Many of us rely heavily on our smartphones and computers. But does it make sense to say we “trust” them? On today’s episode of Examining Ethics, the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen explores the relationship of trust we form with the things we use. We not only can trust non-human objects like smartphones, we tend to trust those objects in an unquestioning way; we’re not thinking about it all that much. While this unquestioning trust makes our everyday lives easier, we don’t recognize just how vulnerable we’re making ourselves to large and increasingly powerful corporations.

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Shownotes

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A Different Way of Thinking about Trust with C. Thi Nguyen

Christiane Wisehart, host and producer: I’m Christiane Wisehart. And this is Examining Ethics, brought to you by The Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University.

[music: Blue Dot Sessions, The Big Ten]

Christiane: Many of us rely heavily on our smartphones and computers. But does it make sense to say we “trust” them? On today’s episode of Examining Ethics, the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen explores the relationship of trust we form with the things we use. 

C. Thi Nguyen: I trust Google Search like I trust my memory and my own internal attentional systems. Trust is a way of welding open pipelines from the outside world, into your own brain and thinking and action. It’s a way to try to integrate things into yourself. When something is part of yourself, you don’t carefully question each of its deliverances, you just trust your memory. You just trust your eyes. If we’re too gullible about this kind of trust. What it is to trust in this case, it’s to too-eagerly weld things into your brain and self without thinking about it and without worrying about what that means.

Christiane: Stay tuned for our discussion on today’s episode of Examining Ethics.

[music fades out]

Christiane: Many philosophers write about trust as something that we consciously direct only toward other people. So I can carefully think about and choose to trust or not trust a new friend or a colleague.

My guest today, the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, explains that there’s another way we trust. We not only can trust non-human objects like smartphones, we tend to trust those objects in an unquestioning way; we’re not thinking about it all that much. That makes sense, because if I had to think through whether or not I trusted Google docs every time I used, I’d never get any work done. (And you wouldn’t be listening to this show!) 

The problem, though, is that while this unquestioning trust makes our everyday lives easier, we don’t recognize just how vulnerable we’re making ourselves. We’re putting ourselves at the mercy of large and increasingly powerful corporations.

[interview begins]

Christiane: Most people understand trust to be a conscious attitude that we have toward people, toward other people. So how is your account of trust different from this common understanding? 

C. Thi Nguyen: In general, the history of philosophy about trust, which is surprisingly thin. I mean, people have been talking about it since the ’80s and ’90s, but there’s been surprisingly little conversation about trust. The conversation about trust has started talking about moral relationships, and it always wants to talk about how we relate to other people in society and a lot of the conversation says something like, what you trust is you trust that something has goodwill or cares for you. 

I got really interested in the fact that we trust other stuff too. I feel like I deeply trust the calendar on my computer, and I deeply trust the Google Docs that I use to share information with my collaborators. I trust them in such a profound way that I don’t even realize it. So I wanted to talk about what it was to trust in such a way, what that special relationship was. My theory in general is that when you trust something, you take on a specific attitude towards it, an unquestioning attitude. You stop thinking about it. You can walk on the ground with suspicion, or you can walk on the ground in a mode of trust. When you’re trusting it, you’re not really thinking about it. That’s the thing I’m most interested in, our dependence relationships in the world in which we just use it, depend on it, put our lives in the hands of something without even thinking about it.

I remember I was teaching this stuff in class, and one of my students, he was like big dude, very bro. He was like, “Look, man, I never trust anything. I’m my own man. I’ve never trusted anybody else.” And then I just paused. I was like, “Okay, I went you to think of yourself. Did you drive to school?” And he was like, “Yeah.” I said, “Okay, you came here on the highway.” He’s like, “Yeah.” I was like, “How many people did you trust with your life in your 30 minute commute to school? I just want to think not just drivers, but also mechanics for brake lines.” I just watched him melt down in the class. This is the thing that I’m really interested in. This kind of trust is often so subconscious, so we don’t realize how many objects, people, artifacts, bits of the world we’re putting profound trust in, including in our lives without even thinking about it. It just recedes to the background.

Christiane: In your account of trust, the fact that you don’t have to think about it too much is a key part of it. We’re not talking about the kind of trust where we sit and think about it for a long time, and we revisit it every once in a while, and we think about it most of the time. The unquestioning part is important, right?

C. Thi Nguyen: Well, it’s a little bit subtle because there are two things you could talk about. There’s the question of whether or not you ever decided to trust something, and then the second question of what it is to trust something, to be in throes of it. I want to separate those. So I think it’s really important to acknowledge two things. One is a lot of the trust we’ve come to, we’ve never thought about it. It’s automatic. It’s background. We’ve never even realized we trust. I think a lot of people are like this with cars, actually. The other thing to think about is there are some things that we decided to trust, but once we decided, what happens is that our trust recedes to the background.

So a lot of my thinking about trust comes from this amazing paper from Annette Baier who starts the conversation about trust and philosophy. The paper’s called “Trust and Antitrust.” If anyone is interested in this space at all, that’s the paper you should read. She stages it as a criticism of social contract theory, because she says, “Look, Rousseau and all this political theory that’s based on the idea of the government is a social contract where free beings voluntarily decide to cooperate with each other.” She says, she actually says in the paper, “That’s something that only rich gentlemen sitting in a gentlemen’s club could ever imagine was the foundation for morality.”

She says, “Morality starts in vulnerability. It starts in children being taken care of parents. It starts in powerlessness, in relationships.” The background theory for her is that what it is to trust is to make yourself vulnerable to somebody, to put some part of yourself into their safe keeping. For her, we trust without realizing that we’ve trusted. One of the primal forms of trust that she wants to talk about is a child taking food from its parent. Now my kid is five. He doesn’t quite trust me perfectly, but for a long time, I give him something in his spoon and he just puts it in his mouth, right? That’s not philosophical. That’s not articulated. The essential relationship we start in this world often is trusting certain other people.

I mean, it’s kind of funny, because a lot of philosophy wants to stage it as the basic primal attitude is distrust, and then you have to decide to trust people, but actually the way she spins it and the way some other philosophers like Tyler Burge spin it, is no. The only way you can start life is by trusting other people, by trusting the objects around you, by trusting what people tell you, and then you need a reason to distrust. So the first background thought is that for Annette Baier, we often start with such profound trust that we haven’t articulated it to ourselves. That’s one thing, how trust is undecided. Another thing, and this is what I’m focused on, is actually the fact that trust is an attitude of unquestioningness, and you might have decided that in the background.

Let me give you an example. I’m a climber, and I got to a lot of this thinking about learning to climb, because there’s a really complicated thing you do as a climber of