Venue: Jeppe Vontilius Auditorium
Chair: Uffe Juul-Jensen, Aarhus University, Denmark
| 15.20-15.35 | Anna Schneider-Kamp, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark: “I don’t need a Doctor – I have a wife”: Trust in Modern Patients’ Therapy Processes |
| 15.35-15.50 | Ella Sihvonen, Sociology University of Helsinki, Finland: Parenting, Experts and Trust |
| 15.50-16.05 | Lorna Zischka, University of Reading, England: Social capital stocks, giving flows and welfare outcomes |
| 16.05-16.20 | Discussion |
Who is to trust:
Trust has been based on authority and status and trust has been widely considered a basic good and a condition for social life. We are, according to the philosopher Onora O’Neill, no longer prepared to place trust on the basis of status. Research shows that this is true at least in some important contexts. Medicine and health care are illustrative fields for illuminating trust and the changing meaning and role of trust.
Since Antiquity and until the end of the 20th century the doctor-patient relationship has been brought out as a paradigm of a trusting relationship. This has been changing over the last 30-40 years. “For the patient the erosion of trust is liberating” claims Richard Horton, editor of the famous medical journal The Lancet. He also claims that trust based upon status and authority is being replaced by a more qualified kind of trust. Horton adds: “The present difficulty is not the loss of trust or the challenge to doctor’s traditional authority. It is that we are in a phase of uncertain transition.”
Is a more qualified kind of trust actually emerging or is trust being replaced by mechanism of governmentality and neoliberal control? Managers and politicians intervene in medicine and health care as never before. The media, users and their networks and organizations challenge traditional medical hegemony. All these changes are sometimes presented as contributions to democratization of society in general and of the welfare state in particular.
Is what way could erosion of (traditional) trust be liberating? Are professionals motivated or forced to trust citizens more as citizens are been given more responsibility, influence and authority in matters of health and welfare? Or is it only powerful groups of citizens, people who have a voice, who are recognized and so trusted while weak and vulnerable individuals and groups are becoming object of systematic suspicion? So, is the erosion of classical trust a challenge to the ethical and political ideals of justice and solidarity?
In the workshop we’ll broaden traditional ethical approaches to trust. Trust will be discussed in a political and politico-philosophical context.
Organised by Uffe Juul Jensen (Philosophy and History of Ideas).
