Deontological moral theory’s policy failures do not undermine its role in trustworthiness.

Evidence

It is hard even to conceive of many public policies as other than consequentialist in their purpose, and it would be astonishing if some limited set of moral rules should always be congruent with achieving those purposes. Any view of the wrongheadedness of deontological moral theory in many public policies, however, should be irrelevant to the assessment here of its plausible undergirding of a moral disposition for trustworthiness. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 920

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s ongoing synthesis: the distinction between consequentialist justification of policy and dispositional (deontic) grounding of trust parallels the descriptive-versus-normative split in Luhmann and Hardin’s trust accounts.