Justified distrust is benign and morally acceptable, not a social failing.

Evidence

It is a peculiar implication of the thesis that trust is inherently moral, and of much of the current literature on the need for trust in society, that distrust must evidently therefore be bad. But, distrust is sometimes the only credible implication of the evidence. Indeed, distrust is sometimes not merely a rational assessment but it is also benign, in that it protects against harms rather that causing them. For example, parents who do not entrust the safety of their children to unworthy caretakers, or international institutions that do not entrust the welfare of the Cambodian people to Pol Pot, are acting morally according to almost any conception of morality. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 430

Categorization

• XREF: Directly fuels the reader’s Hardin-Luhmann-Saramago integration: in Blindness, justified distrust of the sighted-power structures protects against predation; this is the normative flip side of the wife’s monitoring role.
• SEED: Angles into the moral-philosophy claim that distrust is socially useful — could pair with institutional design (e.g., why accountability systems are premised on justified distrust).