Being morally obligated to trustworthy action does not make one trusted.

Evidence

Unless one makes something like Hertzberg’s definitional move, ruling out the application of trust to any cases but those of moral obligation, it does not seem likely that trust can generally be moralized. It can be grounded in moral obligations, as public officials may be regarded as morally obligated to behave in certain ways toward their constituents, but it need not be. It also can be grounded in expectations about the moral commitments of others; but, again, it need not be. Even when we think someone is morally obligated to be trustworthy, we might still doubt that he or she will be. For example, we might suppose a police officer is obligated to be fair and helpful in various contexts, but we might have reason to think she will not act from that obligation. Despite her presumed moral obligation, then, we might not trust her. We could conclude that her failure of duty is primarily to be faulted not because it is a failure of our trust but because it is a failure of her duty as supposedly accepted by her. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 385

Categorization

• XREF: This separation of moral obligation from actual trust supports the reading that the doctor’s wife is trusted for observed capability, not for duty alone, in the Blindness scenario.