RSI describes the moral manifold—the terrain on which moral meaning exists. It defines the conditions under which morality has structure at all: relational coupling (R), suffering or cost (S), and intentional orientation (I). When those dimensions are present, moral space acquires curvature. Costs can be displaced or absorbed. Responsibility propagates. Exploitation and care become legible.
Compared to traditional moral theories, RSI shifts the question from which rule or outcome is correct to where moral structure actually exists. Utilitarian approaches are sensitive to suffering (S), but they treat cost as a scalar and largely ignore how it moves between agents (R) or how intentions shape its distribution (I). Deontological systems foreground constraint and duty (I), yet they often flatten the lived reality of harm (S) by treating all violations as morally equivalent regardless of who bears the cost (R). Virtue ethics attends carefully to character and disposition (I), but tends to under-specify the relational and material conditions that make virtues consequential rather than merely admirable. Rule-based systems, finally, often confuse procedural stability with moral health, mistaking the absence of disruption for the presence of justice. RSI does not seek to replace these frameworks so much as to explain why each becomes unreliable in certain regimes—especially where cost is hidden, responsibility is displaced, or relational coupling breaks down.
But a manifold alone does not tell you where to go. That is the role of the hexagon.
The hexagon functions as a local compass, not a global map. At any point in RSI space where agency is active, the six virtues define the principal directions in which an agent can orient. They are not absolute destinations. They are vectors—ways of turning when something meaningful is at stake.
Crucially, the hexagon is not rigid. Because it lives on a curved manifold, it stretches, bends, and folds depending on where it is placed. Under low relational coupling, virtues that depend on reciprocity—justice, fidelity, compassion—compress or partially collapse. In isolation, the hexagon flattens toward inward virtues: temperance, humility, integrity, truthfulness toward the self. The shape remains, but its geometry degenerates. Nothing disappears; dimensionality is reduced.
As relational coupling increases, the hexagon expands. Vertices become active again. Tensions emerge between virtues that pull in different directions—justice and mercy, courage and restraint, loyalty and truth. These tensions are not contradictions. They are the felt experience of navigating a curved moral space where no single direction can dominate without distortion.
Suffering plays a decisive role here. The hexagon only becomes meaningful when S is non-trivial. Courage without risk is noise. Compassion without cost is sentiment. Justice without stakes is abstraction. As S increases, the hexagon does not change its underlying structure, but its moral salience intensifies. Orientation matters more. Small rotations produce large consequences.
This flexibility explains why the same six virtues appear across ancient traditions and modern philosophy despite radically different contexts. Greek phronesis, Confucian ren and li, Buddhist restraint, Christian kenosis, Stoic temperance, modern accounts of justice and care—all are describing orientations that become visible under different curvatures of moral space. The labels shift. The emphases stretch. The hexagon folds. But the underlying directions persist because the space they navigate persists.
Importantly, this model avoids two common errors. It does not treat virtues as fixed rules, nor does it dissolve them into personal preference. Virtues are structural responses to moral geometry. They tell you how to move when cost cannot be avoided and responsibility cannot be escaped.
In this sense, the hexagon is best understood as a legend printed onto the map itself. RSI defines where moral space exists and how it bends. The hexagon tells finite agents how to orient within it—knowing that the terrain is curved, the scale is local, and no direction is safe everywhere.
The six virtues remain. What changes is how sharply they pull, how far they propagate, and how costly it is to ignore them.
