Aaron opines that breaking scholarship bonds is immoral. I say opines, because he has basically provided no argument for that.

We can agree that if breaking bonds is immoral, it is because it involves breaking a promise. The big gap in Aaron’s post, the gap which renders it an opinion rather than an argument, is that he has not shown that there is such a promise involved. From his analogy with adultery, we can take it that he considers the promise one of unconditional commitment to the scholarship agency. What he has to show, therefore, is that, even though the legal agreement is clearly conditional, there exists an implicit agreement between the scholar and the agency that the commitment is unconditional. Now, he may think that there should be such an agreement, but all that is relevant is whether there is such an agreement, between real scholars and real scholarship agencies (not those in Aaron’s ideal world). If there is no such promise, then it is simply impossible for the scholar to violate the promise, and hence we cannot say that he/she is immoral because he/she violates that promise.

Until evidence is offered to show that real scholars and real scholarship agencies have a voluntary, implicit agreement that the declaration of commitment by the scholars is unconditional, Aaron has no justification for thinking that breaking bonds is immoral because it violates a preexisting agreement (though perhaps it is immoral for other reasons).

As I stated in the comments in Aaron’s post, I am open to the idea that breaking bonds is immoral for reasons other than that it violates a promise, but I’m not convinced there is a robust argument for that assertion either.