Our climate of suspicion
Hugh Laws on-Tancred
A QUESTION OF TRUST by Onora O'Neill CUP, 125 (19.95, paperback), pp. 108, ISBN 0521823048 (0521529964 paperback) AUTONOMY AND TRUST IN BIOETHICS by Onora O'Neill CUP, £40 (E14.95 paperback), pp. 228, ISBN 0521815401 (0521894530 paperback) You are shown four cards with a letter and a figure on each side from the following range: 0, F, 3 and 7. You are told that if a card has a D on one side it will have a 3 on the other. Which card or cards do you turn over to confirm that this is the case?
No, the answer is not D and 3, but D and 7. A 7 with a D would be a fatal counterinstance to the rule, whereas a 3 with or without a D would be entirely irrelevant. The fact that 90 per cent of respondents would opt for D and 3 suggests that we do not behave as Karl Popper recommends that we should and look for disconfirmation of our established assumptions. We prefer to conserve our opinions rather than change them, if we can.
However, our natural scientific rigour increases dramatically when there is any possibility of a behavioural rule being broken, in a word of cheating. If you want to check that only over-18s are drinking alcohol in your bar, do you check the beerdrinker, the Coke-drinker, the 25-year-old or the 16-year-old? Exactly the same problem, but this time the normal success rate is 100 per cent not 10 per cent.
We seem, then, to have an inborn propensity to detect cheats. We are constantly on the look-out for free-loaders, scroungers, those trying to get something for nothing and by extension conmen, spin doctors and generally anyone who may be trying to pull the wool over our eyes.
Is this an inevitable aspect of human nature, or might it fail to apply in some Rousseauesque past or Utopian future? The cottage industry that has grown up around the Prisoner's Dilemma, the branch of games theory which deals with the situation that what is rational for me to do depends on what is rational for you to do which in turn depends on what is rational for me to do, suggests that a certain scepticism about the trustworthiness of others is the reasonable default strategy for coping with human society.
That being so, it would hardly be surprising if the standard 'climate of suspicion' had hardened in the Age of Byers into something rather more wintry. But is it appropriate to speak of a full-blown crisis of trust? This is the question that Onora O'Neill has addressed in two stimulating sets of popular lectures in the last two years. In her Gifford talks, she concentrates on the relatively narrow field of trust in medical, environmental and generally bio ethics, whereas for the BBC she pans the focus to take in a broader front, comprising public institutions, the media and terrorism. The core of her argument is developed in the former set, but then deployed and modulated with admirable subtlety and flexibility for the more heterogeneous range of problems of the latter.
Her starting point is the tension between the rival goods of trust and autonomy. The limelight in medical ethics has been stolen by autonomy, but, even in the diluted version of informed consent, this may not offer much ethical guidance, since the scope for choice is likely in practice to be rather narrow and unless supplemented by some notion of responsibility the enshrinement of the unfettered discretion of the patient is in danger of leading to a rampant consumerism about the body, the environment and ultimately the germ-line.
O'Neill is inclined to shift the focus towards the concept of trust, an attitude adopted to the provider, rather than autonomy, a right of the provided for. However, in the course of her dialectic she finds that an adequately robust notion of trust must in turn be built on what she dubs 'principled autonomy' on the part of the agent. Providers of healthcare, public administration or information should be free to act as they choose, provided that their choices are motivated by an updated version of the Kantian requirement that the principle from which our actions flow should be one that must commend itself to any rational agent in the same circumstances.
The notorious weakness of such universalisability approaches is their reliance on the in the same circumstances' qualifier, which runs the constant risk of either being so restrictive as to exclude any interestingly comparable cases or so broad as to impose an officious overharmonisation. O'Neill opts, like Kant, for the view that at any rate deception can never make sense for a rational agent since universal deception would be self-defeating. Some version or other of this argument is as old as Plato, but it has never seemed very convincing to me because of the permanent possibility of the double bluff. If deception consists of exploiting the expectations of the listener so as to induce him or her to draw a mistaken conclusion, then a listener expecting to be deceived can be had by being told the truth. And so on.
It is no doubt true that public providers have an interest in avoiding what O'Neill calls 'Cassandra's problem', being unfairly mistrusted, but then maybe being trusted is a luxury which is dispensable if the inevitability of abuse or the suspicion of abuse renders it unavailable. Confucius may have believed that the ruler should wave goodbye to his weapons and his food supply before the trust of his people, but distrusted regimes seem to have a better survival rate than weak or impoverished ones, and, just as Adam Smith is right to urge us not to rely on the generosity of the butcher, the vintner and the candlestickmaker for our dinners, so is it the selfinterest of the politician, scientist or editor in not being dished by his rivals that is our guarantee that his economies of actuality will be kept within tolerable bounds. In a market, the guards guard each other.
By a similar token, O'Neill's objection to the audit culture and micromanagement in education, academe and the social services, as she herself concedes, smacks of the reluctance of once cosseted suppliers to have their credentials vetted, a lingering relic of the tenure culture. It is plausible to argue that the Citizen's Charter did little to allay, but hardly that it positively aggravated, public misgivings as to the probity or diligence of the public services.
These 13 chapters, which merit being read together, are lucid, pithy, discriminating and sane, but for all their eloquence I rather doubt that the sort of hands-off spontaneous order of mutual confidence for which their author yearns is a viable runner, even if the great Immanuel were to rise from the graveyards of the city that became Kaliningrad.
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