Trust and Obligation-Ascription Philip J. Nickel Accepted: 16 March 2007 / Published online: 11 April 2007 # Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2007 Abstract This paper defends the view that trust is a moral attitude, by putting forward the Obligation-Ascription Thesis: If E trusts F to do X, this implies that E ascribes an obligation to F to do X. I explicate the idea of obligation-ascription in terms of requirement and the appropriateness of blame. Then, drawing a distinction between attitude and ground, I argue that this account of the attitude of trust is compatible with the possibility of amoral trust, that is, trust held among amoral persons on the basis of amoral grounds. It is also compatible with trust adopted on purely predictive grounds. Then, defending the thesis against a challenge of motivational inefficacy, I argue that obligation-ascription can motivate people to act even in the absence of definite, mutually-known agreements. I end by explaining, briefly, the advantages of this sort of moral account of trust over a view based on reactive attitudes such as resentment. Keywords Agreement . Attitude-ascription . Blame . Morality . Moral requirement . Obligation . Trust What does morality have to do with trust? Nothing much, one might say: the relationship of trust can hold between two apparently amoral people. For, first, it is possible to trust somebody to do what is morally bad; thieves and gangsters can be trusted rationally. Second, bad people, just like anybody else, can trust others. 1 And third, people often use amoral criteria when they trust, in the sense that the grounds on which they draw the distinction between the trustworthy and the untrustworthy are not moral grounds. Trust can be non-moral in its object, its holder, and its ground – even in all three at once. We can label this the Possibility of Amoral Trust. One way of accounting for the Possibility of Amoral Trust is to set forth a predictive account of trust, with no moral qualifications. According to such views, trust involves Ethic Theory Moral Prac (2007) 10:309–319 DOI 10.1007/s10677-007-9069-3 1 These two points are put forward in Baier (1992, p. 110). Hardin (2002, p. 75) presents this as an objection to moralized accounts of trust. P. J. Nickel (*) Department of Philosophy, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-4555, USA e-mail: pnickel@uci.edu