Trust and Transparency

The Reith Lectures

BBC

Society & Culture, Science

4.2 • 770 Ratings

🗓️ 24 April 2002

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

This year's Reith Lecturer is Onora O'Neill. She became Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, in l992 and has chaired the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and the Human Genetics Advisory Commission. She is currently chair of the Nuffield Foundation and she has been President of the Aristotelian Society, and a member of the Animal Procedures (Scientific) Committee. In 1999 she was made a life peer as Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve, and sits as a crossbencher. She has written widely on political philosophy and ethics, international justice, bioethics and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

In her fourth Reith Lecture Onora O'Neill discusses the issue of transparency. As well as improving trust, she argues, it can also add to the ways in which the public can be deceived. She asks, "how can we tell which claims and counterclaims, reports and supposed facts are trustworthy when so much information swirls around us?" She argues a crisis of trust cannot be overcome by a blind rush to place more trust. Transparency certainly destroys secrecy: but it may not limit the deception and deliberate misinformation that undermine relations of trust. If we want to restore trust we need to reduce deception and lies rather than secrecy.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Ruth Lectures. This lecture in the series A Question of Trust, given by Onura O'Neill, was originally broadcast in the year 2002.
0:14.3	Good evening and welcome. We're at the Merseyside Maritime Museum, surrounded by models of famous ships in glass cases. The cases, of course,
0:22.5	are transparent, designed so that we can know everything about their contents from every angle.
0:27.9	A fitting metaphor for the subject of tonight's lecture. Transparency has become a byword for good
0:34.5	behaviour in government and business. The more open you are, the more transparent,
0:39.0	the less able you are to pull the wool over the public's or the consumer's eyes. Greater transparency
0:44.9	therefore equals greater trust. But is that true? The parents of the children who died at Alderhey
0:51.2	Hospital here in Liverpool gave their consent, they thought, to the
0:55.0	retention of tissues from their bodies, but discovered that whole organs had in fact been
1:00.4	retained. The hospital wanted to be transparent in its relationship with the parents, but it
1:05.6	lost the parents' trust. So is it possible in a world awash with information, openness and accountability to retain
1:14.1	a sense of trust, or is trust the victim of all this knowledge? In the audience tonight are many
1:20.3	people who make decisions about what to keep confidential and what to make public. We hope that
1:25.9	this evening they'll choose not to keep their thoughts to themselves,
1:28.4	but to share them with us later on.
1:31.2	First, to develop and deliver her fourth wreath lecture entitled Trust and Transparency,
1:37.8	will you welcome the philosopher and principal of Newham College, Cambridge, and Nora O'Neill.
1:54.9	Thank you. of Newham College, Cambridge and Nora O'Neill. Socrates didn't want his words to go fatherless into the world,
1:59.5	transcribed onto tablets or into books that could circulate
2:03.7	without their author, to travel beyond the reach of discussion and questions, revision and
2:09.7	authentication. So he talked and chatted and argued with others on the streets of Athens,
2:15.8	but he wrote and published nothing.
	...

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