Each week on The Minefield, we walk a fine line between reflecting on certain significant events that have captured public attention, and delving more deeply into the often concealed ethical principles at work. Its a tension we feel constantly: wanting to be responsive, but not wanting the immediacy and sheer speed of current affairs to prevent genuine moral reflection.

Well, the discipline and austerity bound up with the holy month of Ramadan presents us with an irresistible opportunity to focus our minds intently, not just on this or that moral problem, but on some of the more systemic vices that hold us all in their grip. So throughout the month of June, were going to engage in a bit of cultural diagnosis of what we deem to be the fundamental problems that afflict our common life problems that are all the more pernicious because theyre rarely recognised as such.

And for us, they dont come any more fundamental than the problem of pervasive mistrust. As the philosopher Bernard Williams put it, trust at its most basic level is the willingness of one party to rely on another to act in certain ways. But because the consequences of being duped are now regarded as so much more damaging than any benefits that might accrue from mutual reliance, we seem to have decided as an entire culture that its better not to trust at all. Or, as the case may be, to delegate the function of trust to impersonal mechanisms from regulation to welfare services.

And yet, as the great 18th-century Italian economist and philosopher Antonio Genovesi argued against the more austere claims of his contemporary, Adam Smith human sociality and just exchange rely on a certain public faith (res publica): by which he meant our shared capacity to entrust ourselves to the care of others, and in turn to prove trustworthy. Without such faith, the social bond itself unravels.

So the question could not be more stark: unless we cultivate the capacity to trust, to rely on others for what is most precious to our common life, are we condemning ourselves to morally emaciated existences defined by fear, envy and mutual disdain?

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Can We Do Without Trust? - ABC Online