Grounded-moral-obligation views of trust rob the concept of its distinctive content.

Evidence

In one philosophical discussion, however, it is supposed that a person who is trusted has an obligation to fulfill the trust. “When someone’s trust has been misplaced,” the philosopher Lars Hertzberg (1988, 319) writes, “it is always, I want to say, a misunderstanding to regard that as a shortcoming on his part. The responsibility rests with the person who failed the trust.” That is more than a bit odd. It is analogous to saying that a potential promiser has an obligation to fulfill the potential promise—even though no promise has actually been made—if the potential promisee relies on the fulfillment. … On this view, I can only “trust” someone to do what that person already has a moral obligation to do. This is a definitional move that, if accepted, makes unnecessary Hertzberg’s several pages of argument while it raises many ancillary questions. On whose moral theory do I ground your obligation, one might wonder, yours or my own? Hertzberg’s redefinition also makes “trust” a nearly otiose category. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 332

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Hertzberg’s definitional move that collapses trust into moral obligation, and why Hardin finds it vacuous.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s integration of Luhmann: Hertzberg’s obligation-based trust is the opposite pole from Luhmann’s systems-based familiarity — where Luhmann tries to strip normativity, Hertzberg overloads it.