In the framework I’ve been developing, that space is described by three dimensions: R, S, and I. Relational resonance (R), suffering or cost (S), and intentionality or orientation (I). Together, these form a moral field—a geometry in which actions bend, costs propagate, and responsibility can be displaced or absorbed.
But what happens when one of those dimensions disappears?
Consider a lone individual, truly alone in the world. No society, no audience, no reciprocal relationships. At first glance, morality seems to evaporate. Without others, there is no harm to inflict, no injustice to commit, no one to betray.
And yet that conclusion feels wrong. Even in isolation, questions of restraint, honesty, care, and self-destruction still matter. The moral sense does not vanish.
The resolution is not that morality disappears, but that moral space collapses.
In isolation, the R dimension goes to zero. There is no relational resonance because there are no other minds to couple with. Suffering still exists—hunger, pain, fear, psychological distress. Intentionality still exists—choices about indulgence, discipline, truthfulness, and care for one’s future self. What disappears is not ethics, but moral geometry.
This is a case of dimensional reduction, not moral annihilation.
With only S and I remaining, morality persists as a narrow, internal structure. There is cost, and there is orientation toward or away from that cost. But without R, suffering cannot be displaced. One cannot offload pain onto others, exploit asymmetries, or hide behind institutions. Moral curvature flattens into a line: harm returns directly to the agent who causes it.
This explains why ascetic traditions, solitary confinement, and wilderness survival all feel morally intense rather than morally empty. Ethics becomes brutally honest when relational degrees of freedom are removed.
Now add a second conscious agent.
The moment another mind enters the picture, the R dimension reappears—and with it, geometry. Suffering becomes transferable. Intentions become legible or concealable. Alignment and misalignment emerge. Moral actions no longer terminate at the self but propagate through a field of relations.
Only then do concepts like exploitation, justice, responsibility, and virtue take on spatial meaning. Only then can moral forces curve, amplify, or cancel. What was once a line becomes a plane, then a volume.
This is why moral systems that ignore relational structure inevitably misfire. Purely individualistic ethics flatten moral space, while purely social ethics dissolve individual orientation. The geometry requires both.
This also clarifies why certain edge cases—psychopathy, advanced dementia, acute psychosis—break moral explanation rather than merely complicate it. In those cases, one or more dimensions collapse. The map ends because the space itself has degenerated.
The important point is this: morality does not require networks to exist, but moral geometry does. Ethics survives isolation as suffering and intentionality. What disappears is the field—the relational structure that allows cost to be shifted, shared, or absorbed.
A moral theory that cannot acknowledge this collapse is not universal. It is careless. A moral theory that can is not weaker for it. It is finally grounded.
