I don't claim that deontologists actually consciously think that this is why they're deontologists. It does, however, seem like a plausible explanation of the (either development psychological or evolutionary) reason why people end up adopting deontology.

Indeed, I get the impression from the article that a deontologist is someone who makes moral choices based on whether they will feel bad about violating a moral injunction, or good for following it... and then either ignorantly or indignantly denies this is the case, treating the feeling as evidence of a moral judgment's truth, rather than as simply a cached response to prior experience.

Frankly, a big part of the work I do to help people is teaching them to shut off the compelling feelings attached to the explicit and implicit injunctions they picked up in childhood, so I'm definitely inclined to view deontology (at least as described by the article) as a hopelessly naive and tragically confused point of view, well below the sanity waterline... like any other belief in non-physical entities, rooted in mystery worship.

I also seem to recall that previous psychology research showed that that sort of thinking was something people naturally tended to grow out of as they got older (stages of moral reasoning), but then I also seem to recall that there was some more recent dispute about that, and accusations of gender bias in the research.

Nonetheless, it's evolutionarily plausible that we'd have a simple, injunction-based emotional trigger system used in early life, until our more sophisticated reasoning abilities come online. And my experience working with my own and other people's brains seems to support this: when broad childhood injunctions are switched off, people's behavior and judgments in the relevant area immediately become more flexible and sophisticated.

Unfortunately, the deontological view sounds like it's abusing higher reasoning simply to retroactively justify whatever (cached-feeling) injunctions are already in place, by finding more-sophisticated ways to spell the injunctions so they don't sound like they have anything to do with one's own past shames, guilts, fears, and other experiences. (What Robert Fritz refers to as an "ideal-belief-reality conflict", or what Shakespeare called, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." I.e., we create high-sounding ideals and absolute moral injunctions specifically to conceal our personally-experienced failings or conflicts around those issues.)

Of course, I could just be missing the point of deontology entirely. But I can't seem to even guess at what that point would be, because everything I'm reading here seems to closely resemble something that I had to grow out of... making it really hard for me to take it seriously.