The Grammar of Trust as Ethical Challenge

In the last few decades, many have stressed the fundamental significance of trust for people and organizations, politics and economics. The observation that the presence of trust between people comprises an entirely critical condition for humans to be able to share their existence with each other, has led K. E. Løgstrup to develop a complete philosophy of life as well as an ethical theory through the fact that we normally meet each other with trust as point of departure (Løgstrup 1956/1997). In a similar manner, Niklas Luhmann has argued in favor of the importance of trust in reducing social complexity and in creating scope for human action transcending time by claiming the future in advance (Luhmann 1979). In the wake of Francis Fukuyama’s distinction between low-trust and high-trust societies, it has been argued that the growing economic significance of trust for complex postindustrial knowledge-based societies is increasingly supported by flexible networks. If people cannot trust each other, cooperation will only occur within the framework of systems of formal rules and regulations, resulting in increased transactional costs. But in efficient organizations of a “high-trust society,” there is, on the contrary, little need for contracts and legal regulations due to the presence of mutual trust (Fukuyama 1995).