A difference among relations

I want to get at a certain difference between relations like love and hate, on the one hand, and relations like causation and parthood, on the other.

One way to see the difference is that there are significant formal constraints on the distribution of causation and parthood, but no formal contraints on the distribution of love and hate. For instance, there cannot be cycles of causation and parthood must be transitive. But there are no such constraints on love and hatred: any combination of loves and hatreds is possible for ordinary human beings.

Another way to see what seems to be the same difference is this. Bracketing considerations of God’s goodness, God can just directly freely insert and remove instances of love and hatred within a bunch of people without changing anything else. But it seems that God can’t just directly freely insert and remove instances of causation and parthood within a bunch of entities. It seems he can’t, for instance, reverse the direction of causation between my father and myself, or will me to be a part of my heart.

I find it a very mysterious feature of causation and parthood that it has such formal constraints.

The lack of free recombinability for a relation is sometimes explained by the relation being non-fundamental. For instance, “darker than” must be transitive, but the reason is that its obtaining depends on more fundamental facts, such as how dark the two relata are, and this dependence induces the logical features of the relation. It could turn out that causation and parthood do depend on more fundamental things, though this does not seem very plausible. But at the same time, it seems pretty plausible that whatever more fundamental things causation and parthood depend on, these will include relations, and relations of a sort that have the non-recombinability features of causation and parthood.

Anyway, it seems to me that there is some fundamental difference between fundamental relations that have no formal constraints and fundamental relations that do have formal constraints, and I don’t know what accounts for it. I feel that this difference is a mere indicator of some deeper difference in kind. Causation and parthood “look” very different from love and hatred.