I’ve been working toward a simple way to talk about morality without relying on commandments, theological rules, or even culture-specific lists of virtues. What I want is something structural—something that describes how people move through moral life the way physics describes objects moving through space.
The model that finally clicks for me uses three axes that seem unavoidable in every moral situation:
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R — Relational: how we treat other people and how wide our circle of concern extends.
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S — Suffering: how we respond to pain, loss, danger, and cost.
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I — Intentional: what our will is actually aimed at—our real motivations beneath our self-stories.
These aren’t categories; they’re dimensions. Every moral act, good or bad, lives somewhere in this three-dimensional space.
To make this concrete, imagine three basis vectors: R, S & I
Now take the hexagon of six classical virtues—wisdom, courage, temperance, justice, compassion, fidelity—and project each one into this space. Wisdom and humility aim mostly along the I-axis. Courage and patience point up the S-axis. Justice and compassion stretch across the R-axis. This gives us six directional “jets” shaping a person’s overall stance in moral space.
A person’s moral orientation vector is then the weighted sum of these directions in this space.
This gives us something like a moral GPS coordinate. But more importantly, it gives us a direction. And direction turns out to be the interesting part.
While the hexagon of virtues is an ideal 2D representation, I treat moral life as having two attractors, or "apexes" that form in the z-axis (3D). These up/down directions are orthogonal to the plane.
The positive apex points toward expanding concern, willingness to suffer for the good, and an intentional aim beyond the self. In coordinates, this is the positive apex. Its opposite, the negative apex, points toward contraction, avoidance of cost, and self-protective intention.
A person moves toward one or the other depending on how their vector lines up with these two apex directions. In simple terms: we are always bending one way or the other.
To understand how quickly someone changes direction, I add moral mass. It’s exactly what it sounds like: the resistance a person has to changing their moral orientation. People with high moral mass are rigid, entrenched, and stabilized by identity, institutions, or trauma. Low mass means greater moral flexibility—for better or worse. The Newtonian analogy holds cleanly: F = ma.
F is the force acting on someone’s moral life (experiences, relationships, suffering, revelations), and a is their acceleration through R–S–I space. The rate of change of the velocity of the moral vectors in moral space.
Finally, I define moral curvature. This measures how far a person’s orientation vector deviates from the balanced “ideal plane” formed by the six virtues in their proper proportions. Curvature toward the positive apex corresponds to excess (justice becoming legalism, compassion becoming enabling). Curvature toward the negative apex corresponds to collapse (compassion becoming cruelty, wisdom becoming dogmatism). Virtue and vice are therefore not opposites but geometric distortions of the same structure.
This entire framework gives a clean, non-moralizing way to describe moral life:
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moral direction, a sum of vectors pointing to some point in moral space
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mass = moral inertia, how easily their moral vector values change (self/internal nature)
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force = field effects on the vectors which can bend them (world/externalities)
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curvature = how their virtues bend out of shape (a combination of factors I will discuss later)
Thus moral growth becomes nothing more—or less—than the continuous evolution of moral space over time as a person navigates the field of relationships, suffering, and intention.
In the next post I will discuss why existing attempts at this fall short of my RSI model of moral space.
