You Can Have Your Trust and Calculativeness, Too: Uncertainty, Trustworthiness and the Williamson Thesis

Williamson argues that a principal will only trust an agent when there are safeguards to ensure the agent has an incentive for trustworthiness. However, such circumstances are devoid of vulnerability and possibility for betrayal. Williamson claims that this is not trust at all. I argue that a principal can be calculative in her decisions to trust an agent but be genuinely vulnerable to betrayal as well. The key is in distinguishing between an environment of risk and one of uncertainty. Uncertainty creates vulnerabilities for principals because of the difficulty in identifying and erecting safeguards that fully assure agent trustworthiness. In such conditions, a principal will also need to rely on the moral disposition of the agent to refrain from engaging in opportunistic behaviour. However, a reliance on moral dispositions creates the possibility of real betrayal. Thus, in an environment of uncertainty, a reliance on the moral dispositions of others means you can have your trust and calculativeness, too.