In 2023, M R. X. Dentith edited a special issue—“Conspiracy Theory Theory”—of Social Epistemology (37:4). SERRC readers are familiar with Dentith’s philosophical work on conspiracy theory theory—work that includes several published articles and replies and an edited book Taking Conspiracy Theories Seriously (2018) published in the “Collective Studies in Knowledge and Society” series (Lexington/Roman & Littlefield).

Please find below Part III—and please refer to Part I and Part II—of a three-part exchange between Patrick Stokes—with whom SERRC readers are also familiar (2016; 2017)—and M Dentith. The exchange comes out of email correspondence regarding Stokes’s article “The Normative Turn in Conspiracy Theory Theory?” that appears in the “Conspiracy Theory Theory” special issue.^[a] … [please read below the rest of the article].

Image credit: odwalker via Flickr / Creative Commons

P (Patrick Stokes): I should stress that I too am no Kantian – though I’d still take Kant over Hegel, simply because life is too damn short to read Hegel. But it may be that there’s a certain deontic dimension to what I’m arguing here that’s getting lost in the admittedly loose way I’m using the word “flourishing.” The point isn’t simply that trust is normative because if we trust other people our lives (tend to) go pragmatically better. If that were the case, if the world was different such that trust didn’t (tend to) lead to flourishing, then trust would not be normative. (A similar problem bedevils virtue ethics per se, which threatens to collapse into either a prudentialist egoism or deontology.)

For one thing, the “default trust” claim doesn’t rest on the idea that we learn in advance that trust produces better outcomes and then start trusting as a result. One of the things that’s been discussed in both the economics and philosophical literatures on trust is the idea that trust is essentially non-calculative. It’s not simply a matter of reliance, which we would indeed calculate probabilistically. As Karen Jones (2017) for instance has argued, the distinctive ways in which we react to being betrayed wouldn’t make sense if trust was simply a probabilistic reliance on someone acting in a certain way. I may be annoyed that my seemingly reliable computer has broken down, but I’m not angry or hurt by it. We can’t answer a cheated-on spouse’s outraged “How could you?!” with “Quite easily, in fact: about a fifth of people do.” In that context, I’m not sure that we do form justified, evidence-based beliefs about how likely people are to cheat – or that if we do, those beliefs are decisive for our everyday trust of others. (Trust, we might say, is always a little gratuitous; it always goes a little further than the evidence would mandate). So to borrow one last time from Løgtrup, it’s not that trust is good because it leads to flourishing, but rather, the fact that trust leads to flourishing is part of how we know trust is good.

Hence I wouldn’t say the analogy is with Just World beliefs, understood as beliefs that are advantageous (and thus merely prudentially normative). You’re right that such beliefs are structurally very similar to Kantian postulates of practical reason, but the source of the normativity is different. To me the analogy with default trust would not be a heuristic like “everyone gets what they deserve’ but one like “there’s a little bit of good in everyone”: a basically unfalsifiable belief that can sometimes lead you into harm, but which also captures something of how we should treat other people i.e. charitably.

We could of course object here that exclusive romantic relationships are different to most forms of social relationship, where the interaction can be so fleeting or insignificant that it may make little sense to even speak of “trust” at all. Yet even in those cases, I’d want to say that there’s a default posture of trust in play, such that when we do experience deceit, threat, or violence, it’s always experienced as something of a shock or an exception, something that provokes outrage. Something has gone badly wrong if we’re so used to being betrayed or lied to that we just shrug and accept it as part of how the world works – a point that I think is not inconsistent with your genealogical story about how some societies become more just. We know some groups and some entire societies have very good reasons to be more inclined to suspicion, reasons rooted in unjust power dynamics both historical and contemporary. But even then, there’s an implicit normative claim buried in there, a reassertion of a (no doubt mythical) default social and political order in which people just don’t treat each other like that. When governments do terrible things, you sometimes hear appalled citizens say “this isn’t who we are.” That phrase rightly invites mockery, and the retort “given we’re doing this, this clearly is who we are, and telling ourselves otherwise is just making excuses.” But that phrase also functions as a reassertion of a normative order in which these actions are outside the bounds of moral thinkability.

In that sense, the reluctant particularist, living in a liberal democracy characterised by relatively open institutions, is not so much indulging in wishful thinking as defending an order in which actual conspiracy is something aberrant and exceptional, and not, as many particularists seem to assume, an everyday part of the human behavioural repertoire. Perhaps reluctant particularism is thus more Kantian than I realise, given this part is starting to sound a lot like the fourth formulation of the categorical imperative: act as though you already live in the “kingdom of ends.’

I agree that “We really don’t know how often conspiracy theorists of one stripe go around rejecting conspiracy theories of another.” But note that in the cases you cite here, the incredulity is over one specific conspiracy theory in relation to another, not about conspiratorial vs non-conspiratorial explanations. The instances you describe are, more or less by definition, cases of people rejecting a particular conspiracy explanation in favour of another conspiracy theory. In Icke’s case, he’s rejecting the 2012 end-of-days claims because they don’t cohere with other conspiracy theories he does accept. In the case of 9/11 Inside Job folks, they reject the wackier theories, but still adhere to what they take to be more credible conspiracy theories. (Indeed this occasionally seems to be presented as an opportunity for a new bit of conspiracy theorising: the person making the wacky claim must be a plant trying to make the others look bad.) Of course I’ll defer to your far more extensive experience with conspiracy discourse, but I don’t recall many instances of conspiracy theorists deciding some significant event or observation is probably innocent after all.

M (M R. X. Dentith): So, I’m increasingly of the mind that where we disagree depends a lot on what we both think of as “trust” and particularly a notion of default and/or foundational trust.

Recently (well, relatively recently, given this is an email exchange over a lengthy period of time) I was talking to an academic colleague/friend in common about how people talk about their sense there has been a loss of trust in authority over the course of the latter half of the 20^th Century and now well into the 21^st Century. We both claimed that the problem isn’t necessarily the loss of trust but, rather, how we probably were too trusting of authorities before such authorities fell from grace.

So, maybe the problem isn’t one of a default or foundational trust but,^[1] rather, the gratuitous way we (societies and individuals both) allocate trust and then fall back upon that notion of trust to defend a view of the world. So, let me concede, for the sake of argument, that we need some default state of trust in order to flourish. If so, I’m also happy to stake my personal view that personally I think that people are also naively trusting of institutions that do not deserve that trust, and that I think I’ve produced both arguments and evidence to support that contention over the near decade I’ve been publishing on conspiracy theories. Thus, my worry is that reluctant particularism rests to some extent on an misapplication of trust to institutions that do not deserve to be trusted at the very least that much. This, in turns, leads the reluctant particularist to think that they have a default dismissive attitude towards things labelled as “conspiracy theories” (even if the reluctant particularist can sometimes be inspired to treat some of these conspiracy theories seriously). After all, if the reluctant particularist just needs to believe things are generally how they appear to be, and therefore exceptions are extraordinary (and require extraordinary evidence), then we have to ask if we really know that things are generally as they appear to be? Or is at least part of that kind of belief a product or condition of the default and sometimes gratuitous trust we place(d) in institutions that, it turns out, we have evidential grounds to say we should either distrust, or at least not trust as much as we have?

P: I quite like that you use the word “gratuitous” there. As noted above, arguably all trust is at least a little bit gratuitous. Trust necessarily goes beyond the trustworthiness of the other party to some degree – otherwise it wouldn’t be trust, but simple calculative reliance. The sheer fact of human interdependence engenders vulnerability, and the response to that involves a trust that goes beyond what we can predictively expect of each other. But I agree that naïve trust in institutions is a problem, and to reiterate, the standing tension between the suspicion of power we need for healthy civil society and the need for default trust is probably just irresolvable.

Where does that leave us? How do you hold institutions to account without abdicating the background trust that I’ve suggested is a requirement for successful ethical and social life? We might get a glimpse of part of an answer in a passage in Løgstrup (no no, stay with me here), in his reading of Sartre’s play Le Diable et le Bon Dieu. Here, Løgstrup describes how the character Goetz von Berlichingen deals with the treacherous Weislingen:

He will neither trivialize nor disguise the fact, neither from Weislingen nor from himself, that it is a traitor he is dealing with. He will discover Weislingen’s traps, thwart him whenever he is able, and take all precautionary measures. He will take up the challenge, acting prudently and shrewdly, narrowing the scope for Weislingen’s treachery as far as he can. He will let Weislingen know that he is aware of what he can expect from him. Yet in all of this, he will still be giving him a chance—the chance which consists in his not washing his hands of him; and in so doing Goetz von Berlichingen will realize trust and openness—on his own terms and not on Weislingen’s treacherous terms. The opportunity he offers Weislingen is that of being won over to his side against his own treacherous self. No matter how convinced Goetz von Berlichingen may be that this opportunity, too, Weislingen will abuse – he is to have it all the same. But he cherishes no illusions (Løgstrup 2007, 57–8).

Goetz knows Weislingen is not trustworthy, but he “trusts” him in the sense of not shutting him down, but maintaining a certain openness and receptivity to him, giving him the chance to do better. (For more on this, see (Stokes 2020)). It’s a difficult model, and it’s one that’s arguably better suited to interpersonal trust than trust in institutions. Still, it seems to me to capture part of that normative dimension of trust: we don’t just bloodlessly evaluate how trustworthy people are and then decide to trust or not trust them, but rather we find ourselves in a world where trust is how things should be and then have to deal with having that trust periodically abused. There’s a number of ways we can respond to that, from a defensive distrust that becomes corrosive, to a doomed attempt to retreat into naivety. I’d suggest that approach to Weislingen, an approach that holds the other to account without writing them off, might give us a clue as to what a post-disillusionment background trust in institutions might look like. (Perhaps it’d be useful advice for people who have been cheated on too. Given the sheer numbers involved, that could be quite a lucrative side-hustle for an entrepreneurially-minded philosopher…)

M: I’m tempted to end this correspondence with “You fool! You walked into my trap!” but, in truth, I think where we have ended up is not quite where we started, but still somewhere in that vicinity. But, like all good conversations, I think it’s clearer now than before as to where we disagree. Not just that, but why, and—in these perilous and polarised times—that is worth celebrating.

As you say, there might be an irresolvable tension between the trust we need (although perhaps I’m more on the side of “assume” here) in others in order to flourish as individuals or members of communities, and the kind of trust we place in the institutional structures we have erected due to the fact our communities are now so large that we cannot establish interpersonal trust with all the people within them. I think that is the crucial difference: it seems that we might well need a default or assumed trust in others in order to survive, but a default trust in institutions is, I argue, been evidently misplaced. I think we can tell a story of interpersonal trust and social flourishing without having to necessarily drag in what I suspect is a related but not identifical notion of trust in institutions.

Perhaps, maybe, this is also where the tension in our work on the ethics of accusation comes in. Accusing one’s parent, one’s friend, or even someone in your local community of being involved in a conspiracy is something we should be cautious of if our evidence is not firm. But accusing someone in an institution of conspiracy seems like it has a lower evidential threshold given what we know about institutions. Again, it is a tension that is not easily resolved (look at how many words we used to both talk and avoid talk of it), and such a tension is subject to abuse; whatever we think on the appropriateness or inappropriateness of such accusations (and thus their moral weight) in the institutional case, we both agree that people like Donald J. Trump and Alex Jones (drongoes both, but but perhaps not well-intentioned ones) sometimes abuse such accusations (often, it seems, in pursuit of denying their role in some conspiracy). But we recognise that some people are licensed by their position in society to make such calls (journalists, the police, etc.), and in the case of the less powerful making those accusations, I think a lot hinges on how we cash out the (lack of) institutional trust in particular cases.

Maybe the path out of this is not reluctant particularism but, rather, optimistic particularism instead. Despite a host of academic credits to my name that would seem to cast me as the arch-pessimist (and which has earnt me the moniker from at least one other philosopher as a “conspiracy apologist’, although I’m more worried my work makes me look like a libertarian…) in my day-to-day life I still act like an optimist. So, even though objectively I have little evidence to support such optimism when it comes to politics, it seems I have a certain faith (given my behaviour) that things can get better. With that in mind, perhaps the optimistic particularist is someone who thinks part-and-parcel of the particularist project is to grapple with the problems conspiracies present. Part of this is to remind people of the way the term “conspiracy theory” gets abused (sometimes to allow people to get away with conspiracies), part of this is to find a way to reform how we treat conspiratorial reasoning (to work out when it goes right and when it goes wrong), with the hoped for consequence of all this work that this will put us in a position as a society to reform (or perhaps replace) the offending institutions. The results of such an optimistic particularist project would, then, wipe away the original sin of those institutions, and give us a fresh basis (a new covenant, to push the religious analogy to breaking point) to establish our trust in them, knowing that (at least for a time) those institutions have earnt the trust of the people.

❧ Please refer to Part I and Part II of M R. X. Dentith and Patrick Stokes’s “Corresponding Conspiracy Theory Theorists”.

References

Jones, Karen. 2017. “ ‘But I Was Counting On You!’.” The Philosophy of Trust, edited by Paul Faulkner and Thomas Simpson, 90–108. Oxford University Press.

Løgstrup, Knud Ejler. 2007. Beyond the Ethical Demand. Introduction by Kees van Kooten Niekerk. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Stokes, Patrick. 2020. “To Trust the Liar: Løgstrup and Levinas on Ethics, War, and Openness.” The Monist 103 (1): 102-116.

^[1] Although I dispute we can’t answer a cheated spouse’s with “Quite easily, in fact: about a fifth of people do”; I know some people who have relationships where that would count as an adequate response… maybe my friends and I are just wired differently, and thus we treat trust in a more probabilisitic fashion despite philosopher’s objections that we shouldn’t.

^[a] The following articles appear in the 2023 special issue “Conspiracy Theory Theory”, Social Epistemology (37: 4), edited by M R. X. Dentith:
• “The Future of the Philosophy of Conspiracy Theory: An Introduction to the Special Issue on Conspiracy Theory Theory”, M R. X. Dentith;
• “Conspiracy Theory and (or as) Folk Psychology”, Brian L. Keeley;

❧ Keely’s article received replies from Jesse Walker (2023) and Lee Basham (2023).

• “‘Conspiracy Theory’ as a Tonkish Term: Some Runabout Inference-Tickets from Truth to Falsehood”, Charles Pigden;
• “What Does It Mean for a Conspiracy Theory to Be a ‘Theory’?”, J. C. M. Duetz;
• “Who is a Conspiracy Theorist?”, Melina Tsapos;
• “Conceptual Engineering, Conceptual Domination, and the Case of Conspiracy Theories”, Matthew Shields;

❧ Shields’s article received a reply from M. Giulia Napolitano and Kevin Reuter (2023) to which Shields (2023) responded.

• “Conspiracy Theories and Democratic Legitimacy”, Will Mittendorf;
• “‘That’s Just a Conspiracy Theory!’: Relevant Alternatives, Dismissive Conversational Exercitives, and the Problem of Premature Conclusions”, Rico Hauswald;

❧ Hauswald’s article received a reply from David Coady (2023).

• “Towards a Conceptual Framework for Conspiracy Theory Theories”, Niki Pfeifer;
• “Some Conspiracy Theories”, M R. X. Dentith;
• “The Normative Turn in Conspiracy Theory Theory?”, Patrick Stokes.

In addition, Steve Clarke (2023) wrote an article that replies to many of the articles in the issue. In 2022, Kurtis Hagen provided “A Bibliography and Brief History of the Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories.” By searching the names above, or key words from the article titles, readers will find numerous resources on conspiracy theories on the SERRC.

Categories: Articles, Critical Replies

Tags: accusations, conspiracy theories, conspiracy theory generalists and particularists, conspiracy theory theory, M R.X. Dentith, Patrick Stokes, power and politics, SERR 5/17/2024