You cannot easily break a dath ilani's deontology just with ordinary trauma. They are not made, do not choose to individually make themselves, to be easily broken; for most ordinary traumas they could just decide not to break, instead. To call someone from that culture "traumatized" is scarcely more useful then calling them "insane", for purposes of filling out a detailed careful predictive model of precisely what they'll do next.
But there are sufficiently extreme and prior-improbable life experiences which will cause a dath ilani to reconsider whether their previous set of ethical injunctions are appropriate to their new environment.
The Project has not prioritized corrupting Keltham to evil, with Carissa Sevar not in charge of it; he knows what masochism is, and submission, but Carissa Sevar was instructed by authority not to push him into it and risk triggering his suspicion.
There's no plausible version of the story, in this iteration of the story, where Keltham's mistake as evaluated looking back was his being too tolerant of evils and short-term harms. His mistake must have been—not even being Good, so much as, being himself.
