RSI vs Schwartz & MFT

People have been trying to map morality for a long time—sometimes explicitly, sometimes accidentally. Psychologists draw circles, philosophers draw ladders, and social scientists draw circumplexes of human motivation. But most of these systems collapse virtues, instincts, preferences, traditions, and even vices into the same diagram. The result is a kind of conceptual blurring.

So when I started building a moral geometry, I wanted a model grounded in relational, suffering, and intentional axes (R–S–I) and a six-virtue hexagon anchored in wisdom, courage, temperance, justice, compassion, and fidelity, I wanted to see how it stacks against the two most influential attempts at moral mapping today:

1. Schwartz’s Value Hexagon

2. Moral Foundations Theory (MFT)

Both offer sixfold structures. Both are widely used. Neither actually describes morality.

Here’s why—and how R–S–I fixes the problem.

1. Schwartz’s Value Hexagon (1992): Motivations, Not Morality

Schwartz analyzed surveys from dozens of countries and produced a six-sector “value circumplex”:

• self-direction

• stimulation

• hedonism

• achievement

• power

• security/conformity/tradition

It’s impressive empirically—one of the best value maps we have. But it’s not a moral structure. Many of its sectors aren’t virtues at all:

• hedonism is a collapse of temperance

• power is a collapse of justice and fidelity (domination, not duty)

• achievement is morally ambiguous (ego or excellence?)

• conformity is almost never a virtue nor a vice in itself

Only two sectors—self-direction and stimulation—even loosely align with virtue (wisdom and courage).

The rest map cleanly to what I call curvature in R–S–I space: deviations away from moral orientation that either inflate the ego (+ curvature) or collapse the self into impulse and domination (– curvature).

Schwartz’s model is a map of human motivation, not a map of morality. It’s descriptive, not normative. It lacks suffering, intention, relational depth, or an apex structure.

R–S–I absorbs Schwartz’s work but organizes it properly: virtue, vice, and motivation each get their own geometric place.

2. Moral Foundations Theory (MFT): Instincts, Not Virtues

Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory proposes six “moral tastebuds”:

• care/harm

• fairness/cheating

• loyalty/betrayal

• authority/subversion

• sanctity/degradation

• liberty/oppression

This model gets closer to my real moral architecture, but it still confuses categories:

• Care and Fairness are moral directions → R-axis

• Loyalty is fidelity’s relational mode → R + I

• Sanctity matches reverence → I-axis

• Liberty is courage against domination → S + R

• Authority, however, is not a virtue at all—just a preference for social stability.

So MFT mixes:

• genuine moral dimensions,

• emotional instincts,

• and culturally-loaded preferences.

R–S–I separates these cleanly.

It explains why MFT works (we really do evaluate behavior along relational, suffering, and intentional lines), but also why MFT creates confusion: it conflates the psychology of judgment with the geometry of morality.

3. What R–S–I Adds (and Why It Clarifies Everything)

By treating morality as orientation in a three-dimensional vector space, R–S–I brings structure where other models blend categories:

• R (Relational): How widely and fairly I treat others.

• S (Suffering): How I integrate pain, cost, and fear.

• I (Intentional): What my will is actually aimed at, or my motives.

The six classical virtues each become directional vectors inside this space. Vice becomes curvature, not the absence of virtue. Moral development becomes motion, not labels. Good and evil are replaced by apex attractors, not binary categories.

This solves every major failure in the older systems:

• Schwartz mislabels motivations as values → R–S–I separates them.

• MFT mixes instincts with virtues → R–S–I differentiates them.

• Neither model handles suffering → R–S–I dedicates an axis to it.

• Neither model has intentionality → R–S–I gives it its own dimension.

• Neither model has a dynamic structure → R–S–I includes mass, force, and curvature.

What emerges is a moral geometry that is not only more accurate but more humane: a model that doesn’t flatten people into “good” or “bad” but traces where they’re aimed, how resistant they are to change, and where their curvature pulls them off course.

This is the difference between a map of behavior and a map of moral reality. 

In the next post I will return to the threshold of both moral direction and lived moral experience with my "lavender resonance" model.