SO: At today's talk, I was thinking about possible definitions of trust; I have a suspicion that a decent understanding of what's involved in it will be necessary to get some sense of how (e.g.) humanitarian interventions play out beyond the initial moment of intervention, the conditions needed to bring people back into civil and international society. So I submit the following, mostly in the hope that James will tell me if I'm violating ordinary language usage here:
In a two-way relation, trust functions as an exclusionary reason, so that A believes a change in the relative position or interest of B will not fundamentally alter the relationship*, (and vice versa)**.
*or, depending on how much you want to implicate institutions, 'will not lead to a renegotiation of the underlying terms of the relationship'
**my suspicion is that trust can run one way (and in an instance of humanitarian intervention, it may be more important that it run from those in the country being intervened in to those intervening than the opposite), but, for some obvious reasons, works better running both ways
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
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