Moral psychology has made considerable progress in describing moral judgments, identifying their dimensions, and measuring their sensitivities. Yet none of the existing frameworks provides a cognitive mechanism that explains why the integration of multiple evaluative perspectives systematically fails—and why this failure takes specific forms: judgments flip, freeze, or drift. I propose an architectural explanation: the Three-C Model, in which moral judgment operates through three competing evaluative modes—Character, Constraint, and Consequence. Each mode produces its output in a distinct format: Character as a sense of fit, Constraint as a yes-or-no decision, Consequence as a more-or-less comparison. These formats cannot be directly converted into one another. Drawing on research on task switching and working memory limits, I propose that these modes compete for limited executive resources and that only one can be focused at a time. Switching between modes incurs measurable costs that vary in a situation-dependent manner—under ideal conditions, integration is possible; under extreme conditions, it systematically fails. The model reframes moral inconsistency as an architectural phenomenon rather than a character deficit. It explains why the three patterns follow from the same mechanism, predicts under which conditions each occurs, and opens pathways for intervention. Eight hypotheses with falsification criteria and a cued-evaluation paradigm operationalize the model. .
Frank Bohmhammel (Sun,) studied this question.