Moralized accounts of trust actually moralize trustworthiness

Evidence

Trustworthiness may be inherently moral in part for at least some people, or it may be compelled by the force of norms. That many accounts of trust are really accounts of trustworthiness therefore suggests that the moralizing of trust might be more reasonably seen as a moralizing of trustworthiness. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 283

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Echoes the reader’s analytical pivot: the doctor’s wife’s reliability is often read as moral trust, but Hardin reframes it as moralized trustworthiness under visible pressure.
• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely paradigm-shifting reframe: the entire moral-philosophy literature on ‘trust’ may be answering a different question than the sociological one, and the category confusion is structural, not incidental.

Related

• Moralizing trust often stems from confusing it with trustworthiness (similarity 0.90)
• Much academic literature on trust is actually about trustworthiness (similarity 0.90)
• The literature mislabels trust as moral when really trustworthiness is moral (similarity 0.89)
• Theories of trust as a good really describe trustworthiness, not trust (similarity 0.86)
• Trust reduces to knowledge while trustworthiness is motivational (similarity 0.85)
• Virtue ethics and Kantianism can morally ground trustworthiness, but not trust itself (similarity 0.85)
• Trust is wrongly conflated with promise-keeping and entrusting (similarity 0.85)
• Moral dispositions resist contrary incentives yet people overestimate their behavioral role (similarity 0.84)
• Moral characters of trustworthiness can make people trust even against reason. (similarity 0.84)
• Trust as knowledge cannot be morally required (similarity 0.84)
• Most theories of trust rest on four assumptions irreconcilable with encapsulated interest (similarity 0.84)
• Trustworthiness needs no moral groundings to sustain trust (similarity 0.83)
• Only encapsulated-interest accounts ground trust in prior trustworthiness judgments (similarity 0.83)
• Understanding trustworthiness must precede understanding trust itself (similarity 0.83)
• Trust is rational expectation about the trusted party’s self-interest (similarity 0.83)

Broader Connections

• Accounts of trust as a good are really accounts of trustworthiness #corroborates (0.82) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 336
• Actual trustworthiness combines motives that resist institutional mimicry #complicates (0.75) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 282
• Trustworthiness is easier to explain than trust and generates trust as knowledge #expands (0.72) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 681