Equitability is a widely recognized root for ethics, such as human rights or Kantian deontology, and it has a geometric metaphor at its base. This raises the question of whether there is an underlying geometric form to utilitarian or consequentialist ethics, their main ethical alternative. There should be, and it is likely to be, the simple geometry of a perceived experiential ratio: is a specific good getting bigger or smaller? Is it moving forward or backward? The metaphoric perception of bigger or smaller or forward or backward (the same visual relationship) permits the assessment of a wide range of better or worse moral conditions. If this experience is located in time, this permits many judgements regarding the growth and the rate of growth. If in space, this permits judgments of relational value as one’s shape’s size or change is compared with another. The easiest such comparisons are with similar concepts, objects or metaphors. Thus it is possible to talk about the greatest good for the greatest number or the consequences of particular growth trajectories. Since this is incremental in action, it can be understood as a tactical moral-emotion, though never neglecting the underlying sense of growth.

Comparisons of size are based on the understanding that shapes are containers, masses, or amounts for people. As metaphoric representatives of valuables, they may be increasing or decreasing in size. This leads to the need to assess the relative size, especially the trajectory of relative size (in time or space) and the production of a moral emotion oriented around gain in size. A sense of moral satisfaction comes from “doing well,” that is, perceiving the increase in the size of observed masses in relation to others. Therefore one easily moves to the moral-emotional perspective that any improvement in proportions means improving one’s position and/or group. However, at a certain level, it is not the size that is important but the vector of transformation that is most important. Moral evaluation is based around the question: Is the condition one of ongoing improvement (feeling better) through improving size or ongoing decline (feeling worse) as one’s perceived circle shrinks? 

Tactical moral dynamics are very flexible given the simplicity of their dynamic and the wide range of possible visual metaphors. Since there is no inherent specification of the central value, only growth as the outcome, that may be applied to any context where a human being can conceive of a good that is dynamic. Since human beings work through metaphoric relations, there is little that cannot be so conceived. Any good can be experienced as growing or shrinking and thus subject to a simple consequential moral analysis.

So, for example, as children, something as simple as growing physically bigger provides a profound sense of well-being. As adults, we measure many aspects of the world around us and determine if they are growing in relation to us, either as an opportunity/gain or threat. Those other things include material possessions, physical attributes, and relational capacities. Growth in that which we desire is always a satisfying moral good. On the other hand, as things we desire to shrink or as threats grow, it is easy to gain a sense of a world gone morally awry.

Measuring change is thus important, which brings into play the possibility of money as a moral phenomenon. Money is an easy concept for which growth (or shrinkage) is easy to grasp. This leads to the easy confluence in market economies between financial profit and an intrinsic sense of moral good. The risk is that in the absence of an appropriate contextual awareness of other ethical realities, money may be perceived as an ultimate value and personal accumulation as the ultimate good. Given the possibility of strategically (relational model no. six) exchanging money for some of the goods available through the other moral-relational frameworks, this feeling of financial growth can be immensely morally satisfying even as it violates the intrinsic moral structures of other participants in the social encounter. As money indicates, simple trajectorial (vectored) analysis is not morally adequate on its own to gain a sense of ultimate morality, even if it creates powerful feelings of moral good when it is experienced even in limited contexts or forms which may indicate long-term negative outcomes.

Given the structural simplicity of tactical moral-emotional dynamics and their developmental tie to simple rewards, it is possible this moral emotion could be tied into fundamental pleasure dynamics in the brain. It is not hard to conceive of individuals who experience dopamine release (pleasure) in response to perceptions of growth. Many developmental contexts could lead to such a linkage around this moral framework. If so, then not only are the moral-emotional conditions of satisfaction met through growth, there may be the direct experience of pleasure based on the experience of growth alone. If the brain’s negative outcomes bias comes into effect, then the experience of negative transformation may lead very quickly away from rational analysis toward intuitive disgust. Either possibility (pleasure or disgust) would make this moral-emotion quite powerful for those who experience it. If this is the case, then it is important to recognize that the sense of morality emerges from the scope or the gain or loss, not the area of human action in which there is gain or loss. The target may be immaterial or even highly negative such as military “body counts,” which provide a sense of moral value (negative if “ours,” positive if “theirs”) even if they are due to the deaths of human beings. Similarly, a cancer ward might have patients boasting that their cancer is “worse” than others. It is bigger that provides a sense of good feeling.

While, as with many things, there is the possibility of a negative action bias (more worry about shrinkage than pleasure in growth) built into the brain, there may be an additional intrinsic problem with this moral framework. It is possible that growth can become the moral evaluation of value or importance itself. Thus a bigger problem may be experienced as a better problem than is a small problem. An encroaching deadline may be perceived as more important than one in the distance, regardless of the importance of the project facing the deadline. If this is true, then human beings face the possibility of a negative moral bias around any action that leads to a reduction in scope or capacity of the organism, regardless of the rationality or appropriateness of the reduction. Such moral experiences are fundamentally irrational but might feel natural to the participants and lead to problematic behaviour and destructive outcomes.