The Foundations of Corporate Trustworthiness: How to Get Businesses and Organisations We Can Trust

Building trust is a key aim of businesses and policymakers. Yet crises of trust continue. The faltering dash for corporate trustworthiness raises philosophical questions which this thesis answers. What trustworthiness do we want from business? How, if at all, can something like a business be trustworthy?

I develop a new framework for understanding trustworthiness and trust. “Trustworthiness” picks out features of agents that mitigate vulnerabilities we face as limited, social beings in specific ways which an agent brings about herself. These features take various forms, and so trustworthiness’s nature is radically pluralist. “Trust” picks out various attitudes that attempt to track these features. Different forms of vulnerability dominate different interactions demanding different forms of trustworthiness and trust.

Our interactions with business are dominated by our reliance on them. I argue that trustworthiness which responds to others’ reliance requires a responsiveness to a novel practical obligation grounded in someone offering her reliability as a reason for action to another. To be trustworthy in this way an agent must understand herself as socially situated, reason appropriately about these obligations, and ensure that she acts on them.

I then develop an original model of organisational agency, based on a specific form of joint reliance obligations. This model shows that organisations are capable of the capacities required for reliance-responsive trustworthiness. I then argue that a business is any organisation operating in a market environment which relies on producing an economic surplus to exist and distributes that surplus to its members. I argue that the nature of “business” makes it difficult for them to be trustworthy, but that these problems can be overcome. Finally, I argue that this means we should work to increase the trustworthiness of businesses, but, where we cannot, we should look to alternative forms of regulation.