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LIT-507: Moral psychology is relationship regulation: Moral motives for unity, hierarchy, equality, and proportionality

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Properties4
StatusActive — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-405); worth reading as the relational alternative to both Moral Foundations Theory and morality-as-cooperation, and as the source of the Equality/Proportionality split the MFQ-2 later adopted. It is a theoretical review with no new data. It agrees with morality-as-cooperation that morality exists to sustain cooperative relationships, and differs from it on purity (a Unity motive, the same motive as ingroup loyalty), on harm (violence can be morally required) and on the units (four relational models, not seven game-theoretic problems).
Tagsmoral-psychology, social-science, social-ontology, religion
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-405 — Rai & Fiske 2011, relationship regulation
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-626 — Moral judgments are made relative to the social relationship an act is taken to occur within: each of four relational models (communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, market pricing) carries a moral motive (Unity, Hierarchy, Equality, Proportionality), so the same act can be required under one and wrong under another

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Tage Shakti Rai, Alan Page Fiske (2011), Psychological Review 118(1), 57–75 — DOI-10.1037/a0021867

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-02 in the morality-as-cooperation batch (ADR-018). No anthology topic holds it, and it carries no instruction for machine-learning practice.

It is the rival closest to morality-as-cooperation. Curry, Mullins and Whitehouse (LIT-047, read in NOTE-034) cite it as an ally: its statement that “our sense of morality functions to facilitate the generation and maintenance of long-term social-cooperative relationships” (p. 59) is one of the sources LIT-047 lists for the cooperative view of morality. The two differ on what the units are and on the cases that matter most to the dispute. NOTE-405 sets out the comparison:

  • Purity. Here purity is the Unity motive guarding communal relationships, the same motive as ingroup loyalty. That is a cooperative account of purity, different from the self-control account in Fitouchi, André and Baumard’s moral disciplining (LIT-101), and it covers the contamination purity that account leaves out.
  • Harm. Here intentional harm is not a moral domain at all. Violence is moral or immoral depending on the relationship model, which runs against Bloom’s objection to LIT-047 that hitting is moralized everywhere, and against dyadic morality’s harm-centred view (LIT-494).
  • Fairness. Equality and Proportionality are separate motives. The MFQ-2 (LIT-500) took the split from this paper. Morality-as- cooperation draws its line elsewhere, between reciprocity and dividing a disputed resource.

Graham et al. 2013 (LIT-499) treat it as an alternative pluralism compatible with MFT, and Haidt’s earlier social intuitionist model (LIT-511) draws on the same four relational models for the origin of moral intuitions.

NOTE-405 is the close reading of 2026-10-02, and it placed the work: Active. It reframes the dispute well and gives the clearest cooperative reading of honour killing and purity in the literature read here. Its evidence is illustrative, drawn from history, ethnography and others’ experiments, and its predictions are stated, not tested.

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