Intragroup trust can enable intergroup brutality
Evidence
If we wish generally to moralize the notion of trust, we will have to take out cases of acting on trust to accomplish bad ends. Such a move, however, is perverse in either an explanatory theory or a conceptual account. It is better just to let trust work its way and then to judge the morality of acting on it. Members of a community may trust one another in ways that are commonly all to the good, and yet their trust may enable them to subjugate and brutalize a neighboring community. For example, Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic might well have been able to cooperate to wreak gruesome harm on Bosnian Muslims only because they trusted each other. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 372
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- XREF: Connects to the Hobbesian predation the reader expects in Saramago’s blindness epidemic — trusting insiders (the wife’s group) cooperating against outsiders (the blind masses) — and to Hardin’s own claim here that trust enables coordinated harm.
- ADDENDUM: Resonates with ‘On Sacrifice’ insofar as ritual social order within a community can stabilize stratified predation against outsiders — real-world case of solidarity funding subjugation.
Related
- Trust is morally neutral; mutual trust can enable atrocity (similarity 0.89)
- External distrust or threat drives people to build stronger local trust enclaves (similarity 0.79)
Broader Connections
- Communal trustworthiness often turns outsiders into targets of abuse
#corroborates(0.90) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 827