Philip K. Howard: On social trust and accountability

We mostly start with trust…

…but can end up without much.

“The Visit of the Plague in Milan’’ (F. Jenewein, 1899), a painting of a man stoned on suspicion of spreading the plague.

Social trust is a barometer for the health of society. A trusting society is more energetic, more collaborative, and more hopeful. America, unfortunately, is going in the wrong direction. Only one in five Americans trusts governing institutions, and only one in three trusts other people. America is now in a downward spiral of distrust, defensiveness, polarization, and greater distrust.

Social distrust is a kind of cancer, causing gears to grind ever more slowly. David Brooks, in his farewell New York Times column, connects Americans’ “loss of faith” in each other with their loss of hope for the future—over two-thirds of Americans say they no longer believe in the American dream.

How does America pull out of this downward spiral of distrust? Accepted wisdom is that America is just too diverse. But America has thrived with diversity since the latter half of the nineteenth century, and surveys suggest that Americans of diverse backgrounds still share basic values such as truthfulness, reciprocity (“Do unto others …”), and respect for the common good. 

Why don’t Americans just do what they think is right? Brooks argues that selfishness eroded trust after “four decades of hyperindividualism.” But Brooks doesn’t explain where hyperindividualism came from. Americans did not suddenly wake up with selfish values. What happened is that, trying to avoid bias, Americans were disempowered from making “value judgments” about other people. An unintended effect was that people learned they could get away with selfishly gaming the system.

The key to social trust is accountability. Trust erodes when people no longer feel others will abide by norms of fair dealing. Selfishness grows as people see it succeeding. What’s been lost is not our values of right and wrong, but confidence that other Americans will also be held to those values.

Social values can’t be sustained unless they are enforced—not by law, but by judgments of other people. Individuals in a free society are free to be rude, selfish, untruthful, irresponsible, and immoral, constrained only by the broad boundaries of law. But the rest of us are free to judge them accordingly. People who act selfishly are no longer respected, or excluded from positions of respect, or lose their jobs. 

For most of American history, mutual trust in the values of honor, integrity, and community was taken for granted because good character was an asset, not just virtue for its own sake, but a condition for success. People succeeded, as economist Friedrich Hayek observed, “according to what others think.” 

American culture provided a marketplace for good character as well as individual achievement—“a most conspicuous Theatre,” as George Washington predicted in 1783, “which seems to be peculiarly designated by Providence for the display of human greatness and felicity.”

America became the strongest society in human history not just because it unleashed the initiative of each individual. Atomized individuality soon bogs down in a society riven with distrust. America was supercharged by unleashing individual initiative within a culture of responsible values, or what Alexis de Tocqueville called “self-interest, rightly understood.”

These shared values allowed America to reap the benefits of high “social capital”—greater cooperation and social bonds, innovation, and hope for the future. But shared values evaporate, like a kind of dark magic, when people realize those values are no longer enforced. Mutual trust vanishes when people can act irresponsibly with impunity.

David Brooks is hardly the first observer to lament “the loss of a shared moral order,” in which Americans no longer act on what is “true, beautiful and good.” Almost three decades ago, political scientist Alan Wolfe found that Americans had “lost the distinction between right and wrong and desperately want it back.”

Americans lost the freedom to uphold core social values because of a deliberate change in legal and social philosophy. Coming out of the 1960s, the urge to avoid bias and unfairness became a top social priority. Civil rights laws were vital to end systemic segregation and other indefensible practices. But reformers wanted to go further and create a new system where unfairness would be no more.

The new idea was to replace human judgment with law. Thick rulebooks would prescribe exactly how to do things, and elaborate procedures would require officials to justify decisions with objective evidence. But people can still be unfair, so reformers had one more innovation: A new concept of individual rights that allowed any person to challenge decisions that affected them. Decisions about people in the workplace and elsewhere became fraught with legal risk. Supervisors were put to the proof that someone isn’t pulling their weight, or has bad character.

The freedom to live our values, and to associate with those who share our values, is a core strength of America’s pluralistic society. Each community needs its own moral integrity.

Americans no longer feel free to judge others. There’s hardly any cultural value more ingrained in modern America than the proscription against being “judgmental.” Political correctness is enforced ruthlessly, but judgments about personal character are taboo. Making decisions about someone’s moral character is tantamount to a violation of their rights. The evil to be purged is subjectivity, which is a synonym for bias. Who are you to judge?

Human judgment is indeed subjective. Judgment emerges from the black box of the human subconscious as an amalgam of perceptions, instincts, values, experience, biases, and more. Judgment is fallible—that’s why most organizations run important decisions by other people, and why psychologist Daniel Kahneman urged more reflective thinking.

But the only way to avoid the subjectivity of human judgment is to eliminate judgment altogether. How do you prove that someone has poor character? Even harder, how do you disprove that your judgment isn’t tainted by implicit bias?

So Americans abdicated making judgments about other people. There was “a massive redefinition of freedom,” historian Eric Foner found, “as a rejection of all authority.” The goal was virtuous—to enhance freedom by eliminating any possibility of unfairness. Instead, letting people “come up with their own individual values,” as Brooks observes, infected society with debilitating distrust. 

Leadership is a hollow concept without the authority to uphold shared values. Those values are activated mainly in supervisory decisions about personnel.

People judging people is the main mechanism for a moral culture. Otherwise, morality is just words. Does this person act in a way we respect and trust? Or is he self-serving? People who are selfish or antisocial should lose our votes, or lose their jobs, or lose our friendship. To rebuild a moral culture, Americans must be free to make these judgments.

But what if the leader is unfair? Or plays favorites? Law can certainly safeguard against patterns of discrimination. But extruding every personnel decision through a legal sieve has not enhanced fairness and human understanding. It has instead made candor extinct and exacerbated bias by chilling honest interaction.

Fairness in decisions about particular people is beyond the capacity of law. Fairness to one person is unfairness in the eyes of another. Making these judgments is an unavoidable necessity of collective activity. Scrutinizing personal judgments through the lens of objective proof does not enhance relations, but fosters a mindset of grievance and entitlement.

Morality has little connection to legality. The law protects against conduct so bad that it should be banned. Morality, on the other hand, is the practice of doing good. A society works because people come together in groups to achieve common goals, in business and in a wide variety of communal activities. How well those groups succeed depends in large part on adherence to shared norms. People must be free to associate based on their evaluation of moral character.

Rebuilding the framework for a moral society requires removing law from most social interactions—not devaluing moral judgments with legal bickering. Except for tortious conduct, such as sexual harassment and other misconduct, law should have nothing to do with how people get along—no lawsuits for individual personnel decisions, no lawsuits when someone says something offensive or makes someone feel “unsafe.”

Letting people interact freely should not be considered a novel risk for a society organized on the principle of individual freedom. Honest feedback causes pain, but failure is also the main way people learn. Letting people be spontaneous means some will put their feet in their mouths, but their authenticity is also a basis for trust. Let them apologize. Yes, all humans have implicit biases. But, for most people, biases diminish when we get to know each other. Any healthy organization strives to avoid unfairness. Good workers and helpful colleagues tend to do well, whatever their identity group or background.

But what about individual rights? The legal spotlight shines on the predicament of the one employee who may lose a job. But whose rights? What about the 28 students learning nothing from an indifferent teacher? Or co-workers discouraged by someone shirking his responsibility? How about the freedom of the supervisor? Making personnel choices is his job.

The post-1960s concept of rights against others’ choices should be abandoned as a mutant subversion of freedom, not an enhancement. Instead of a shield protecting everyone’s freedom against state power, this new concept of rights is a sword by one self-interested person against the freedom of other free citizens. That’s why so many Americans react viscerally against it, and why it engenders pervasive distrust.

Too much law has suffocated America’s moral culture. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1978 cautioned that “a society with no other scale but the legal one … is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses.”

Pulling law away from daily interactions will be a historic change. Like victims with Stockholm Syndrome, many Americans will have a hard time imagining how to take moral responsibility. Law everywhere absolves us from making hard choices. But that’s legal servitude, not freedom, and causes cultural rot.

The freedom to live our values, and to associate with those who share our values, is a core strength of America’s pluralistic society. Each community needs its own moral integrity. The resulting trust in shared values within these groups is like rocket fuel for human initiative. That’s what America is losing, and can only be regained by letting us interact freely again.

Philip K. Howard, a lawyer, is chairman of Common Good, a nonpartisan coalition dedicated to simplifying laws. He is a best-selling author, a New York civic leader and a photographer. His most recent book is Saving Can-Do: How to Revive the Spirit of America(2025).