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A Question of Trust: The BBC Reith Lectures 2002
Can trust be restored by making people and institutions more accountable? Or do complex systems of accountability and control damage trust? Onora O'Neill challenges current approaches, investigates sources of deception in our society and re-examines questions of press freedom. This year's Reith Lectures present a philosopher's view of trust and deception and ask whether and how trust can be restored in modern democracy.
110 pages, Paperback
First published June 6, 2002
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About the author
Onora O'Neill
34 books32 followersOnora Sylvia O'Neill, Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve CH CBE FBA FRS (born 23 August 1941) is a philosopher and a crossbench member of the House of Lords.
The daughter of Sir Con Douglas Walter O'Neill, she was educated partly in Germany and at St Paul's Girls' School, London before studying philosophy, psychology and physiology at Oxford University. She went on to complete a doctorate at Harvard University, with John Rawls as supervisor. During the 1970s she taught at Barnard College, the women's college in Columbia University, New York City. In 1977 she returned to Britain and took up a post at the University of Essex; she was Professor of Philosophy there when she became Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge in 1992.
She is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, a former President of the British Academy 1988–1989 and chaired the Nuffield Foundation 1998–2010. In 2003, she was the founding President of the British Philosophical Association (BPA). In 2013 she held the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. Until October 2006, she was the Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, and she currently chairs the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
(from Wikipedia)
The daughter of Sir Con Douglas Walter O'Neill, she was educated partly in Germany and at St Paul's Girls' School, London before studying philosophy, psychology and physiology at Oxford University. She went on to complete a doctorate at Harvard University, with John Rawls as supervisor. During the 1970s she taught at Barnard College, the women's college in Columbia University, New York City. In 1977 she returned to Britain and took up a post at the University of Essex; she was Professor of Philosophy there when she became Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge in 1992.
She is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, a former President of the British Academy 1988–1989 and chaired the Nuffield Foundation 1998–2010. In 2003, she was the founding President of the British Philosophical Association (BPA). In 2013 she held the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. Until October 2006, she was the Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, and she currently chairs the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
(from Wikipedia)
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December 17, 2013
I read the five lectures, found here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/print/radio4/reith2002/. TED talk on same topic: http://www.ted.com/talks/onora_o_neill_what_we_don_t_understand_about_trust.html
All the text I highlighted:
Spreading Suspicion - Lecture 1
Confucius told his disciple Tsze-kung that three things are needed for government: weapons, food and trust. If a ruler can't hold on to all three, he should give up the weapons first and the food next. Trust should be guarded to the end: "without trust we cannot stand"
The sociologist Niklas Luhman was right that 'A complete absence of trust would prevent [one] even getting up in the morning.'
trust is needed precisely because all guarantees are incomplete. Guarantees are useless unless they lead to a trusted source, and a regress of guarantees is no better for being longer unless it ends in a trusted source.
The evidence suggests that we still constantly place trust in many of the institutions and professions that we profess to not to trust.
Unless we take account of the good news of trustworthiness as well as the bad news of untrustworthiness, we won't know whether we have a crisis of trust or only a culture of suspicion. In my view it isn't surprising that if we persist in viewing good news as no news at all, we end up viewing no news at all as good news.
transparency, which has marginalised the more basic and important obligation not to deceive.
Perhaps the culture of accountability that we are relentlessly building for ourselves actually damages trust rather than supporting it.
Trust and Terror - Lecture 2
Samuel Johnson put it this way: "It is happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust".
Trust is needed not because everything is wholly predictable, or wholly guaranteed, but on the contrary because life has to be led without guarantees.
we would I believe do better to begin by thinking about what ought to be done and who ought to do it, rather than about what we ought to get. Passive citizens, who wait for others to accord and respect their rights and mistakenly suppose that states alone can do so, are, I think, doomed to disappointment. Active citizens who meet their duties thereby secure one another's rights.
So let me begin with the classic Kantian thought: we are all moral equals. Nowadays this thought is usually followed up quickly with the claim that we therefore all have equal rights. But for Kant the deeper implication is that we all have equal duties. No competent person, and none of the institutions that human beings construct, is exempt from fundamental duties.
In the wake of terror, trust spirals downwards. Its restoration is the hardest of political and civic tasks: but not a task that states can handle alone. The passive culture of human rights suggests that we can sit back and wait for others to deliver our entitlements. I suggest that if we really want human rights we have to act and to meet our duties to one another.
Called to Account - Lecture 3
Growing mistrust would be a reasonable response to growing untrustworthiness: but the evidence that people or institutions are less trustworthy is elusive.
In fact I think there isn't even very good evidence that we trust less. There is good evidence that we say we trust less: we tell the pollsters, they tell the media, and the news that we say we do not trust is then put into circulation. But saying repeatedly that we don't trust no more shows that we trust less, than an echo shows the truth of the echoed words; still less does it show that others are less trustworthy.
Could our actions provide better evidence than our words and show that we do indeed trust less than we used to? Curiously I think that our action often provides evidence that we still trust.
The supposed 'crisis of trust' may be more a matter of what we tell inquisitive pollsters than of any active refusal of trust, let alone of conclusive evidence of reduced trustworthiness. The supposed 'crisis of trust' is, I think, first and foremost a culture of suspicion.
Central planning may have failed in the former Soviet Union but it is alive and well in Britain today. The new accountability culture aims at ever more perfect administrative control of institutional and professional life.
complaint procedures are so burdensome that avoiding complaints, including ill-founded complaints, becomes a central institutional goal in its own right.
In theory again the new culture of accountability and audit makes professionals and institutions more accountable for good performance. But beneath this admirable rhetoric the real focus is on performance indicators chosen for ease of measurement and control rather than because they measure accurately what the quality of performance is. Most
Perverse incentives are real incentives.
In the end, the new culture of accountability provides incentives for arbitrary and unprofessional choices.
In the New World of accountability, conscientious professionals often find that the public claim to mistrust them-but the public still demand their services. Claims of mistrust are poor reward for meeting requirements that allegedly embody higher standards of public accountability.
professionals and institutions doing trustworthy work today may find that the public say that they do not trust them-- but (unlike Cassandra) their services are still demanded.
Serious and effective accountability, I believe, needs to concentrate on good governance, on obligations to tell the truth and needs to seek intelligent accountability. I think it has to fantasise much less about Herculean micro-management by means of performance indicators or total transparency. If we want a culture of public service, professionals and public servants must in the end be free to serve the public rather than their paymasters.
Trust and Transparency - Lecture 4
Reasonably placed trust requires not only information about the proposals or undertakings that others put forward, but also information about those who put them forward.
Openness or transparency is now all too easy: if they can produce or restore trust, trust should surely be within our grasp.
Some sorts of openness and transparency may be bad for trust.
Increasing transparency can produce a flood of unsorted information and misinformation that provides little but confusion unless it can be sorted and assessed.
Increasing transparency can produce a flood of unsorted information and misinformation that provides little but confusion unless it can be sorted and assessed. It may add to uncertainty rather than to trust.
Demands for universal transparency are likely to encourage the evasions, hypocrisies and half-truths that we usually refer to as 'political correctness', but which might more forthrightly be called either self-censorship or deception.
We place and refuse trust not because we have torrents of information (more is not always better), but because we can trace specific bits of information and specific undertakings to particular sources on whose veracity and reliability we can run some checks. Well-placed trust grows out of active inquiry rather than blind acceptance
So if we want a society in which placing trust is feasible we need to look for ways in which we can actively check one another's claims.
There are no guarantees. But informed consent can provide a basis for trust provided that those who are to consent are not offered a flood of uncheckable information, but rather information whose accuracy they can check and assess for themselves. This is demanding.
Capacities for testing others' credibility and reliability often fail and falter. Sometimes they falter because the information provided is too arcane and obscure. But sometimes they fail because those asked to consent cannot check and test the information they are offered, so can't work out whether they are being deceived, or whether they can reasonably place their trust.
Licence to Deceive - Lecture 5
The new information technologies are ideal for spreading reliable information, but they dislocate our ordinary ways of judging one another's claims and deciding where to place our trust.
Informed consent is therefore always important, but it isn't the basis of trust. On the contrary, it presupposes and expresses trust, which we must already place to assess the information we're given.
When we draw on friendly-- or on expert-- help we ultimately have to judge for ourselves where to place our trust. To do this we need to find trustworthy information. This can be dauntingly hard in a world of one-way communication.
Today information is abundant, but it's often mixed with misinformation and a little spice of disinformation.
we need to focus less on grandiose ideals of transparency and rather more on limiting deception.
I think we may undermine professional performance and standards in public life by excessive regulation, and that we may condone and even encourage deception in our zeal for transparency.
A free press can be and should be an accountable press.
A free press is not an unconditional good. It is good because and insofar as it helps the public to explore and test opinions and to judge for themselves whom and what to believe.
The press are skilled at making material accessible, but erratic about making it assessable.
Only if we build a public culture-and especially a media culture-in which we can rely more on others not to deceive us, will we be able to judge whom and what we can reasonably trust.
To restore trust we need not only trustworthy persons and institutions, but also assessable reasons for trusting and mistrusting
All the text I highlighted:
Spreading Suspicion - Lecture 1
Confucius told his disciple Tsze-kung that three things are needed for government: weapons, food and trust. If a ruler can't hold on to all three, he should give up the weapons first and the food next. Trust should be guarded to the end: "without trust we cannot stand"
The sociologist Niklas Luhman was right that 'A complete absence of trust would prevent [one] even getting up in the morning.'
trust is needed precisely because all guarantees are incomplete. Guarantees are useless unless they lead to a trusted source, and a regress of guarantees is no better for being longer unless it ends in a trusted source.
The evidence suggests that we still constantly place trust in many of the institutions and professions that we profess to not to trust.
Unless we take account of the good news of trustworthiness as well as the bad news of untrustworthiness, we won't know whether we have a crisis of trust or only a culture of suspicion. In my view it isn't surprising that if we persist in viewing good news as no news at all, we end up viewing no news at all as good news.
transparency, which has marginalised the more basic and important obligation not to deceive.
Perhaps the culture of accountability that we are relentlessly building for ourselves actually damages trust rather than supporting it.
Trust and Terror - Lecture 2
Samuel Johnson put it this way: "It is happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust".
Trust is needed not because everything is wholly predictable, or wholly guaranteed, but on the contrary because life has to be led without guarantees.
we would I believe do better to begin by thinking about what ought to be done and who ought to do it, rather than about what we ought to get. Passive citizens, who wait for others to accord and respect their rights and mistakenly suppose that states alone can do so, are, I think, doomed to disappointment. Active citizens who meet their duties thereby secure one another's rights.
So let me begin with the classic Kantian thought: we are all moral equals. Nowadays this thought is usually followed up quickly with the claim that we therefore all have equal rights. But for Kant the deeper implication is that we all have equal duties. No competent person, and none of the institutions that human beings construct, is exempt from fundamental duties.
In the wake of terror, trust spirals downwards. Its restoration is the hardest of political and civic tasks: but not a task that states can handle alone. The passive culture of human rights suggests that we can sit back and wait for others to deliver our entitlements. I suggest that if we really want human rights we have to act and to meet our duties to one another.
Called to Account - Lecture 3
Growing mistrust would be a reasonable response to growing untrustworthiness: but the evidence that people or institutions are less trustworthy is elusive.
In fact I think there isn't even very good evidence that we trust less. There is good evidence that we say we trust less: we tell the pollsters, they tell the media, and the news that we say we do not trust is then put into circulation. But saying repeatedly that we don't trust no more shows that we trust less, than an echo shows the truth of the echoed words; still less does it show that others are less trustworthy.
Could our actions provide better evidence than our words and show that we do indeed trust less than we used to? Curiously I think that our action often provides evidence that we still trust.
The supposed 'crisis of trust' may be more a matter of what we tell inquisitive pollsters than of any active refusal of trust, let alone of conclusive evidence of reduced trustworthiness. The supposed 'crisis of trust' is, I think, first and foremost a culture of suspicion.
Central planning may have failed in the former Soviet Union but it is alive and well in Britain today. The new accountability culture aims at ever more perfect administrative control of institutional and professional life.
complaint procedures are so burdensome that avoiding complaints, including ill-founded complaints, becomes a central institutional goal in its own right.
In theory again the new culture of accountability and audit makes professionals and institutions more accountable for good performance. But beneath this admirable rhetoric the real focus is on performance indicators chosen for ease of measurement and control rather than because they measure accurately what the quality of performance is. Most
Perverse incentives are real incentives.
In the end, the new culture of accountability provides incentives for arbitrary and unprofessional choices.
In the New World of accountability, conscientious professionals often find that the public claim to mistrust them-but the public still demand their services. Claims of mistrust are poor reward for meeting requirements that allegedly embody higher standards of public accountability.
professionals and institutions doing trustworthy work today may find that the public say that they do not trust them-- but (unlike Cassandra) their services are still demanded.
Serious and effective accountability, I believe, needs to concentrate on good governance, on obligations to tell the truth and needs to seek intelligent accountability. I think it has to fantasise much less about Herculean micro-management by means of performance indicators or total transparency. If we want a culture of public service, professionals and public servants must in the end be free to serve the public rather than their paymasters.
Trust and Transparency - Lecture 4
Reasonably placed trust requires not only information about the proposals or undertakings that others put forward, but also information about those who put them forward.
Openness or transparency is now all too easy: if they can produce or restore trust, trust should surely be within our grasp.
Some sorts of openness and transparency may be bad for trust.
Increasing transparency can produce a flood of unsorted information and misinformation that provides little but confusion unless it can be sorted and assessed.
Increasing transparency can produce a flood of unsorted information and misinformation that provides little but confusion unless it can be sorted and assessed. It may add to uncertainty rather than to trust.
Demands for universal transparency are likely to encourage the evasions, hypocrisies and half-truths that we usually refer to as 'political correctness', but which might more forthrightly be called either self-censorship or deception.
We place and refuse trust not because we have torrents of information (more is not always better), but because we can trace specific bits of information and specific undertakings to particular sources on whose veracity and reliability we can run some checks. Well-placed trust grows out of active inquiry rather than blind acceptance
So if we want a society in which placing trust is feasible we need to look for ways in which we can actively check one another's claims.
There are no guarantees. But informed consent can provide a basis for trust provided that those who are to consent are not offered a flood of uncheckable information, but rather information whose accuracy they can check and assess for themselves. This is demanding.
Capacities for testing others' credibility and reliability often fail and falter. Sometimes they falter because the information provided is too arcane and obscure. But sometimes they fail because those asked to consent cannot check and test the information they are offered, so can't work out whether they are being deceived, or whether they can reasonably place their trust.
Licence to Deceive - Lecture 5
The new information technologies are ideal for spreading reliable information, but they dislocate our ordinary ways of judging one another's claims and deciding where to place our trust.
Informed consent is therefore always important, but it isn't the basis of trust. On the contrary, it presupposes and expresses trust, which we must already place to assess the information we're given.
When we draw on friendly-- or on expert-- help we ultimately have to judge for ourselves where to place our trust. To do this we need to find trustworthy information. This can be dauntingly hard in a world of one-way communication.
Today information is abundant, but it's often mixed with misinformation and a little spice of disinformation.
we need to focus less on grandiose ideals of transparency and rather more on limiting deception.
I think we may undermine professional performance and standards in public life by excessive regulation, and that we may condone and even encourage deception in our zeal for transparency.
A free press can be and should be an accountable press.
A free press is not an unconditional good. It is good because and insofar as it helps the public to explore and test opinions and to judge for themselves whom and what to believe.
The press are skilled at making material accessible, but erratic about making it assessable.
Only if we build a public culture-and especially a media culture-in which we can rely more on others not to deceive us, will we be able to judge whom and what we can reasonably trust.
To restore trust we need not only trustworthy persons and institutions, but also assessable reasons for trusting and mistrusting
August 31, 2023
Onora O’Neill asks some challenging and conceptual questions within this BBC Reith Lecture.
The main dichotomy this aims to answer is if there is a difference between a “crisis of trust” and a “culture of suspicion” (O’Neill’s hypothesis being that there is, and despite many thinking we suffer from the former we are actually living in the latter).
This adapted speech has been divided up into 5 chapters each comprising of 4 or 5 sections. Chapter 1 aims to define transparency and its value within society, the key quote from this book stuck with me from here, coming in the final section of the first chapter:
“plants don’t flourish when we pull them up often to check how their roots are growing: political, institutional, and professional life too may not flourish if we constantly uproot it to demonstrate that everything is transparent and trustworthy”
This is then continued into the following chapters by discussing whether transparency and democracy is truly the saving grace we seem to think it is within western society.
I consider this speech to be a reflection heavily of post 9/11 paranoia and a fallout of the discussions which arose in that of the Y2K crisis and the sudden realisation we had truly reached “the Information Age” (whatever that means - as O’Neill argues that the press being free opens us up to as much misinformation and disinformation as it does credible journalism).
Both interesting to analyse in the context of the terror state many were living in at the time, and to listen to an academic’s thoughts on how we can better adapt what we do and how we view trust and personal politics within the 21st century to better suit our needs and highlight a different way of living in which many don’t consider as they value transparency above all else, not considering that the hypocrisy of transparency is that it’s two way - people want transparency in organisations to be self admitted under the guise of “trust” and “accountability”, but also fear and bury their heads in the sand when there is a breach of GDPR or a data “leak”.
“democracy can show us what is politically legitimate; it can’t show what’s ethically justified”
Closing thoughts: an amazing speech from a clearly incredibly talented academic. Though I’ve never heard of Onora O’Neill before reading this I am glad I have now.
The main dichotomy this aims to answer is if there is a difference between a “crisis of trust” and a “culture of suspicion” (O’Neill’s hypothesis being that there is, and despite many thinking we suffer from the former we are actually living in the latter).
This adapted speech has been divided up into 5 chapters each comprising of 4 or 5 sections. Chapter 1 aims to define transparency and its value within society, the key quote from this book stuck with me from here, coming in the final section of the first chapter:
“plants don’t flourish when we pull them up often to check how their roots are growing: political, institutional, and professional life too may not flourish if we constantly uproot it to demonstrate that everything is transparent and trustworthy”
This is then continued into the following chapters by discussing whether transparency and democracy is truly the saving grace we seem to think it is within western society.
I consider this speech to be a reflection heavily of post 9/11 paranoia and a fallout of the discussions which arose in that of the Y2K crisis and the sudden realisation we had truly reached “the Information Age” (whatever that means - as O’Neill argues that the press being free opens us up to as much misinformation and disinformation as it does credible journalism).
Both interesting to analyse in the context of the terror state many were living in at the time, and to listen to an academic’s thoughts on how we can better adapt what we do and how we view trust and personal politics within the 21st century to better suit our needs and highlight a different way of living in which many don’t consider as they value transparency above all else, not considering that the hypocrisy of transparency is that it’s two way - people want transparency in organisations to be self admitted under the guise of “trust” and “accountability”, but also fear and bury their heads in the sand when there is a breach of GDPR or a data “leak”.
“democracy can show us what is politically legitimate; it can’t show what’s ethically justified”
Closing thoughts: an amazing speech from a clearly incredibly talented academic. Though I’ve never heard of Onora O’Neill before reading this I am glad I have now.
May 27, 2024
Although written (and spoken) in 2002 Onora O’Neill’s thoughts on the nature of trust and its prerequisites remain relevant and insightful today.
Drawing on philosophical principles of rights and responsibilities (Mill, Kant. Socrates etc) she considers a number of ways trust is gained and lost in a number of chapters.
In each she questions whether trust really is diminishing - despite what people tell surveys. She questions how important absolutely accountability and transparency are to trust - instead suggesting a prioritising of good governance and a lack of deception. She also makes it clear that while we expect the establishment to protect rights and gain our trust the onus is also on all of us to build that trust - rights by necessity demand responsibilities.
In relation to my specific area of interest - the media- these essays pose challenging questions for the current direction of travel. Again I highlight these were written in 2002 but the arguments for transparency and the BBC ‘Reality Check’ culture require finessing . It is important to challenge misinformation and fake news but ultimately this interrogation is only valuable if audiences already trust the institution, in this case the BBC (although there is a relevance for all UK broadcasters). And with reference to the press and their hidden agendas how is this now being played out with new entrants to the broadcasting ecology eg GB News ?
This collection of lectures generated many more questions and thoughts for me to ponder and i shall not share them all here. But for those interested in trust and the current debate around the restoration (if it has gone) of trust in our institutions this is definitely worth a read. Note you can also access these lectures on BBC iPlayer .
Drawing on philosophical principles of rights and responsibilities (Mill, Kant. Socrates etc) she considers a number of ways trust is gained and lost in a number of chapters.
In each she questions whether trust really is diminishing - despite what people tell surveys. She questions how important absolutely accountability and transparency are to trust - instead suggesting a prioritising of good governance and a lack of deception. She also makes it clear that while we expect the establishment to protect rights and gain our trust the onus is also on all of us to build that trust - rights by necessity demand responsibilities.
In relation to my specific area of interest - the media- these essays pose challenging questions for the current direction of travel. Again I highlight these were written in 2002 but the arguments for transparency and the BBC ‘Reality Check’ culture require finessing . It is important to challenge misinformation and fake news but ultimately this interrogation is only valuable if audiences already trust the institution, in this case the BBC (although there is a relevance for all UK broadcasters). And with reference to the press and their hidden agendas how is this now being played out with new entrants to the broadcasting ecology eg GB News ?
This collection of lectures generated many more questions and thoughts for me to ponder and i shall not share them all here. But for those interested in trust and the current debate around the restoration (if it has gone) of trust in our institutions this is definitely worth a read. Note you can also access these lectures on BBC iPlayer .
November 5, 2019
An easily readable, and still notably topical, though-provoking discussion of the corrosion of trust and ways to guard and renew conditions of trust. O'Neill thinks critically about a selection of topics that, some claim, are a proper basis on which to secure trust, ranging from a legal regime of rights, to the managerial rhetoric of "accountability," to the notion of "transparency" (and access to information in general), to freedom of the press and other supposed media of communication in a democratic society.
March 30, 2018
Interesting treatise on the relationship between accountability and transparency and how too much of both can damage trust in public institutions.
January 21, 2022
An essential contribution to our understanding of trust and trustworthiness. A critique of both the idea of a 'crisis of trust' and the usual remedies, accountability and transparency.
December 18, 2014
O´Neil brings up a topic to become the centre of the discussion as we are headed to a kind of accountability overdose, which has the potential to ultimately undermining trust.
January 8, 2021
Draws out the tension between trust and transparency, marking the difference between trust and cultures of suspicion. While very short and surface-level, it is clear and effective.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews