Trust as a Virtue

This paper addresses the nature and significance of trust in terms of ethics generally and economic ethics in particular. The concept of trust between human beings, often used loosely and imprecisely, has not occupied a crucial place in philosophy and social science.1 To provide a perspective in which trust can properly be treated, I first outline a few of the more prominent issues raised by the resurgence of virtue ethics in recent decades. Since, in my view, trust is best regarded as a kind of virtue, the approach of virtue ethics should be clarified at the outset. Furthermore, I compare virtue ethics and contractarian ethics with special reference to the views of Alasdair Maclntyre and John Rawls respectively and consider the relationship between virtue and right, the basic concepts of the two theories. This leads me to the meaning of trust and its relevance to the concept of community, a central notion of communitarianism that is a modern version of virtue ethics. Next, I examine the positive and negative aspects of competition as an ideal type in economics and political philosophy with regard to trust. Lastly, I examine the relationship between trust and community from the viewpoints of the institutional evolution thesis of Coase-Hayek and of the moral development thesis of Kohlberg-Piaget-Rawls in order to determine the locus of trust in economic ethics.