Suppose the lieutenant colonel thought that Trifonov was under a norm of trustworthiness of some internalized kind. Such a belief, while perhaps common, would actually be quite odd in this case. The lieutenant colonel was, after all, engaging in criminal activity with Trifonov, and he was violating the trust of his command and of his nation. Perhaps the lieutenant colonel would himself have felt bound by a norm of trustworthiness in strictly personal relations while blithely violating any such norm with respect to the Russian army and the Russian nation. More generally, any broad system of norms is likely to include within it quite different norms that would commend contradictory behaviors in common contexts. It is perhaps therefore not surprising that universalistic norms tend to be vague and limited, and they might tend to be weakened by their potential conflicts.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 273