MC #13 – Trustworthiness and Dignity, Virtues and Vices [8 pages]

Trustworthiness and dignity are fundamental concerns of all human beings, all spouses and all married couples,

… because without dignity people become marginalized away from knowledge and power. 

This prevents them from taking satisfactory care of all of their most fundamental human concerns.

Trustworthiness and dignity appear as concerns spontaneously as we confront the fact that we are finite.  Each time we need help from another, we realize that we can be betrayed, and that betrayal threatens our capacities to survive, be free and live a good life.

Trustworthiness

The concern we call “trust” appears as we find ourselves and our concerns in the hands of others, such as our spouse, employers, customers or neighbors, who can fail or otherwise betray us. 

Trust, as an action, means to make a judgment about how we anticipate others will act with regard to our concerns or to what we care about. 

Trust is the action of anticipating how others will take care of us, or if they can take care of us. 

How, or if, another person will take care of us includes our concerns for the people with whom we are concerned and our ambitions for the future.

We “trust” our spouses, for instance, to the extent we judge that we can anticipate how they will think and act with regard to our concerns.

Other spouses and couples trust us and our spouse for the same reasons, or not.

To be trusted we must be sincere, competent and reliable in a specific domain of concerns, which takes much more cost, work and discipline than most married couples suspect (obviously).  Trust is “domain-specific”, which means trust is earned for specific domains and is never generalized.   

We might, for example, trust our spouse to act on our own and on our family’s behalf in one domain, such as earning a living or knowing how to dress, because they have shown recurrently in the past that they fulfill their commitments or meet our standards of performance. 

At the same time, none of the trust we grant someone or earn ourselves in one specific domain means that trust is granted in another domain. 

We can see this easily in the way we might learn to trust our dentists to take care of our teeth but would not trust them to manage our money.  People who grant trust naively cannot take care of their concerns or fulfill an ambition.

Marriage is a division of labor like any other that requires spouses to trust one another.  Spouses must trust one another to take care of both individual and shared concerns.  They must trust one another to live in the ethics of their vows to love, honor and cherish to which they have already committed.  They must trust each other to invent, hold in existence and act for the sake of their shared ambitions.

In order to maintain our marriages, we must keep in mind that trust is a big deal because it is difficult to maintain, and very easy to lose, especially because we have to maintain it in  three dimensions   — sincerity, competence and reliability.

Sincerity means that we mean privately what we promise or declare publicly to our spouse, that we will remember what we promised as long as the promise is relevant or unfulfilled, and that we will not justify or excuse our failures in a way that makes it all right to fail. 

We must endeavor to never break trust by being insincere. 

Breaks in sincerity are the most difficult to repair.

Competence is necessary for trust because it means we have the capacity to take care of a concern recurrently. 

None of us are competent in everything.  That is impossible.  And none of us are competent when we begin to take care of a new concern. 

Spouses have to learn, and this takes time, work, practice, energy and money.  When we fail to keep a promise or fulfill a declaration through lack of competence, we need to apologize and move to recover trust. 

The same is true for reliability.  Reliability is the capacity to remember or keep in existence all of our commitments so that we know what to do and when to do it.  Reliability is necessary for planning and acting powerfully for the sake of an ambition. 

As our concerns change and grow over time, new practices for maintaining the existence of our concerns and commitments to take care are required. 

Meaningful marriages, not to mention ambitious marriages, require spouses to keep track of enormous numbers of concerns and commitments in the present. 

Ambitious marriages include even more concerns for the future.  When our capacity to keep commitments in existence breaks down and we fail, we need to apologize and move to recover our spouse’s trust.

Dignity

Dignity, on the other hand, is not domain-specific like trust.

Dignity is an overall assessment of a person’s value and integrity in the relationship.  We maintain our dignity in our marriage by being valuable and having integrity. 

We are valuable when we offer significant help to our spouse that is scarce or difficult to obtain otherwise. 

We can be valuable when we design offers and practices for fulfillment of our spouse’s and our marriage’s concerns. 

We are valuable when our practices for loving, honoring and cherishing our spouses help our spouses fulfill their ambitions in life, take care of the concerns of our marriage, and help fulfill the ambitions of our marriage.

We have integrity when our actions are consistent and coherent with the ethics we declare.  We have integrity when others judge us to act consistently and coherently with our concerns, our commitments and our ambition. 

We have integrity, for instance, when we earn, save and invest enough money to live a good life throughout our entire life, and without becoming a burden for our children because we lacked the integrity to save and invest enough.

We lack integrity and dignity when we fail or decline to do what is necessary to have enough money to get the help we all need.

For instance, a bridge has “structural integrity” when it fulfills the intentions of the builder, and lacks integrity if it collapses.

A family has “financial integrity” when they have enough money to pay for the goods and services everyone requires to take care of their most fundamental concerns throughout their entire life, including 20-30 years of old age,

… and lacks integrity, and dignity, when they do not have enough money.

When we act out of our psychology, or momentary impulses  — wants, wishes, desires, beliefs, entitlements and preferences,

… instead of acknowledging how the causes and effects of our thoughts and actions will affect our fundamental concerns and capacities to keep our vows,

… we often break our vows,

… betray the concerns of our marriage or thwart our ambitions to take care of future concerns,

… and lose our integrity, and our dignity, with our spouse and community. 

From moment to moment, or for long periods of time, we can want, wish, desire, believe, think, or prefer something that is either too costly, distracting or counterproductive.  We act out of our psychology anytime we act for the sake of “me” or “I” concerns rather than out of “we” or “our” concerns.

Breaking trust or losing our dignity with our spouses makes it difficult for them to love, honor and cherish us.  This is a breakdown in the reciprocal ethics of a marriage.  It makes us the breakdown in our spouse’s life rather than the source of power they can look to for help. 

Virtues and Vices

Spouses are accepted and “loved” for their virtues.  Vices are nothing but “cost” that annoy, upset and threaten people because they “waste” or “squander” their time, energy, money and opportunities.

Virtues are positive interpretations our spouses make about our capabilities to fulfill our vows and to take care of a marriage’s fundamental concerns. 

For instance, this makes honoring our vows and making enough money to survive, be free and live a good life throughout our entire life, including 20-30 years of old age, virtues.

Building our spouse’s virtues is one of the practices of our commitment to love, honor and cherish our spouse.  Building virtues is a way of loving someone.  Working to embody and manifest virtues to care for another is a way of loving, honoring and cherishing someone else.

Breaking trust or losing dignity makes it difficult for our spouse to appreciate our virtues and speak them to others.  Avoid forcing your family to include, tolerate, put up with, or cope with your vices!

Vices are negative assessments we make of someone’s capabilities to take care of concerns, which includes capabilities to thwart our intentions, such as bad moods, an unwillingness to learn, being argumentative or arrogant, and refusals to honor marriage vows.  They also exist in a context of concerns.

Common vices in marriage today include:

Declining or failing to remember and keep marriage vows, and reciprocal vows

Declining or failing to learn how to take care of human, financial, marriage, career and business concerns

Overspending and saving too little

Failing to earn, save and invest enough money

Disrespect and declining to keep commitments needed to take care of “immediate concerns” such as being on time, helping generally, being entitled, or being casual about trustworthiness

Vices are assessments of immoral or unethical actions, lack of knowledge or competence, weak character, insincerity, weak action, fault, failings, frailty, imperfections, defects in character or performance, or flaws. 

We all fail from time to time.  We can all be judged harshly, unkindly or in a mean-spirited manner.  We don’t need our spouses to offer their services here.  Plenty of people are around who will make negative assessments of us.  Our spouses committed to include our failings when they promised to love, honor and cherish us in good times and bad. 

On the other hand, we promised to love, honor and cherish them and to act for the sake of the concerns of our marriage.  That means we committed to not indulge our vices but to do our best to reduce them.  It means we must endeavor to manifest our virtues and learn to minimize our vices.

The habit of judging our spouses harshly or unkindly boomerangs back as resentment, despair, resignation, distrust and anger from our spouses.  Speaking our spouses’ vices to others, other than those we trust to help us, produces distrust for the marriage and a lack of dignity. 

Not speaking our spouse’s vices does not mean we are pretentious in the marriage.  It means we are ethical, kind and loving while being an adult who is serious about marriage and does what is necessary to make it work.

Virtues come into existence in a context of moral, ethical and pragmatic concerns and ambitions.  Virtues do not exist when we don’t care about anything, and don’t need capabilities to think and act effectively, strategically or competitively.  This is important and one of the reasons to have a meaningful and ambitious marriage. 

Committing to take care of concerns and act for an ambition produces, spontaneously, the existence of virtues. 

Virtues are interpretations of how our spouses or we are good, effective, right, worthwhile, valuable, excellent, dignified, trustworthy, powerful and appreciated for their character or ours. 

They appear against a background of concerns that are difficult to care for and that require people who care for them to modify and develop themSelves. 

We need our spouses to speak our virtues to us in order to help us build them in ourselves, and to build identities of trustworthiness and dignity in the world. 

Since virtues are assessments that are invented in language as interpretations and, therefore, are never truths, we need our spouse to be willing to make these assessments.  Assessing and declaring virtues is a skill of honoring our spouses.  It’s telling spouses how much and how often they are “right” and know what they are doing, and thanking them for it, rather than pointing out their flaws.

It means we need to appreciate the difficult things they do on behalf of our concerns, the concerns of the marriage and our shared ambitions for the future to live a good life. 

It means we and our spouses cannot take anything we do for one another for granted.  We must be alert all the time to value their contributions and have some idea how difficult it is for them to accomplish the care they perform. 

The more our spouses speak our virtues, the more able we are to think and act with them in mind. 

One of the worst moves, ethically, in a marriage is to not appreciate, value and give thanks to our spouses for the virtues they manifest on our behalf.  They are difficult, costly and often uncomfortable to produce, and if they are not noticed, observed and appreciated …they go away because of a lack of attention. 

Why work so hard if your spouse and children don’t care?

We need our spouses to speak our virtues in public to build trust and dignity in the community that helps us take care of our concerns.  To do that, spouses need to be concerned with constituting descriptions, meanings, relevance, value and purposes for our virtues, especially their meaning and value.

After all, if a person cannot impress his or her spouse, what good could the spouse possibly be to anyone else?  Our spouse is a major contributor to our identity and the viability of our marriage in public. 

And, we need our spouses to speak our virtues to our children.  Our children need to hear our virtues to learn for themselves about the virtues of marriage, living a good life and living powerfully.  Our children need to hear our virtues to live peacefully.