Reasons for trusting virtue are themselves fragile enough that trust in trust is unjustified.

Evidence

I can even be brought in principle to see the virtue in virtue. But I see no reason to believe that the reason to believe in it will, just as that reason, hold. As Elizabeth said to Parliament in 1586, we all, if less dramatically than she, ‘in trust have found treason’. I see no reason to trust trust just as trust. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1534

Categorization

• XREF: The recursive instability of trusting the reasons for trusting parallels Luhmann’s point about trust needing to rest ultimately on something more basic than reasons; connects to the reader’s Blindness analysis of why habituated cooperative relations collapse without observability.