If we wish generally to moralize the notion of trust, we will have to take out cases of acting on trust to accomplish bad ends. Such a move, however, is perverse in either an explanatory theory or a conceptual account. It is better just to let trust work its way and then to judge the morality of acting on it. Members of a community may trust one another in ways that are commonly all to the good, and yet their trust may enable them to subjugate and brutalize a neighboring community. For example, Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic might well have been able to cooperate to wreak gruesome harm on Bosnian Muslims only because they trusted each other.

XREF: Connects to discussions of how virtuous traits or institutions can have dark applications — parallels the problem of loyalty in organized crime or trust within authoritarian regimes.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 372