The name is absent

20

Market Pricing motivates an ideology of freedom, especially the freedom to enter into
contracts and to make promises. The individual should be given the freedom to choose how best
to maximize utilities, taking calculated risks and then accepting the consequences. When
individuals willingly commit themselves to agreements, they place themselves under enforceable
obligations. Prior to such agreements, there are no obligations but only inherent rights to the
freedoms just mentioned.

For Fiske, these models are biologically innate. The child is prepared to find them in his
or her social milieu. What is not innate, on Fiske’s view, is which model is to be implemented in
a given situation and the form of that implementation. For Fiske, this learned element explains
moral diversity. A social situation can be divided into parts such that different models structure
those different parts, or the same model can be multiply embedded within itself. For example,
people may vote on a law (Equality Matching) while the decision as to how to apply that law is
the responsibility of officials (Authority Ranking). “By combining the elementary forms in
various concatenations and nested hierarchies, people produce complex social forms” (Fiske,
Haslam, and S. T. Fiske: 1991: 658). This allows for recursive embedding and hence also
productivity (topics to be discussed in the next section).

The variables or options in implementing the models not only pertain to which model is to
be applied to which social situation, but how it is to be applied. In the United States, leaders are
chosen according to Equality Matching, each person having one vote. But how Equality
Matching is here implemented has changed through U.S. history: Initially, only 21-year-old male
propertied Whites voted. This has changed step-by-step over time to be more inclusive, so that
now anyone at least 18 years of age who is not a convicted felon can vote (Fiske, 1992). This can
be interpreted as an example of changing parameter settings relative to a single model. Elements
of the other models can also be construed as having different parameter settings. In the case of

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