nucleation

LIT-509: Moral Molecules: Morality as a Combinatorial System

2 min read

Properties3
StatusProposed — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-399); a clear statement of the programme's ambition, that seven cooperative elements generate "all moral ideas, possible and actual", but its test is the weakest in the programme. For each of the 21 pairs the authors proposed a concept and then searched the literature until they found it ("We succeeded in every case"). No search protocol, judges or failed attempts are reported, and the theory "doesn't predict which of these many possibilities will be actualities". Two molecules (mendicance, common ownership) combine an element with the negation of another, which the paper's own notation counts as mixed valence. It would be settled by blind judges classifying an independent list of moral concepts into the scheme, with a count of those that fit nothing.
Tagsmoral-psychology, social-science
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-399 — Curry et al. 2021, moral molecules

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Oliver Scott Curry, Mark Alfano, Mark J. Brandt, Christine Pelican (2021), Review of Philosophy and Psychology 13(4):1039–1058 (online 11 August 2021; issue December 2022) — DOI-10.1007/s13164-021-00540-x

Key takeaways

  • If the seven cooperative domains combine pairwise, there are 21 second-order moral concepts. The paper names one for each, from fraternity (family + group) to queuing (division + possession).
  • The combinatorics is offered as a framework that “has the potential to explain all moral ideas, possible and actual”. The evidence is an example per cell, found after the cell was proposed.

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request, with the rest of the morality-as-cooperation programme (ADR-018). It combines the seven domains of the founding statement (LIT-503). The MAC-Q paper (LIT-496) announced the idea, and this paper works it out.

NOTE-399 is the close reading of 2026-10-02, and it placed the work Proposed. It does not bear on the empirical verdict in NOTE-034, because it gathers no data on whether the seven are moralized or whether anything else is. It makes the programme’s method plainer, though. LIT-047 coded only for the seven, and the MAC-Q wrote items only for the seven. Here concepts are proposed from the seven and then sought in the literature. At no step is a moral concept taken from outside the scheme and checked against it.

Its footnote 9 matters for the purity objection. It says that a moral element that “turned out to be non-cooperative” would require the theory to “be revised more fundamentally”. The paper offers one puritanical concept, mendicance, the religious vow of poverty, read as humility plus property. Fitouchi, André and Baumard (LIT-101) explain ascetic piety and ritual differently, through beliefs about self-control.

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