Trust of science and technology and of the people who conduct research and invent, design, develop, manufacture, operate, maintain, and repair technology is essential to the development of science and technology. When the trust proves unwarranted, however, the result can be disaster in forms varying from harm to health and safety, to persistent distortions of knowledge, to theft of credit or property that cripples cooperation necessary to support the growth of knowledge and development of technology. A deeper question is what it means for science and technology, and the people responsible for them, to be trustworthy.

The Concepts of Trust and Trustworthiness

Although Sissela Bok (1978) discussed trust as a moral resource beginning in the 1970s, the question of the morality of trust relationships—the conditions under which, from a moral point view, one ought to trust—was not explicitly discussed until a decade later by Annette Baier...