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Communal Sharing, who counts as a member of the in-group is parametric. In the case of
Authority Ranking, it is who enjoys a privileged or a lower position. In the case of Market
Pricing, it is what counts as a unit of utility.
In both Chomskian linguistics and relational models theory, there are various innate
options requiring external triggering (culture) to receive a determinate setting. Just as Chomsky
considers universal grammar and internal language to be the proper objects of linguistic study, so
Fiske’s approach, if further developed, could come to focus on, in addition to the four models,
internal morality as its object, i.e. the mental representations of the models along with their
parameter settings in the individual (5). This internal morality could also be described as a state
of a particular moral faculty at some stage of maturation.
Principles, Parameters, Pluralism
If true, Fiske’s theory would imply the two descriptive assumptions of pluralism, namely
that there is moral diversity, and that there is, in at least some cases, no universally recognizably
reasonable method for resolving such diversity. Such a dispute would be like Turkish speakers
saying that Spanish is wrong. On Fiske’s view, people in different cultures, people with different
individual histories, will often have incompatible moral intuitions due to having internalized
different implementation rules. In some, indeed many, cases, there would be no method which
all could agree on as reasonable for resolving the resultant moral disputes.
But relational models theory tends to militate against relativism. As evidence for his
view, Fiske notes that people in all cultures can understand the four models, everyone can see
how someone could be motivated by any one of them. This is so, even though many are quite
happy that they do not apply all of the models, e.g. foragers are happy not to apply Market
Pricing and tend to view those who do with some contempt, but they have no trouble