Onora O'Neill and Griceian Trust: The Principle of Conversational Self-Love and the Principle of Conversational Benevolence

Speranza

There’s something Griceian about O’Neill.

No, I don’t mean Oona O’Neill, whose life is portrayed in “Rebel in the Rye” – now playing.

I mean, Onora, the philosopher.

Exactly what is Griceian about O’Neill is a matter of dispute, as Popper might agree.

In any case, philosopher Onora O’Neill, but not Grice, received “The Berggruen Memorial Prize” for her thoughts on interpersonal trust, among other ideas. 

Grice didn’t – but he developed his ideas on interpersonal trust in Oxford – O’Neill is Cantab., rather. In his Oxford lectures on implicature, Grice speaks of the conversational principle of self-interest (or self-love) and how it should combine with a conversational principle of benevolence (Actually, his phrasings are: ‘principle of conversational self-love’ and ‘principle of conversational benevolence,’ but in an O’Neill play, those can easily get exchanged.

And while Grice spent most of his time in Oxford and Berkeley, O’Neill will be visting New York in December.

The prize is awarded to a philosopher whose ideas “have profoundly shaped human self-understanding and advancement in a rapidly changing world.”

It was instituted to honour Berggruen.

Unlike the Nobel Prize, which is given in a ceremony in Scandinavia, the Berggruen prize is given in a ceremony in New York.

The prize was inaugurated last year by the Berggruen Institute, a research organization.

O’Neill (that’s Onora, not Oona) is best-known for her work in ethics, which builds on the work of Kant, a German philosopher – “with a Scots surname.”

The prize jury was led by Kwame Anthony Appiah. Appiah praised O’Neill (that’s Onora, not Oona) for providing insight on

“the central questions of our time, [including] the role of interpersonal trust in enabling autonomy.”

Griceian trust, in particular, has been a major theme in the oeuvre by O’Neill (again, that’s Onora, not Oona), elaborated in pieces like “Justice, Trust and Accountability,” as well as a memorable TED Talk (named after “TED”), called “What we don’t understand about trust,” – which really should read, “What we don’t understand about Griceian trust,” and even, via implicature, “What we don’t understand about Grice’s unpublished Oxford lectures on implicature and trust as it pertains to his principles of conversational self-love and conversational benevolence,” and which anyway, _challenge_ (in typical Griceian fashion) the frequently heard call to “re-build trust” across society.

“Frankly,” O’Neill (that’s Onora, not Oona) said, “I think that aim is a a stupid aim.” The audience were slightly surprised, and she goes on, as per explicature: “Allow me to explain: I would *aim*, rather, to have _more_ [Griceian] trust in the [Griceian] trustworthy but not in the [un-Griceian]untrustworthy.” O’Neill goes on, relying on one of Grice’s favourite figures of rhetoric – cfr. litotes and meiosis --: “In fact, I aim positively to try NOT to trust the UN-trustworthy.””

The call to re-build trust, O’Neill says, “gets things backwards.”

Judith Baker and H. P. Grice would trust O’Neill there. But Baker and Grice (or Grice and Baker, if you prefer) tried to see how obligation ultimately ‘cashes’ in _desire_ or interest – and that’s how things ‘get gotten’ forwards, as it were.

This is not the first prize for O’Neill (that’s Onora, not Oona), a crossbench member of the House of Lords (Oona, by default, was the top debutante in Manhattan), and a professor of philosophy at Cambridge (where Witters and Moore taught – which gave Austin an excuse, overheard by Grice, to utter, “Some like Witters, but Moore’s MY man”), and who (Onora O’Neill, not Oona) was the winner of the Holberg Prize (to honour Holberg), and which, since we were talking about Scandianavia, is awarded by the Norwegian parliament. O’Neill (that’s Onora, not Oona) also won the Kant Prize – whereas Grice gave the Kant lectures (When Grice was invited two years later to give the John Locke lectures, he crossed out – “Kant” and wrote “Locke” instead – but a comparison of both manuscripts show a difference “here and there.”

REFERENCES

Baker, J. and H. P. Grice, “Trust,” – The Grice Papers, Bancroft, Berkeley.

Grice, H. P. Oxford lectures on implicature – The principle of conversational self-love and the principle of conversational benevolence.

O’Neill, O. Trust.

Warnock, G. J. Trust.