#1287 Audun Dahl - Between Fixed and Fickle: Why Our Moral Views Keep Changing

Hello, everyone, welcome to a new episode of The Decenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricard Lopes, and today I'm joined by Dr. Uvan Doll. He's associate professor of psychology at Cornell University, and today we're talking about his fascinating book between Fixed and Fickle. Why our moral views keep changing. So, Doctor Dol, welcome to the show. It's a huge pleasure to everyone. Thank you. Thank you for having me. So I I mean it's not the first time that I have a moral psychologist on the show, but uh let me start by asking you this, particularly for people in the audience that might not be familiar with this subject. So how do you approach morality and moral views, moral values from a psychological perspective?

So to to uh see what's distinct about the uh psychological perspective, it might be useful to contrast it with what's not. What I call a psychological perspective. So a lot of the times when we encounter people who hold moral views, especially those we disagree with, our first response might be to say, Oh, that's wrong, or I disagree with that, or let me convince you otherwise. Uh the psychological perspective, what I mean by the the moments of moral psychology, uh is that we uh are those processes where we try to understand Why the person arrived at the view they have, you know. So where did that view come from in their own life history or historically? And how is that moral view uh changing uh or affecting guiding their uh emotions, their judgments, their reasoning, their actions. So it's it's the it's the time when we

Moral psychology means to under try to understand the moral views of others before or instead of judging them. And What do we do as as a scientists to study morality from a psychological perspective is that we take this thing that we all do, which all try to understand each other's moral views uh at times, we try to turn that into a science, uh, and that means uh doing you know designing studies, it means collecting data, it means uh analyzing data, and it means drawing conclude conclusions, uh using more rigorous and resource intensive methods to try to reach more reliable conclusions. So for example, you know

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