What Do We Want Trust to Be?: Some Distinctions of Trust

"Trust is the hobby-horse of moralists about business; it is nectar and ambrosia to them." The great 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant didn't say that. What he did say was that friendship was the hobby-horse and nectar and ambrosia for the rhetorical moralists of his day.2 The two statements, however, are pretty much functionally equivalent; in both Kant's original statement and in my appropriation of it, we are exhorted to ethical behavior in terms of a relationship that is to be the universal panacea for our problems. And it may also be true in both cases that the exhortation to embrace the championed relationship is of more passionate concern for its advocates than is thorough, painstaking analysis of what that relationship is. That is, we are directed to trust under the presumption that we already understand the concept well enough or need only a quick gloss to be in a position to make authoritative judgments about its promise and limitations. I do not mean to denigrate trust or entirely to condemn the fad of interest in trust in recent commentary on business. Trust certainly is an important topic, though historically it has been neglected in philo sophical ethics, in applied ethics, and in the ethical analysis of business in particular. And if we commentators and practitioners must have a banner to march under, then "trust" has a lot more to be said for it