If some personal or professional tragedy affected my ability to pay, there is a pecking order of things I will pay for, at that point, too bad, I'm insolvent.
There's no moral hazard if you borrowed money in good faith. It's not immoral to fail to repay a credit card if the alternative is to leave my family without some necessity.
In other words, my obligation to pay is contingent on your not demolishing my ability to pay.
Do you believe in individual responsibility, then? That is, if I, your friend, promise to give you a ride to the store and then don't follow through, am I morally culpable?
I would argue that most people who think they're talking about morality are actually talking about risk.
well, that's debatable. Imagine the consequence if agencies were obliged to forgo demands like that. They would do the opposite of what they set out to do, which they surely deem highly immoral.
If anything, they were morally bound to forgive the debt in it's entirety. They could easily absorb the loss without even blinking, while the money owed meant the difference between being able to afford a few more weeks of food or begging for it.