while, for example, too little trust and too much distrust can be collapsed into a single
idea there are other distinctions to be made between trust and distrust. There is a
tendency to view trust as positive and distrust as negative but this is overly simplistic.
As White (1996) points out, an appropriate amount of distrust in institutions is
something we should encourage as a positive civic virtue because this has the overall
effect of assisting those institutions to be recognised as trustworthy. Similarly, the
possibility of pathological trust (that is, a blind trust that can lead to harm and be an
obstacle to human flourishing) is something that cannot be considered as positive.
Additionally, it is true to say that a willingness to trust appropriately is the primary
virtue in personal relationships where distrust would be tend to be destructive.
I said earlier that we trust unwisely when we trust someone who neither understands the
value we put on that which we entrust to them nor has the necessary discretion to
recognise the boundaries that a given trust entails. Under normal circumstances, we
cannot abrogate responsibility for making judgments about others’ trustworthiness when
we exercise trust. General everyday experience suggests that, leaving aside the
confidence trickster who offers a simulacrum of trustworthiness, most of us
approximate the mean of trust (or distrust) more often than not. And learning to aim for
the mean (trusting the right amount for a given situation) is important if we are not to be
disappointed when we trust. Part of what aiming for the mean entails is recognising in
others those things about them that give us confidence in their discretion in looking
after whatever it is they have been entrusted with. The discretion of the trusted person to
act in ways consistent with the value given by the trustee to whatever has been entrusted
is crucial to the assessment of the trusted person’s trustworthiness (at least from the
point of view of the trustee). So the person who is trusted to look after one’s home
while one is on vacation and takes it upon her or himself to redecorate is demonstrating
a failure of trust by going beyond what is required of trust in that context2. Similarly the
person who does not do enough to care for that with which she or he has been entrusted
is also guilty of a failure of trust from the perspective of the trustee. These examples
might be construed as failures of trust on the part of both the trustee (misplaced trust)
and the trusted (being untrustworthy). That such interdependency between trustee and
trusted exists should come as no surprise given the complex nature of human
relationships. One set of problems for trust that arises from this insight is the way in
which actors in any trust relationship determine the boundaries of discretion in
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