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acquaintances, such as personality, ethnicity, and age. They also studied person memory errors
in which one incorrectly remembers with whom one did something and misdirected actions in
which one performs an action with a person other than the one intended, e.g. placing a glass of
milk by the wrong child’s plate. In each case, they predicted that mistakes would generally occur
“within mode,” i.e. that the relational models would tend to predict the mistakes. Nine such
studies were conducted across different cultures (Fiske, Haslam, and S. T. Fiske, 1991; Fiske
1993). Fiske found that, with the exception of gender, the four relational models were better
predictors of such errors than were other categories. People’s deliberate substitutions, e.g.
changing one’s mind about the person with whom one will perform an activity, such as going to
see a film, also support the relational models theory (Fiske and Haslam, 1997).
Fiske’s view also shows that the principles which underlie moral competence need not be
principles in the moral sense, e.g. Brandt’s basic moral principles. A universal psychological
structure underlying moral competence, considered just by itself, may not count as an axiom from
which moral conclusions can be drawn (but for a contrary view, see suggestions by John Mikhail
discussed in Harman 2000: 224-25). Equality Matching, for example, only generates moral
principles when taken in conjunction with learned information, e.g. which contexts to apply it to,
and rules of implementation. The model’s being universal does not mean that there are any
universally held moral principles. In other words, it does not imply absolutism.
Earlier it was noted that a single individual, in practically all normal cases, knows and
uses more than one internal language, utilizing a different internal language in different contexts,
e.g. with different conversational partners. This means that each of us is, despite commonsense
assumptions to the contrary, multilingual. Similarities between internal language and internal
morality lead one to ask whether each of us is also multi-moral, having different moral intuitions