11. There is a universal, absolute, strict set of rules speci­fying what is right and what is wrong for all times, all cultures, and all stages of human development.

If this were not true, there would not be strict moral bound­aries, there would be no single straight and narrow path for us all to follow, and there would be no absolute moral standards.

Each such rule has a fixed, clear, unequivocal, di­rectly interpretable meaning which does not vary.

If rules have any significant variability of meaning, then moral boundaries and standards are not strict and the "same" rule could legitimately mean different things to different peo­ple.

Each moral rule must be literal, and hence must make use of only literal concepts.

If a moral rule is metaphorical, then it is not directly inter­pretable. In order to know how to follow it, one would have to supply a metaphorical interpretation. But since different metaphorical interpretations are possible, the rule would not be fixed and absolute.

Each human being has access to the fixed, clear, un­equivocal meaning of moral rules.

If someone cannot understand exactly what the rule is in­tended to mean, then punishment for disobedience cannot have the effect of getting the person to follow the rule.

Each rule is general, in that it applies not just to spe­cific people or actions but to whole categories of peo­ple and actions.

The categories mentioned in each rule must have fixed definitions and precise boundaries, set for all time and the same in all cultures.

If the definitions of the categories were not absolutely fixed, then the meanings of the rules could vary from person to person, culture to culture, or time to time, and they would no longer be absolute.

All human beings must be able to understand such rules in order to have the free will to follow them or not.

These rules must be able to be communicated per­fectly, from the legitimate authority responsible for en­forcement to the person under the obligation to follow them. There must be no variation in meaning between what is said and what is understood.

People do things they don't want to do in order to get rewards and avoid punishments. This is just human nature and is part of what it means to be "rational."

But, for this to be true, people must be able to under­stand precisely what constitutes a reward and what constitutes a punishment. There must be no meaning variation concerning what rewards and punishments are.

Strict Father morality requires that four conditions on the human mind and human behavior must be met:

1. Absolute categorization: Everything is either in or out of a category.

2. Laterality: All moral rules must be literal.

3. Perfect communication: The hearer receives exactly the same meaning as the speaker intends to communicate.

4. Folk behaviorism: According to human nature, people normally act effectively to get rewards and avoid punish­ments.

Categorization

It is about 'fuzzy' (неясний) and “radial” (променевий) and prototype effects. Fuzzy – there is no clear differentiation between rich and poor people, because this differentiation is different for every person. Radial - If the concept undergoing change is part of a moral rule, then the rule is not clear and unequivocal. It will require interpretation. But there are always different possibilities for interpretation. And that makes the rule not strict and un-equivocal. It means the rule defines not one path but many possible ones.

In short, the fact that people really do reason about categories on the basis of stereotypes vio­lates the condition that the meaning of a rule must be invari­ant from person to person and occasion to occasion. The mind just doesn't work that way.

Alternative framing possibilities also provide for forms of ev­eryday variation in meaning. Consider an example from my colleague Charles Fillmore (see References, sec. A3). Sup­pose you have a friend named Harry who doesn't like to spend much money. You could conceptualize him and describe him in two very different ways. You could say either "He's thrifty" or "He's stingy." Both sentences indicate that he doesn't spend much money, but the first frames that fact in terms of the issue of resource preservation (thrift), while the second frames the issue in terms of generosity (stinginess).

The reason that we have the metaphors for morality that we have—both in our culture and in cultures around the world—is that the very notion of morality is founded on experiential well-being and human flourishing. Putting all metaphorical thought aside, what is moral is what promotes experiential well-being in others. Morality is thus correlated with the promotion in others of health, wealth, strength, wholeness, nurturance, and so on. And it is this correlation between morality and aspects of experiential well-being that gives rise to our metaphors for morality. That is, metaphors for morality are grounded in nonmetaphorical experiential morality, in the correlation of morality with promoting strength, wholeness, and health and immorality with promot­ing weakness, decay, and contagion.

Our abstract system of morality is primarily metaphorical, since ituses metaphors like Moral Accounting, Morality Is Strength, and Morality Is Wholeness. Most of the metaphori­cal reasoning described in this book makes use of patterns of inference and of language through such metaphors. Because experiential morality is the grounding for all of these meta­phors, it is also the grounding for moral understanding and moral reasoning.

The highest metaphors in the system—Moral Strength, Moral Authority, and Moral Order—therefore do not keep one in direct touch with human flourishing at the most basic level of human experience. It matters more in Strict Father morality that a person is morally weak (lacking in self-discipline and self-reliance) or violating moral authority (a criminal) than that he is poor, sick, physically weak, or un-cared for.

The Strict Father moral system therefore gives priority to forms of metaphorical morality—Moral Strength and Moral Authority—over experiential morality, namely, poverty, ill­ness, physical weakness, and lack of care. This is where this metaphorical moral system loses touch with the nonmetaphorical, literal, directly experienced foundation of all meta­phorical moral systems. It is where this system of metaphori­cal morality loses touch with common humanity.