All in the game Hollis, Martin
Trust Within Reason,
03/1998
Book Chapter
The problem of trust lies in what Kant termed ‘man's asocial sociality’. If we were wholly asocial, there would be no trust; if wholly social, no problem. Since we have both elements, however, we ...need to decide how elastic to make the bond of society. Is it one which adapts to who we are and where we belong? This would be a plausible answer if the question were solely one of who does in practice trust whom. But it is not an answer within reason to an Enlightenment question of who merits trust. That may yet turn out to be a moral question requiring the moral answer that only those who act uprightly should be trusted. But, if this implies a Kantian moral point of view, its universalising character is double-edged. It shows how trustworthy persons can overcome the perils of prudence and reach The Triumph of Reason. But it does so by making each so unconditionally moral that progress along the trail does not depend on trust at all. Hence it neither captures the conditional character of everyday trust nor lets us ask which social relations generate trust-within-reason.Reason grants that one can find many examples of trust, as in honour among thieves, teamwork among terrorists and a shared sense of mission among missionaries. It does not grant that these are all examples of trust-within-reason, however, and we need to know which, if any, it approves. To ask, we must explore the idea that we are more embedded in social relations than modern individualists usually allow.
In Condorcet's vision, the moral and political sciences will advance partly by learning more of how human beings tick and partly by developing a technical and precise ‘social mathematics’. The unity ...of this enterprise depends on human nature and social mathematics being made for one another – an assumption challenged by the problem of trust. His current heirs commonly put their faith in a theory of expected utility, which encapsulates a schematic, universal account of human nature in a way suited to a theory of rational choice, including game theory, in all its elegant technicality and precision. For the purposes of this book, that means being clear what is involved, when prudence bids us make strategic choices as game theory recommends. The last chapter left some loose ends by being vague about the notion of utility and so about instrumental rationality. This one will tidy up by defining these notions more exactly and relating them to the assumptions of game theory. Whether prudence can advise us to be trustworthy depends in part on the game-theoretic implications of being prudent. Meanwhile, we are still looking for a defensible definition of reason which makes it rational to trust rational people.Let us start with the idea of instrumental rationality. The broad idea so far has been that action is the product of the agent's beliefs and desires, and is directed to securing what the agent most wants, all things considered. Practical reasoning arrives at a rational choice of an action, or course of action, by comparing alternatives to see how completely they are likely to secure what the agent wants.
Impartiality looks likely to help Adam and Eve on their way, since it detaches each from their own point of view. Yet it cannot simply be the detachment which gets Adam to think of all his states or ...selves, rather than those of the immediate moment, since his need to arbitrate between his earlier and later ones is unpuzzlingly for his own benefit. How he chooses among his present, earlier and later selves and whether he is to be identified with one, all or none of them are interesting questions. But, while nothing normative intrudes on the predictions of his present self about the actions of a later one, there is still a difference between two Adams and the relation of Adam to Eve. With Adam and Eve to think about and trust at issue, impartiality turns trickier. Although they have become more complex since the start, being by now two-tier agents able to reflect that their preferences are interfering with their interests, they need something more before they can rule against themselves and trust one another.Yet we seem to have dealt them some useful cards, if only they could play them. What is stopping them? Part of the answer, I think, is that for Adam alone there is finally only one point of view, whereas for Adam and Eve there are three: his, hers and theirs. Given the strong assumption of individualism, however, ‘theirs’ is an amalgam of his and hers, and impartiality is, in effect, anonymity between individuals – a device for disregarding who in particular gets what in a distribution of utilities.
John Locke declared trust to be ‘the bond of society’, the vinculum societatis, and we need not doubt him. Everyday life is a catalogue of success in the exercise of trust. Our dealings with friends ...and enemies, neighbours and strangers depend on it, whether in homes, streets, markets, seats of government or other arenas of civil society. Would you ask a stranger the time unless you could normally count on a true answer? Could you use the highway without trusting other drivers? Could an economy progress beyond barter, or a society beyond mud huts, unless people relied on one another to keep their promises? Without trust, social life would be impossible and there would be no philosophers to try casting the light of reason upon it.But, although trust is an obvious fact of life, it is an exasperating one. Like the flight of the bumblebee or a cure for hiccoughs, it works in practice but not in theory. When we think about it, the obvious fact that, on the whole, we manage to live together in mutual confidence turns mysterious. In Essays on the Law of Nature, Locke accounted for trust by invoking a divinely ordained ‘rule of morals or law of nature’, which makes us trustworthy when we are acting in conformity with it. This ordinance, discernible through sense experience by the light of nature and binding on us, lets us see what does and does not accord with our rational nature. In the more famous Essay Concerning Human Understanding he made it a matter of appeal to nature without recourse to God's will.
Progress along the Enlightenment Trail depends on relating Adam and Eve in a way which satisfies the demands of teamwork and which liberals can accept. Since these conditions still threaten to ...conflict, the trail remains difficult. I shall open the final attempt by thinking about reciprocity and a contrast begun in chapter 6. One idea of it is initially bilateral and, although extendable to a wider circle, retains the idea that debts and obligations must be to the overall benefit of the persons acquiring them. The other is a generalised reciprocity, whose form is that, because A has hurt or helped B, C owes something to D. The conflict springs from trying to read this both universally and locally. Either way corrects the bilateral version but one requires the self to be abstracted and the other embedded. This emerges when the motives of blood donors are considered with the aid of John Rawls' idea of reciprocity, and will lead us to another such idea, one which involves what Rousseau termed ‘a remarkable change in man’. The aim is to make sense of a final hope that citizens in a local community can also be citizens of the world. To achieve it, we must also challenge Condorcet's typical Enlightenment notion of the political and moral sciences, however, before we can hope for a positively free world order. That gives liberals much to fight over as well as for, and the book ends speculatively in recommending trust in the light of reason.reciprocityAmong mutual back-scratchers, reciprocity is at heart bilateral: you scratch my back and I scratch yours; if you scratched mine yesterday, I owe you one today.
The bond of society Hollis, Martin
Trust Within Reason,
03/1998
Book Chapter
The crux remains how Adam can resist the lure of The Extra Trick and how both Hume's farmers are to get their harvests in. The problem arose initially because prudence addressed Adam in a language of ...forward-looking reasons, concerned solely with what would secure better consequences for him, as measured by his preferences over the possible outcomes. It advised him to take The Extra Trick if given the chance. But it also advised the equally rational Eve not to give him the chance, whether or not they had made an agreement; and, since both knew it, the trail ended sadly at The Rational Choice. Similarly, prudence told the second farmer to defect and told the first farmer to expect a defection. So they both lost their harvests ‘for want of mutual confidence and security’. Trust had become rationally impossible. The point could be blunted by embodying a one-shot game in a series or by letting third parties know how these players had behaved for future reference. But it could not be so thoroughly overcome that cooperation became the basic form of social action, while prudence remained the governing idea. So, if prudence, speaking a language of homogenised utility and forward-looking reasons, is the voice of reason itself, then there is no trust within reason and critics will be right to say that the progress of Enlightenment destroys the bond of society.Since then, we have tried complicating the character of a rational agent so that prudence can recommend indirect strategies. But neither a two-tiered preference structure nor a disposition to play fair with those who play fair could overcome the lure of a better bargain.
Hume's farmers are still about to lose both their harvests for want of mutual confidence and security. Although greater sympathy for one another might help, Hume is clear that sympathy is not enough. ...The problem set by our natural partiality is not solved by pointing out that we are often partial to our neighbours as well as to our friends. It is set by our natural inability to be impartial. To let us rise above this inconvenience of human nature and so overcome the perils of prudence, he therefore gives practical reason a twist.He makes his move while discussing the origins of property and justice. Our natural sympathy and generosity are too limited to overcome the scanty provision which nature has made for our wants, he remarks, and too partial to ourselves to underpin the secure social framework needed if the benefits of cooperation are not to elude us. Hence all viable societies provide rules which secure ownership and an impersonal scheme of duties. These rules are artificial. In the Enquiry he notes the sheer variety of them in different societies and argues that, since the sentiments inherent in our universal human nature cannot account for it, the rules must be credited to reason and custom. In the Treatise he contends that our natural ideas of morality, far from counteracting our natural partiality, serve to reinforce it. Hence justice, which enjoins impartiality, is an artificial virtue and the remedy which it offers is an artificial remedy:The remedy, then, is not derived from nature, but from artifice, or, more properly speaking, nature provides a remedy, in the judgement and understanding, for what is irregular and incommodious in the affections.
