Virtue-based motives alone cannot sustain trust without explicit impersonal beliefs supporting them.

Evidence

Such codes present themselves as self-justifying, but they are not. The virtues of virtue, unlike the motives of friends, may be self-evident, but they are by no means self-evidently secure. Hence the point that I take to be implicit in Dunn’s discussion of Locke, the third of the three reasons for believing that a socially extensive and enduring trust is not an easy thing to create: that ‘motive’ cannot do all the work, in theoretical reason or in practical reason, that we would like it to do. It has to be buttressed by ‘belief’, by some more explicit and elaborated and perhaps also more impersonally grounded set of reasons to act. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1525

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels Hardin’s argument that trust requires observable constraints and more than internalized motives; resonates with the Blindness reading where the doctor’s wife is the sole externally observable guarantor.