ABSTRACT

Throughout his writing, Hollis sought a way of mediating between two apparently irreconcilable approaches to morality: one based on some version of self-interest, revealed by instrumental reason, the other based on duty, revealed by disinterested reason. In his last, and greatest, work, Trust Within Reason, Hollis (1998) focused on the all-important social virtue of trust, as it is understood according to these two approaches, taking the philosophers and political economists of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment as his starting point, and engaging with twentieth-century game theory in the heart of the book, before returning to Jean-Jacques Rousseau by the end. Each position was subjected to the challenge of Gyges’ ring, and each (with the possible exception of Rousseau’s) was found to be wanting.2