukla is offering a picture according to which incurring
commitment depends upon audience reaction and behaviour, so speakers
often lack control over what commitments they incur. Such speakers
lack control over the ways in which they become proper objects of
others’ trust and distrust, over what trustworthiness requires them to
do. In the best-case scenario, they can detect these unwanted commit-
ments and fulfil them, behaving as a trustworthy person does,
although at some cost to themselves. But in the worst case, they either
lack insight into their normative situation or lack the competence to
fulfil these commitments, so are rendered untrustworthy despite their
best intentions.
For better or for worse, I have held open more conceptual space
between being (un)trustworthy and being regarded as (un)trustworthy,
and correspondingly between incurring a commitment and being
regarded as having incurred a commitment. But we can retain our grip
on why Kukla’s focus and examples are important, without accepting
that her account of commitment-through-language is the right match
for thinking about trustworthiness. We can say instead that speakers are
often taken to have commitments which they do not really have, or to
lack commitments which they do really have. And, depending on the
circumstances, speakers either possess or lack insight into what other
people take them to be committed to. A novice entering a new, diffi-
cult situation may not realize how systematically she can be misun-
derstood. Meanwhile, old hands may have found ways of anticipating
potential misunderstandings, working around them to the extent that
this is possible.
In different ways, I have approached these three authors through the
conceptual connections between commitment, trustworthiness, and
success in action (including truth in assertive speech). These connec-
tions inform the judgements and inferences we make about other
people—accurately or inaccurately, sequentially or holistically—especially
when they behave or speak in ways we find surprising. Where prejudice,
pernicious ignorance, or imbalances of social power influence what we
think about someone’s commitment, her trustworthiness, or her action,
this influence will spread to our other judgements. Moreover, we are all
142 Consequences

also on the receiving end of such judgements from other people,

although some of us are more vulnerable to this than are others.
Explicitly or not, we are aware of the dangers when we think about how
to act, speak, and commit in the world, in situations where others will
form opinions about us.
It’s not easy to be trustworthy. But it can be made easier when the
people around us are aware of the obstacles we encounter, and the diffi-
cult choices we face. In our turn, we can make it easier for other people
to be trustworthy by taking care over the ways in which we judge their
behaviour and speech.

Additional Sources

6.1 How We See Each Other. Marsh (2011) discusses our duties to trust
one another, whilst Oderberg (2013) argues that we should err on the
side of over-estimating others’ reputations rather than underestimating
them. I explore some related issues in Hawley (2014b). D’Cruz (2015)
draws out the connections between trust, trustworthiness, and consist-
ency of character. Other valuable work in this broader area includes
Gambetta  (2011), Jones  (2012), Medina  (2013), Origgi  (2017), and
Williams (2002).
6.2 Responding to Limited Control of Our Commitments. Sources
listed for section 5.1 are relevant here.
6.3 Responding to Obstacles to Grasping Our Competence. Sources
listed for section 5.2 are relevant here.
6.4 Retrospective Perspectives. Sources listed for section  5.1 are rele-
vant here.
6.5 Testimony and Testimonials. I draw more explicit connections
between trust, distrust and epistemic injustice in my (2017a). Peet (2015)
provides another perspective on what can go wrong with speech, whilst
both Kukla and Dotson trace links to work such as Langton  (1992),
Hornsby (1994), and Hornsby and Langton (1998). The papers collected
within Maitra and McGowan (eds) (2012) are also significant.
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