Effective Trustworthiness in the Professions For trustworthiness to be effective at developing trust, professional communities work to develop robust reputations for the professional social role, while individual practitioners utilize this reputation in their professional signature and buttress it with their authenticity signaling. 1. Trust has at least two enemies: bad character and poor information.1 2. When well communicated, trustworthiness becomes effective trustworthiness. 3. The development of trustworthiness, effective trustworthiness cannot be developed by the professional alone, but is the result of the concerted effort of the profession working as an ethical community 4. The ethical community establishes a reputation for the professional role. 5. However, reputation of the professional role alone is insufficient for effective trustworthiness. Professionals themselves must be adept at signalling their own trustworthiness to trust-evaluators 6. What are professional communities functions: Support ongoing justificatory and application discourses that interpret the telos of the profession, determine the obligations and virtues that constitute competent professional practice, and how those virtues are best practiced in applied contexts. Use professional discourse to symbolically construct the trustworthy professional as a social type that practitioners are encouraged to internalize as part of their own sense of authenticity. Create discursive products, such as ethics codes, mission statements, white papers, and ethics opinions to articulate the demands of the professional role and give I discursive legitimacy in the minds of community members. Work to create educational environments that promote the development of moral competence and professional virtues. Create institutional environments, which lend practical credibility to the behavioral and dispositional demands of being a trustworthy professional. Develop and support disciplinary regimes that disincentivize misconduct. The communication of ones trustworthiness in the professional context invites clients, employers, the public, and even professional peers, to trust the professional in light of the professionals commitment to ethical conduct. 1. Effectively communicating a professionals trustworthiness requires not only the development of a positive community reputation, but also the appropriate signaling that links the particular practitioner with that reputation. The most effective signal of ones trustworthiness comes from the ethical nature of ones conduct. 2. When professionals act in ways that are deceptive, paternalistic, unfair, or manipulative, trust evaluators withdraw trust and adopt a variety of hedging strategies that limit their vulnerability, but also make professional practice much less effective. Thus, to overcome these problems, it is essential that impression management be understood within a broader, nonstrategic action context in which clients and other dependents are treated in ways consistent with the trustworthy dispositions that professionals claim to possess. 3. The idea of communicative action is best understood in contrast with strategic action. In strategic action agents are not interested in mutual understanding or intersubjective evaluation of their goals and the means to attain them. They are interested instead in efficiently achieving their goals, and treat others as objective elements of the world that may be utilized in order to achieve their ends 4. In contrast, communicative action is a second-person standpoint, grounded on an I-Thou participant stance, mediated through communication, toward mutual understanding, intersubjective evaluation, and consensus. Communicative action begins with the practical commitment that the other is an inherently valuable member of ones moral community to whom one owes rational accountability. 5. Communicative action creates a context in which professionals are able to put their virtues to work. In recognizing the client as a Thou with inherent dignity, professionals commit themselves to treating the client with honesty, beneficence, discretion, and in ways that respects his or her autonomy. Treating clients virtuously in the context of communicative action creates real substance that supports the signals of ones trustworthiness. This commitment is expressed in a number of explicit promises, such as oaths and ethics codes, and is implied by the totality of the circumstances by when an individual presents him or herself as a professional. 1. Reputational development by the professional community serves as an important bootstrapping measure by which trust-evaluators can build prima facie trust with professionals. This allows the impression management of the individual professional to develop the richer levels of trust necessary for effective professional practice. 2. This trust is reinforced by the professionals demonstration of trustworthiness through virtuous behavior in the context of communicative action. In honoring the trust of those who depend on them, professionals not only enhance that trust, they also promote the generalized reputation of their social rolewith the end result of promoting the effective trustworthiness of their profession generally. 3. At the community level, the profession works to create the kind of symbolic identity, training, and credentialing standards that produce genuinely trustworthy professionals. Professional communities also use these efforts to promote the reputation of the professional role or social-type. At the individual level, each professional can utilize the reputation of the professional role by signaling his or her authorized occupation of that role. Professionals also use interpersonal signaling to communicate their personal possession of trust-warranting properties. Finally, the substantive ethical and moral quality of professional conduct itself has a feedback effect on the reputation of their professional role. 4. Members of a profession are in it together when it comes to building trust with clients and other dependents. The conduct of unscrupulous professionals has a negative effect on the reputation needed by all members of the profession in offering their effective expert assistance. Professional misconduct leads trust evaluators to infer that the professional social-type is not trustworthy, and that the signals given by the professional community and the individual professionals are but manipulative window dressing 5. The interconnectedness of professionals in maintaining the reputation essential for effective trustworthiness provides yet another reason for professionals, as members of the professional community, to adopt the authenticity paradigm of professional ethics that aims to develop the virtues necessary for individuals to be trustworthy professionals. 6. In the development of the reputation of the professional role as well as the identity and authenticity signaling of professional practitioners, trust evaluators are assured that professionals possess trust-warranting properties and can therefore be relied upon to exercise the professional virtues in the responsible care of the interests entrusted to them. In making such assurances, professionals, as members of communities, and as individuals, make a commitment to those they serve- for example through oaths. 7. A professional oath is clearly a promise, as it invites the public and ones peers to trust the professional to engage in the accepted standards of conduct. As moral statements, oaths also make clear the professionals recognition that he or she is morally bound by the pledged standards of conduct. The appearances created by professional conduct are by no means simply a matter of marketing or brand. Because professionals have moral and ethical reasons to be effectively trustworthy, the impression management of professionals is a matter of praise or blame. .......... Assignment Beside from oaths, what are the various forms of communication and signaling used by professionals to invite trust best understood as promises? .............. Assignment answer must be more than 5 pages