Trust and Information and Communication Technologies
Charles Ess · 2020
My exploration of trust begins with K.E. Løgstrup’s account of trust as requiring embodied co-presence. This initiates a more extensive philosophical anthropology emphasizing human beings as both rational and affective, and as relational autonomies. This account of being human then grounds both virtue ethics and Kantian deontology as ethical frameworks that issue in a still more robust account of the conditions of human-to-human trust. Several features and affordances of online environments challenge these conditions, as especially two examples illustrate: pre-emptive policing and loss of trust in (public) media. I conclude by arguing that virtue ethics and contemporary existentialism offer ways to overcome online challenges to trust. These include the increasingly central role of virtue ethics in ICT design, and the understanding that trust is a virtue, i.e. a capability that must be cultivated if we are to achieve good lives of flourishing and meaning – which likewise require especially the virtue of courage in order to confront our existential realities as embodied and thereby vulnerable beings.