Introduction

Abstract

Most people have experienced a significant betrayal at least once in their lives. We extended our friendship, love and trust and received in return a slap in the face or, worse, a stab in the back. People can often be selfish, manipulative, dishonest and deliberately hurtful. And yet people also regularly place their trust in others and cooperate with “genetically unrelated strangers [and] with individuals they will never meet again” (Krueger et al. 2007: 3). ¹ Are we all “very simple” fools? Or willfully blind? Or is there an advantage to trusting that exceeds the potential risk of error?

Ha, ha, what a fool Honesty is! And

Trust, his sworn brother, a very simple gentleman

(The Winter’s Tale IV.iv 600)

“Man conquers himself not in any detached freedom of standing over against the world, but rather in his daily intercourse with the world, in allowing himself to participate in its conditionedness. Only by doing so does he attain the proper attitude for the act of knowing”

(Gadamar 1947: 16)