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Hello, I'm David Edmonds and this is the Pandemic Ethics Accelerator Podcast.

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The UK Pandemic Ethics Accelerator was a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research

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Council in 2021 22 to examine the ethical challenges faced during the COVID pandemic,

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it combined expertise from the University of Oxford, Bristol, Edinburgh University College, London and the Nuffield Council on Bioethics.

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This six part podcast series covers some of the themes that emerged from the research.

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Jamie Webb, welcome. Hi, David. Thank you so much for having me.

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We're talking today about trust. We all sort of understand what trust is.

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But do you have a handy definition and is trust the same as trustworthiness?

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So the first thing to say is that they're distinct concepts.

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Trust is a relational attitude. Patient X, trust agent y.

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Whereas trustworthiness is a property of agents or indeed institutions, and a trust as an attitude is usually distinguished from reliance.

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Suppose a morally thicker notion than the line. So here's a couple of examples.

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I relied on my alarm clock to wake me up in the morning, but I wouldn't normally say that I trust it.

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And in most philosophical accounts of trust, trust is defined as reliance.

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Plus, something else obviously does array of accounts of what that kind of something else might be.

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But when we talk about trust between agents usually saying, well, if I trust you, I rely on you to do something on certain tasks.

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And not only do I rely on you, I think that there's an attitude of investment or goodwill towards me to kind of fill that account out further.

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So that's the link between trust and reliance.

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Is it central to the idea of trust that someone can let you down or betray you, that that's always a possibility?

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Absolutely. I think it's essential to the idea that trust can be betrayed.

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And that's in one way what makes it thicker than reliance. And of course, we can be mistaken about our trust relationships.

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I might trust someone who is untrustworthy on my trust, an institution that is untrustworthy.

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So trust and trustworthiness can really come apart. And actually, in some of the work accelerator's done,

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we've really stressed the importance of focusing on trustworthiness as a kind of foundational concept here that institutions, government,

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individuals should be focusing on not just how can I make people trust me more,

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but how can I behave in a trustworthy manner because warranted mistrust when an agent mistrusts a government, for example, is a really good thing.

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A couple of historical examples of David HUME so that the consequences of

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unwarranted trust were much worse than placing trust mistakenly in government.

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James Madison thought that we should generally distrust government and that

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that was part of the way he justified the shape of the American institutions.

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And if I woke up tomorrow and found out that a vast majority of the Russian people, for example,

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had lost trust in their government, I would say, Oh, what a shame that we've lost trust.

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In this case, I think that's fantastic news because those people are not trustworthy.

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So if you have the part that distinct notions in that sense.

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So before we end with the definition of trust, I want to talk about one other aspect of it.

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I guess an interesting property of trust is that one can trust both an individual but also a group or an organisation.

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Of course I can say I've lost trust in the Prime Minister, but I can also say I've lost trust in the Government.

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We can make sense of that, can't we, of losing trust in the collective?

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Yes, absolutely. And I think many accounts would suggest that there's probably slightly different conditions for

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a kind of relational trust in individual versus the trust you might hold to an institution.

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So often, the accounts of trust, the focus on individuals will stress to trust the person,

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you have to rely on them and you have to believe that they have to have some kind of appropriate motivation towards your interests.

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Now, when I talk about trusting the Prime Minister, for example, obviously no one would suggest that the Prime Minister has a kind of individual,

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one on one relationship with every single member of the country.

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But you might think, okay, well, we can describe that in terms of the Prime Minister having the appropriate motivational

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status in relation to their duties towards the public as a government representative.

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So maybe being motivated by the best interests of the public and so on.

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And then institutions, obviously there's that classic quote about institutions that they have no body to be punished and no soul to be down.

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They don't have motivation states in the way people do, but we nevertheless do talk generally about trust in institutions.

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So what might that mean? Well, some accounts stress this thing called independence, responsiveness,

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trustworthy means responding appropriately to the reason the government has to do what they're being relied on to do.

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So maybe government making decisions again in the best interests of the public, whatever that means, rather than prioritising electoral benefits.

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We don't need to say that they have any kind of emotional states and.

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Democracy. There might be particular procedure requirements.

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We expect governments to make their decisions along.

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It's not enough that a decision is made in a democracy, but that particular process is followed for decision making.

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That in some way respects the equality of its citizens, something like that.

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Okay, so those are all aspects of the definition of trust and trustworthiness.

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Basic question what is the point of trust? So there are generally two different qualities you might talk about in relation to the benefits of trust.

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You might think trust has an instrumental value, and you might think trust has an intrinsic value.

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On the instrumental point first, giving the pandemic as an example,

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the instrumental value of trust can lie there in its capacity to increase compliance with government decision making,

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which obviously was especially important during a pandemic where disease is being spread person to person.

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So adherence to social distancing restrictions that the government had placed,

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that's one of the main ways we were able to break the chain of infection, particularly before vaccinations.

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So compliance with government policymaking would be one benefit of increased trust.

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Compliance and trust are distinct notions. But also trust has, I would argue, an intrinsic value.

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And I think in a democracy you could argue that when we trust the government and when we're correct in doing so, then it's suggesting something.

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I think it's suggesting that we think that the equality of citizens is being respected in our decision making and governance,

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and also that there's almost an element of self-respect because it's a democratic government.

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We're, in a sense, recognising ourselves as fulfilling that capacity of self government,

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and we're expecting our fellow citizens as trustworthy in that capacity.

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And I think that might be intrinsically valuable if it's held and if that trust is warranted.

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In addition to the more, maybe more obvious benefits, the amount is instrumental benefits of trust on policy adherence.

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Right. So we've got some of the abstract questions out of the way.

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You have touched on the pandemic, but let's get specific and empirical.

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Did the British people trust the government during the pandemic?

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And were there key moments during the pandemic when trust rose dramatically or fell?

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So one thing you saw at the start of the pandemic and you can see this in various pieces

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of survey data is trust actually in government rose quite sharply around March 2020.

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We saw things like an Ipsos Mori poll that measured support for Boris Johnson at 52%, which is up 16 points from before the December 2019 election.

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And we saw that quite globally, actually. And what that some have suggested, that is an example of what sometimes called the rally round,

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the flag effect, which is usually talked about in terms of wartime,

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but at times of war, support for government increases as we all rally around the flag about this collective effort.

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Metaphors of war commonly used in the pandemic as that kind of collective moment of struggle and sacrifice.

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And you saw that at the start, unfortunately or fortunately, depending on whether you think the trust would have been warranted or not.

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You know, we did see that increase in support and trust last year, particularly long time.

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We saw a big drop in government approval ratings around May 2020.

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If you think back to what was going on in May 2020,

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we saw the Dominic Cummings affair in travelling to Durham at the start of the national lockdown in apparent breach of social distancing regulations.

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He didn't resign, he wasn't sacked. That was obviously a massive controversy at the time.

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And we saw in respective analysis of data a significant reduction in confidence in Westminster

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government compared to the devolved government and the health services in response to that incident.

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We also saw levels of trust pretty low around the time that the UK government,

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after several weeks of delay and denial, eventually brought in a second national lockdown at the end of 2020.

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And then of course, following that, there were a number of other incidents where trust was negatively affected.

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Scandals around how government contracts had been procured and organised.

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A perception that they'd been given to mates of Ministers rather than through a really vigorous process.

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And then, even more recently, party gate.

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There is a very clear perception that if we think back to some of those theoretical questions that individual

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members of government were behaving in ways very much not fulfilling their personal obligations to the public,

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we thought that the government had displayed a lack of competence throughout the pandemic and that a

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decreased trust and a general sense that the government wasn't really fulfilling its responsibility.

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So we saw reductions there as well. It's interesting that you cite approval ratings because of.

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Course one can approve of the government and yet still not trust it.

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Those two concepts you can see how they overlap, but they're not synonymous.

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And I wonder whether there's a great difficulty in measuring trust.

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Yeah, absolutely. I think one recommendation I'd have is just be really specific in what you're asking.

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Recognise that those kind of things can come apart.

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So for example, compliance with government social distancing, for example, can come apart from whether you trust the government.

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I might not trust the government, particularly in its decision making.

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Nevertheless, I might wear a mask on public transport whilst it's mandated by the government.

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Not because I trust that they've decided on the right policy to say because of qualities about them.

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But just because I think independently it's the right thing to do for a number of reasons and I have concerns,

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my fellow travellers, my own clinical vulnerability and so on.

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But it doesn't really have much to do with my attitudes towards the government.

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You know, I might approve of a government, as you say. I might not necessarily trust it.

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I'm not approving the government's decision making for purely selfish reasons.

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I might say, Well, I'm a member of a particular demographic. I know this government is biased in favour of my personal interests,

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but because I recognise that bias, I don't think that's particularly trustworthy at all.

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So it's really complicated. And compliance, approval, trust.

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They're all distinct notions.

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And a final complication is what you might talk about, you know, is the problem of many hands in this kind of big public crisis.

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You've got many different institutions that are kind of coordinating with each other.

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And you might have different levels of trust and trustworthiness and inscriptions of trust within each of them as it happened during the pandemic.

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I might distrust the Westminster government.

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Nevertheless, I might trust if I'm a member of one of the devolved countries and I trust my local government,

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I might distrust the UK government, but I might have great trust in the National Health Service.

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So when we're thinking about did we trust the vaccination programme, for example,

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well that might be delivered by a devolved government delivered by the NHS also involve the Westminster Government.

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So there's a lot of complications there and that's before we even think about individuals versus institutions as the additional complication of that.

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Right. So you might trust the chief medical officer who was Chris Whitty, and you might distrust the Prime Minister.

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And I guess that might be one reason why the Government in all its press conferences would

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have the scientific adviser of some kind next to them because they were more trustworthy.

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Generally, trust in scientific authorities when it's measured is usually higher than trust in central government.

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And, you know, yes, you're absolutely right. And you can see that in a positive way,

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that it's perfectly legitimate for the government to present the scientific advice from the scientific advisers,

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from the scientific authorities that they are better communicators of scientific evidence and on non-expert politicians.

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There's also a more cynical interpretation, which is that the government is trying to borrow the credibility of scientific advisers.

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And there's also the fact that the government made a great show of the fact that that decision supposedly was just following the science.

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That was a big mantra, especially in the early stages of the pandemic,

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followed up by not just like dates and not dates when we were trying to decide when to come out of lockdown

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measures suggesting that policymaking was basically being to some extent determined by scientific advice,

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and therefore that the scientific advisers were the best people to put forward that information.

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So the United Kingdom has a population of 60 million people, presumably trust wasn't uniform throughout that population.

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It varied according to geography, sex class.

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Yeah, absolutely. And levels of trust have not been consistent across all parts of society,

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but really have varied across different demographic groups, including gender, age, ethnicity, socioeconomic background.

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One survey conducted early in the pandemic found that members of older generations supported the highest level of trust in government.

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In contrast to younger counterparts, younger, black,

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Asian and minority ethnic participants showed significantly lower average levels of trust in government than their white peers.

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And I think this connects, quite interestingly, to questions of trustworthiness,

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because there was some empirical data which highlighted some of the reasons that BME people had a lack of trust in the vaccination campaign.

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Largely that is a result of the Government's hostile immigration policy, its policies towards minorities, communities in this country more generally.

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If you the government you might say, well, actually we conducted this vaccination campaign in a totally trustworthy manner.

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No one was asked.

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As far as I'm aware, no one has been asked about their immigration status when they tried to go and get a vaccination or anything like that.

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So we did this in a trustworthy way. I think that just demonstrates that trust is built up over a long period.

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Time in relation to a lot of different aspects of government decision making.

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You can't isolate it. You can't expect that a community that has warranted mistrust towards you is suddenly

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going to turn the switch and trust you again in relation to one specific thing.

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Trust is complicated to build something for a long time in a lot of different contexts.

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We've touched on party gate and the fact that Boris Johnson famously or notoriously

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was the Prime Minister during a whole bunch of social events in number ten,

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when other people outside government were not holding those kinds of events.

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And obviously that eroded trust because it exhibited a kind of hypocrisy and that's particularly annoying.

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Can I ask you about other factors that might erode trust?

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Obviously, competence would seem to be one, but are there ingredients to trust?

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I guess that's an empirical question. But if an individual is to trust a politician, how does that politician need to behave?

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Well, this has been something that's obviously been considered for a long time, and we almost have the recipe available to us.

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In 1995, there was the establishment of the Nolan principles, the seven principles of public life.

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Those principles were selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership.

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And we can relate quite clearly to the idea of trust.

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We trust if we think the person is competent,

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but also if we think they have these motivational stakes in relation to the test of performing and maybe,

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you know, the Nolan principles could be seen as the articulation of some of those qualities, those motivations,

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the way they relate to their responsibilities in their jobs, and especially in a pandemic where government was obviously extremely prominent,

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but individual members of government were extremely prominent, particularly the prime minister, particularly the health secretary.

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They were fronting these press conferences every day,

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basically telling people what to do in a way that maybe we haven't experienced since the Second World War.

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And individual acts of hypocrisy, individual acts of incompetence,

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individual acts of favouring your mates in procurement contracts in party when other people were not allowed to gather for funerals.

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It's hard to overstate the impact that that justifiably has on trust.

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And once again, just to reiterate, maybe that's a good thing.

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The fact that people lost trust in government and individuals in government is absolutely a good thing if trust would not be planted.

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Is it possible? I don't know if empirical work has been done on this to track the correlation between

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an erosion of trust and citizens complying with government regulations and rules.

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So I think historically there is evidence that what you might call high trust societies in general, more rule abiding.

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We did have surveys that clearly separated questions about trust in government with questions about compliance with social distancing measures.

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You can see impacts on compliance when you look at and obviously some of this is still being done.

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Now, retrospectively, when you look at compliance with regulations in response to what you might describe

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as those kind of key scandal points to Dominic Cummings of party gate points,

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where the government demonstrated a lack of competence in its decision making.

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It's not a relationship that can be drawn 1 to 1,

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and it's very important to separate out these different notions when you're looking at any survey data,

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when you're looking at rates of adherence to social distancing measures.

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So you've done this interesting work, which both has an analytic conceptual element, but also an empirical component.

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Governments need to be trustworthy and they need to be trusted. If citizens are going to follow the rules, there's some kind of link there.

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When the next pandemic comes round, as it inevitably will, what will be your advice to the government that has to deal with it?

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I think there are some things that are often said about how to increase trust in these kind of situations.

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And one of those things is we should have greater transparency and a trust will follow from transparency.

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And I think to a certain extent that is true.

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I think you need more than just transparency. An obvious point is that transparency into untrustworthy practices will not increase trust.

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If we had an entirely transparent look into the way hope would come checks were being awarded,

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we might not necessarily have increased trust because you might feel that practice is being done in an untrustworthy manner.

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A slightly different point is that the government needs to be transparent about how value laden and inescapably the.

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And challenging these kind of decisions in a pandemic.

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So I mentioned earlier the follow the science mantra.

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There was a sense that the government was trying. It felt to me at least trying to wash its hands of a certain degree of responsibility.

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We're just doing what the science tells us.

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Now, science is obviously going to be incredibly important in influencing the kind of decisions that we make.

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But it cannot determine because the best data on the rate of the viral spread and the effectiveness of vaccinations and

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the effectiveness of social distancing measures that can't determine what a government should do in response to that.

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They have to weigh lots of sometimes possibly competing values and priorities when they're making that decisions.

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So to link that back to transparency, I really think that the government in this pandemic gave a false theory of how decision making was happening.

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It was all done just in the course of scientific evidence.

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And if you just actually opened up the black box of decision making and showed how complicated and multifaceted and validated those decisions were,

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you might not necessarily increase just because you've actually told people that you're making these decisions in a completely different way.

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Another thing I say, and this is I think was done excellently,

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particularly by the scientific advisers during the pandemic, was just the need to communicate uncertainty.

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So in the context of the pandemic,

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you are necessarily going to be making decisions before all the information you might like in order to make that decision is going to be available.

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So it's left an essential part of communicating policy to communicate that uncertainty and to justify decision making in

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the light of it and justify the fact that you might need to make a different decision when more information is available.

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So a bit more humility and a little more honesty about the fact that the government just has to make value laden judgements.

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Absolutely. And I think there was a real moral hollowing out of decision making in a pandemic.

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You very rarely heard government ministers talking in terms of the wide range of values that they would

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have to be considering in order to make decisions a bit more honesty about that would be fantastic.

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You know, you could see moments where this mantra of follow the science was really crumbling.

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For example, in the lead up to Christmas 2021, with a debate around whether vaccine certification for large venues should be introduced,

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I think it was pretty obvious that some of the factors going into that decision were, for example,

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preserving internal party unity within the Conservative Party as well as the kind of issues of public health.

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So a greater honesty and a greater openness and a greater prioritisation of the right kind of normative considerations.

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Jamie Webb, thank you very much indeed. Thank you very much, David.

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Thanks for listening to the Pandemic Ethics Accelerator podcast.

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You can hear more in this six part series on University of Oxford Podcasts.

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Well, that's Pandemic Ethics dot UK.