It is not yet clear that trustworthiness can take its place alongside established virtues
particularly in the light of the foregoing discussion. However, no conception of virtue is
without difficulty, and for some (including Potter) a virtue approach offers the best
alternative to the unresolved (perhaps even irresolvable) problems that beset modem
moral theory. It might be more productive to consider trustworthiness against other
virtues. The virtue of justice may share some of these relational difficulties. There are a
number of conceptions of justice and the difficulties this presents are compounded by
the use of the term justice in ethical thought; some use justice to describe an ethical
principle (indeed, it is a core principle in the major versions of principle based ethics);
others use it to mean a virtue; others conflate the two suggesting that it can serve as both
principle and virtue.
For Aristotle, justice requires that we do not differentiate our responses to others on
irrelevant grounds; a sentiment that meets with almost universal approval. MacIntyre
(1985) reinforces the point by noting that it would be unjust for a professor to award
grades on the basis of, for example, some arbitrary whim or some particular distinction
over which the student has no control (such as the colour of his eyes). Justice demands
that we assess student essays on the basis of merit. A student may, of course, perceive
that his work has been judged unjustly, and in this respect justice seems to share a
problem familiar to trustworthiness. That is, the same act can be judged to be just by
one person and unjust by another, in the same way that a single act can be judged
trustworthy and untrustworthy from the perspective of different persons. Yet there is a
significant difference for if the professor awards marks on the basis of merit then she
will not be struggling with the sort of dilemma the nurse in our earlier example is
experiencing in deciding to whom she should be trustworthy. In marking students’
assignments, the professor can be either just or unjust, but not both at the same time
(regardless of the conception of justice held); whereas, our nurse knows that whatever
action she or he chooses, a betrayal of trust will occur.
It is not clear that these problems are sufficient to claim trustworthiness cannot be a
virtue. Indeed, if Aristotle is correct in noting that aiming to do the right thing to the
right person in the right way at the right time and for the right reason is what helps us
towards the expression of virtue then we may yet find that we are fully trustworthy (that
is, we express the virtue of trustworthiness) if and only if we have identified the right
person to whom we should be trustworthy. Thus it might be that trustworthiness is
133