convincingly, that “...surviving infants will usually have shown some trust, enough to
accept offered nourishment...” (Baier 1986 p. 241). This inclination of an infant to
trust suggests that trust, rather than distrust (certainly rather than mere hope) is the
default position. It suggests a tendency to anticipate good will towards one, which later
becomes fixed on particular others. So for the trusting infant, a trustworthy parent (or
other carer) is the ideal if the child is to flourish. Similarly, for the trusting patient, a
trustworthy nurse is a moral imperative especially where the recipient of nursing
practice has a diminished or compromised capacity to make an assessment of the
trustworthiness of others. Such patients are otherwise exposed to the possibility that
those in whose care they are placed do not have a good will, indeed, may even have ill
will, toward them. Being an untrustworthy nurse then is to fail to care for important
human goods, the sorts of goods that, if we are able to, we value as goods essential for
human flourishing. Thus abuse of trust of more-than-ordinarily vulnerable persons,
especially those with a limited capacity to choose to trust, is fundamentally at odds with
any conception of nursing that encompasses the good of the patient as a aim or as a
good of practice. If this is true then it is to the trustworthiness of individual health care
professionals rather than to the capacity of patients to exercise discretion in trusting that
we must turn.
Trustworthiness
Rising to the challenge set by Baier who notes that “One might have ... expected those
with a moral theory of the virtues to have looked at trustworthiness...” (Baier 1986 p.
232), Nancy Potter offers an account of trustworthiness as a virtue. Following Aristotle,
Potter locates trustworthiness as a mean situated between insufficient care on one hand
and an inappropriate and excessive way of caring for those things that others value on
the other. She writes:
A trustworthy person ... is one who can be counted, on, as a matter of the sort of
person he or she is, to take care of those things that others entrust to one and ...
whose ways of caring are neither excessive nor deficient... An excess ... might
be the lack of discretion as to the limits to what one can reasonably care for or
the lack of discretion as to appropriate objects of care... A deficiency ... might
be when one cannot be entrusted to properly care for what others value.
(Potter 2002 p. 16-17) (original emphasis).
Potter’s account is a welcome contribution to a literature that is otherwise sparse in
analyses of trustworthiness in general and the trustworthiness of health care
professionals in particular. To my knowledge, Potter is the first to claim trustworthiness
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