Cooperation and Cause

I'm interested in Blackburn's account of cooperation and cooperative dispositions. As he claims, "success needs society" which speaks to the idea that mutual cooperation leaves all parties better off than in, say Hobbes' state of nature, and "society needs trust" (198). Cooperation seems to stem from two main places for Blackburn, and perhaps at different orders: from the acknowledgement of eligible agents that "the chance of their being the only group to benefit from unrestrained greed is vanishingly small" which would lead to a socially better "cooperative state" (181) where all are more likely to enjoy greater benefits and from the motivation of trust (194). In the first case it is not more rational to cooperate, we choose to do so because cooperation "appeals most to us" because of its appeal to satisfying our concerns (181). If they cannot see this appeal, they are doomed to the "invisible boot" and stay in a mutually disadvantageous competitive and aggressive state. 

Trust seems to be Blackburn's way of more or less securing human action in accordance with this appeal. He introduces trust by suggesting that war is not the only way nature has provided for us to interact: "we grow into communities in which the mechanism of counting on people and signalling that we can be counted upon is embedded" (194). The motivation for trust is then described in two primary ways: your goodwill and the knowledge that others rely on you (194). He says that, although there is no "inevitability theorem" dictating that trust will always evolve, there is also no "impossibility theorem" proving how trust cannot evolve; we rarely have a guarantee that others are to be universally mistrusted (196). So, with the benefit of cooperation along with this optimistic possibility of beneficial evolution, we should be inclined, Blackburn argues, to trust others, and place an "organic growth model in place of a rational design model" which might suggest trust to be irrational because it is not guaranteed or because it may not immediately maximize one's utility. We must develop "habits of reliance" according to him. While certainly society needs trust, I do not think Blackburn's arguments definitively prove that we should trust one another. The possibility of evolution of any sort of trust seems to be a weak claim akin to saying that one should certainly do something just because there's a chance it becomes something greater and positive, despite the risk. There are many who would choose not to act. It also seems like a reach to suggest that our motivations for trust in cooperative relationships stems primarily from goodwill or knowledge of another's reliance. These seems to be ingredients for exploitation (as we've discussed in previous works). It makes more sense to me that trust is treated similarly to how Sen (I believe) treated morality. Being trusting and trustworthy (like being moral) is rational (although I know Blackburn doesn't like this distinction) because otherwise, in a society where all pursued narrow self-interests and disregarded cooperation, all would be worse off. Unfortunately, if one is not concerned with being trustworthy in Blackburn's conception that person is acting in a perfectly permissible way, as being uncooperative is a reasonable choice for them to make due to consistency or otherwise.