Sometimes Fixed Sometimes Fickle: Audun Dahl on Why Our Moral Judgements Are Always in Flux

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. We've all heard the phrase, if you're a liberal if you're not a liberal at 20, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative at 40, you have no head. It was supposedly like most things said by Churchill, which, like most things, isn't actually true. Some people have attributed it to Georges Clemenceau, the, nineteenth century French statesman. But, actually, according to Thomas Jefferson, at least, it was first said by John Adams, the a founding father and the second president of The United States. In any case, those words of wisdom by Adams or Churchill or whoever said them suggest that our morality changes, that as young people, we have one way of thinking about the world, and as we get older, we think quite differently. That is a theme of, a new book, an interesting new book published by Harvard University Press called Between Fixed and Fickle, Why Our Moral Views Keep Changing? And it's by my guest today, Audun Dahl, who teaches psychology at Cornell University, and he's talking to us from Ithaca in Upstate New York. Audun, congratulations on the new book. I'm sure you've played around with this phrase. Does this summarize at least the central curiosity of the book, how we are so convinced to be liberals in our youth, and then we become equally convinced conservatives by the time we get older?

00:02:08 Audun Dahl: Funny you should bring it up. I actually grew up thinking it was my grandpa who had said this, but now I'm doubting it. Other people [unclear].

00:02:15 Andrew Keen: Your Norwegian grandpa, I know you grew up, couple of hours north of, Oslo in the beautiful but rather boring Norwegian countryside.

00:02:24 Audun Dahl: That's correct. Yeah. Yeah. Well, should go and check it out. But, yes. It was it was boring for a young kid growing up there, but also beautiful. But, yeah, so this quote is obviously one it captures one aspect of moral change, of the kind of change in political orientations that happen across the lifespan. And there is, you know, some evidence that this, change towards more conservative views as we get older is true. But, it's not the sort of most troubling kind of moral change that the book, starts with. So the most troubling sources or the most puzzling forms of moral change that the book is about are the kinds where where people go from one situation saying, well, cheating is wrong, violence is wrong, to another situation engaging in cheating or engaging in violence, storming the capital, for example. So that's the kind of moral change I call situational moral change where people seem to act in a violation of the principles they otherwise espouse. Another kind of, puzzling moral change that the book deals with is historical moral change. So talk about Thomas Jefferson who famously, proclaimed, the self evident, inalienable rights, to liberty in his in the Declaration of Independence, or at least when he was drafting it, while at the same time enslaving hundreds of people and his plantation in Virginia. So these are the kinds of changes that, really, have troubled, and continue to trouble us and psychologists and ordinary people. How is it possible that morality can be so fickle, so changeable, when we expect it to be reliable and where we want it to be a reliable, trustworthy guides of our action?

00:04:04 Andrew Keen: Or the trustworthy guides of other people's actions. Of course, there's another rather perhaps cynical interpretation which suggests that guys like Jefferson are simply hypocrites that, they claim everyone's equal, but when they own slaves, they're not willing to give them up because if you own slaves, you don't have to do a great deal of work. What for you then, an as I said, you teach this. You got your PhD at Berkeley. You spent your life thinking about these issues. What exactly is a moral view? How would you define it?

00:04:40 Audun Dahl: So when I talk about morality and moral views, it's basically, our views about how we ought to treat other sentient creatures. Most of the time, that's about other humans, but sometimes that can be other animals or other things that we attribute sentience to. Nowadays, we think about AIs, and we can ask whether they have moral rights as well. In the realm of psychology, and also if you pick up any dictionary, that is a relatively narrow definition in the sense that, you have other people defining morality more broadly so as to include religious concerns, for example. And, when I define morality like that, I'm not, you know, saying this is how everybody ought to use the word morality It's just to, capture one aspect, really central aspect, how we all think about matters of right and wrong, namely the duties, the obligations, the things we ought to we owe to the people, to other people, and to other sentient creatures. And what makes morality defined that way so complicated is that, first, even our moral principles about fairness, about rights, about welfare, they themselves enter into conflict. And then you layer on top of that, conflict with other, principles. For example, concerns with obeying God or obeying other obeying other authorities that make our morals lives very, very messy because we have to figure out at any given time which of these principles, which of these concerns do we have to give priority to. And that's where we see a lot of the conflicts happen and a lot of the developments happen, a lot of the changes happening around, what how we ought to act.

00:06:11 Andrew Keen: So why do we have morality, Audun? There's obviously very different readings of it. Nietzsche seemed to suggest that we have morality to acquire power. Slave morality often, he analyzed Christianity as a form of slave morality. And then there's the Kantian view that somehow suggests that it's intrinsic to us as humans. It's what defines us. I mean, there's an awful lot of space, of course, between Nietzsche and Kant. Where do you position yourself? And what's your working definition in terms of these alternative philosophies in terms of, the book and your studies?

00:06:55 Audun Dahl: So, yeah, I should clarify first, that, the role of psychologists here is not to say much about how we ought to act per se, but rather how people think we ought to act. Right? Our job as empirical scientists is not to adjudicate and whether we ought to follow Kant's categorical imperative or rather whether we ought to maximize the welfare of the of others. The core question for us is like where do people's ideas about right and wrong come from, and how do those views change, and how do they guide people's actions? And the evolution we can ask about this, so the evolutionary history of morality, or we can ask about the historical construction of morality. But, and we can ask, oh, was it did it arise, as Nietzsche was saying, to serve certain interests to oppress the powerful, for example? Or as as, you know, as Marxists might say, is it the powerful who are using the morality to make, you know, the working class more obedient? What from my starting point as a psychologist working today with the humans who are alive today is to recognize that virtually everybody around the world have an intrinsic concern with how we ought to treat other sentient beings, other people. And that is not a the way we people think about morality today, how it emerges, developmentally in people's in people's lifetimes, is not, as a tool for something else but as an intrinsic concern. You know, that we simply, have the ability by around age three to say, hey, it's wrong to harm others. We oughtn't to steal from other people. And that's a uniquely human characteristic that, no other animal is able to acquire, but that we acquire over the first three years or so of life. And that's so we can then ask, okay, well, like, how how is this being leveraged? Are there people who, for example, are being disingenuous, right, who are pretending to talk about morality when they're really sort of covering their own truth?

00:09:00 Andrew Keen: I can't imagine who that could be. I don't wanna turn this into another Trump conversation. The current American president gets too much airtime. But, of course, there is the I'm not sure if this is an academic theory, Audun, but commonplace assumption by many people that Trump's absence of morality or the way in which he uses his own, quote, unquote, morality to suit his own purpose, pursue his own interests, is a reflection of some sort of narcissistic personality. As a psychologist, as I said, I don't wanna turn this, I don't know what you think about Trump. I don't even know if you think about him. But, are there people who don't have morality, who have never had it, and what would we call them? Would we call them narcissists? Are they mad? Are they perhaps more sane than the rest of us?

00:09:54 Audun Dahl: Well, I like you said, I would rather not say too much specifically about Trump, partly because, you know, if you wanted to get into analysis of him, we really need to assess him psychologically, and I'm not a clinical psychologist. I do think though that there are people who lack a genuine concern with right and wrong. You know, sometimes and we talk call them psychopaths or sociopaths or people with antisocial personality disorder. And they will say so themselves that they lack that sort of fundamental concern with right and wrong. So those people do exist, but they are perhaps rarer, than, we often think. So one of the sort of problems we have in American society today and other polarized societies is that we tend to, attribute a lack of moral concerns to the other political side. We, you know, there's lots of research on this finding that Republicans and Democrats don't think that the other side is merely wrong. You know, there's a way reasonable people can disagree about matters, but rather that they think the other side is evil, that the other side, is, for example, likely to think that it's child pornography is okay. Right? So there is a tendency today in this polarized society to over to think that the other side is psychopath-like to a much greater degree than they actually are. So part of the message of the book for political divisions that we is that we need to develop better theories of why the other side believes what they do. You know, better theories of why, while I might be pro choice on abortion, somebody else might for reasons they think is totally valid and compelling might be pro, life. And, of course, we that having an accurate theory of the other political side includes recognizing if somebody is a psychopath or if somebody truly doesn't care about the welfare of others. I mean, I think the Epstein files is a kind of moral psychological Yeah.

00:11:48 Andrew Keen: I mean, he makes Trump look like a choir boy, doesn't Jeffrey

00:11:54 Audun Dahl: Epstein. So he's been — the thing for me as a psychologist thinking about this is like, here is someone who has portrayed a very different kind of morality than he truly had. Right? So that's also a moral psychological discovery that will update our beliefs. But, you know, that needs to be recognized as the kind of exception it is. He is not representative of an entire political party, nor is Trump. So that's that's the sort of the scientist's role here is not so much to adjudicate the moral questions, but rather to help society arrive at a better theory of why the other side believes what they do.

00:12:27 Andrew Keen: Maybe there's a degree I don't know if it's moral equivalency, certainly, of moral tolerance in your book between fixed and fickle, which addresses the fact that we sometimes change our morality. Many people see that as hypocrisy. So if someone believes one thing and then the next week or the next year, they believe something else, excuse me, We assume they've changed their mind because of self-interest or because it's convenient for them or because the hypocrisy is too obvious. But are you arguing in between fixed and fickle that we need to be a little bit more open minded, tolerant of peoples of people whose morality changes or people indeed who hold two moralities, seemingly incompatible mal moralities simultaneously. So, for example, in the Iran war, a lot of the Iran war hawks say that we have to go to war with Iran to avoid war. That seems to critics of the war as either hypocrisy or absurd, but maybe there's some logic to it. So are you encouraging a more open minded, tolerant view of changing morality?

00:13:43 Audun Dahl: So I again, I want to sort of separate the psychological project. We're trying to understand somebody from the moralizing project of judging them. So, tolerance, accepting thinking that the other side is, moral or good or, that is a question for all of us, not just for, you know, not that's not a question for psychological science. But I what I'm am saying is that we live in a time when we're strongly encouraged to jump to judgments, based on faulty theories of the other side. There are powerful, people. I'm not being conspiratorial. There are powerful people, political leaders who benefit from our thinking that the other side is crazy and evil. And the, job of the psychologists among us, and really for all of us, is to try to develop, again, better theories of the other side. And so, you know, here's an example of where I think a kind of an updated psychological theory, is important. So you, and I use this in the book too. I'm sure everybody remembers the whole debacle around the Supreme Court nominations at the end of Obama's term when, Mitch McConnell refused to have a hold a hearing on Merrick Garland's nominations of the Supreme Court. And at the time, it was, McConnell said, oh, it's because we don't, you know, wanna hear Supreme Court nominees in an election year. And then, of course, when Trump did the same thing and then another election year, he did hold a hearing. And some a lot of people would see this as examples of somebody being unprincipled, hypocritical, or selfish, in the case of Mitch McConnell. But McConnell had a principle in that case. His principle, which he articulated, many times, in more secret or outside of this context or in more personal conversations, his principle was to try to get as many conservative judges on the Supreme Court as possible. So as a as an audience, as a public, we can think that's not a good reason, but we can say it was it was immoral. But he did this we when we judged McConnell, we'd want to base it on an accurate understanding of why he did what he did. And he thought he was entitled — it was right for him to give a justification in public that he didn't, that didn't match his actual justification. And he thought, well, this is a necessary, means to a just end. And, what I'm focusing on here in the book is to try to get us to understand that the reasons people have for their judgments and why they think they're entitled to pursue those ends. And then we can judge. And then we can say, well, this was, yeah, sometimes it's okay to lie, but this was not a good situation to lie. This is not warranted, for example. So Yeah.

00:16:28 Andrew Keen: You keep on waving your science flag, Audun, suggesting that somehow you can get above all the rest of us, and you can make sense of this while we're all stuck in, pointing fingers. But can you really do that? I mean, let's take the McConnell case. He no doubt told everyone that he had a principle, but, of course, that principle was only used because it clearly suited him, and it's not just a Republican principle. I'm sure a Democrat would have done the same thing. And in fact, many Democrats were critical of Congress at the time because their congresspeople didn't do what McConnell did, and so they lost politically. Can one really establish some sort of scientific pedestal above all this? Everyone pursues their own interests, and meaning in a way, it goes back to Nietzsche, and especially when it comes to politics. Machiavelli, of course, wrote very influentially and controversially about this. So doesn't everyone pursue their own interests and that's just the nature of things and that they use morality to suit their own purposes? And if the shoe is on the other foot, then they simply reverse their argument?

00:17:41 Audun Dahl: Sure. And the but there's a difference between pursuing one's own self-interest or political interest in a kind of principled way and doing it without concern for right and wrong. So Machiavelli is an interesting case. Right? Sometimes he is portrayed as a pathological and a power hungry person, but he is, you know, very principled in how he explains why this or that action from the ruler is necessary and warranted in order to preserve, you know, the country or the governing, system, of the prince. So the what I so the what I want to try to discourage is to immediately assume that just because somebody's acting in their self-interest, they're being, being, selfish and unprincipled. So here's another example from that we've studied quite extensively, about, student cheating. So when, people, my colleagues, when researchers hear about students cheating, so they cheat on a test, for example, as most students do during their academic careers, I see, selfishness. It seems like these students, they claim to care about integrity and honesty, but they don't actually. But when you ask people, when you ask students, whether it's sometimes, acceptable to cheat, they typically say most people say, well, sometimes under certain circumstances, it is okay to cheat, not just for me, but for everybody. So there's a kind of principled granting of, to each other of the rights to sometimes prioritize one's own self-interest over, other, you know, concerns that we also care about, for example, honesty.

00:19:17 Andrew Keen: So I take your point. I mean, maybe that's true. You've done the research. Doesn't that suggest the Nietzschean interpretation that morality is just a facade? We just simply use it to pursue our own interest and that we dress up, our behavior in moral codes to promote ourselves when it suits us. And, otherwise, we simply are hypocrites, and that's who we are as a species.

00:19:45 Audun Dahl: Well, that would be the case if people were simply sort of cheating whenever they felt like it, and then they just concocted a justification for it afterwards as as some, you know, psychologists claim is the case. But the what the story I'm proposing here based on our research and cheating and then based on other literature is that there is a moral regulation even of these behaviors that seem self-serving or that are promoting people's interest. And that morality is still stopping people from doing things that they otherwise might have done if we didn't have a moral sense. There's still a difference between being a self-serving psychopath and a principled person who says, well, to some extent we all have the right to prioritize our own, self-interest or our own interests over, other considerations. So it's the we can still disagree about when that's warranted. Now, for example, many of my colleagues and including myself would want students not to cheat. Right? But, we can still disagree about that. But as we are judging acts of cheating or judging other kinds of dishonesty like in the McConnell case, we'd want to differentiate some somebody simply sort of concocting principles to fit their own self-interest versus somebody who's adjudicating and saying, well, sometimes we do have the right to pursue our own interests. Sometimes it's more important to get more conservative judges in the Supreme Court than to be totally honest with the public. And sometimes we ought to be honest. Sometimes we ought to —

00:21:10 Andrew Keen: Wait, wait, wait. You're losing me a bit, Audun. I don't understand this cheating example. So okay. So I take your point. You've you've done your research. Some the students say it's not really okay to cheat, but sometimes it is, and sometimes we do. Mhmm. Can you give me a more concrete example in their minds at least or in our minds in terms of the research of when it's okay to cheat? Because clearly, you're not saving the world. You're not benefiting humanity in any way by cheating in a in an exam or lying about whether or not you use AI. How are people justifying it?

00:21:47 Audun Dahl: So yeah. So for so for example, when we did started doing research on cheating, we were collecting stories, of when students recounted having cheating in the past. So, for example, they might say that, oh, there was a time when I was working two jobs. I was you know, I forgot that the assignment was due the next day. I need to pass this class. The instructor was really unfair and wouldn't give an extension, and my mom was in the hospital. So and under those circumstances, I, you know, thought that, well, cheating is wrong, but in this case, it's and I decided to do it. So that by itself because it okay. Maybe the students just concocting justifications or maybe they sincerely believe this. To test that, then we present other, students with the same situation. So then we remove the role of self-interest. Like these other students who are hearing about this hypothetical other student, they have no personal stake in the situation. They have no, you know, self-interested motive to excuse this. And yet we find that those other students, unrelated to the event, they also think that it's acceptable to cheat in that situation. And then we present the same dilemma or problem to, non students, so just regular US adults. And they too tend to be much more likely to think it's okay to cheat under that situation. So what we are doing is that by identifying the factors that people seem to think warrant their own acts of cheating. And then we see are those conditions that under which other people have no self-interest in the situation, also think that it's okay to cheat.

00:23:17 Andrew Keen: So what is it what is that I mean, you're you're you're painting an increasingly dark picture, Audun, of the human condition from your research at Cornell with these students. They're accepting that if someone concocts a story about their mother being sick or them having to do a second job, that it's fine to cheat. I mean, what about the kids who who's who who who do their work in equally, if not more problematic circumstances. Aren't we just suiting ourselves? And, in fact, your research suggests that there's an epidemic of dishonesty or an epidemic of amorality in the world. Everyone thinks that everyone has the right to cheat or not pay their taxes or rob if they need to. I'm I'm, you seem to be your research really suggests something rather rotten. Isn't it? Doesn't it?

00:24:11 Audun Dahl: Well, it is you know, you are, of course, perfectly entitled to think that nobody should ever cheat on an academic assignment and as it

00:24:19 Andrew Keen: No. I'm not saying that. You know, because you're you're you're you're changing the language. Now I'm not saying people shouldn't. I'm simply saying that when it comes to morality, one doesn't have the right to cheat on an exam because you had to work at night or because your mother is sick. If you're having a problem, then go to the go to the professor. You're a professor. You know, if someone came into your office and said, look, I can't take the exam tomorrow. My mom's sick, or I had to work nights, and it's a bit of a struggle for me, you'd give them an extension, or you'd be understanding. So it just suggests to me that we've lost any kind of moral bearing if people justify it, not just for themselves, but for others.

00:25:06 Audun Dahl: So the moral bearing comes in, because most of the time, students don't cheat. Right? Most of the time, we don't lie. If you just look at, you know, whether it any kind of dishonesty, most people, most of the time, act in honest ways. And, occasionally, they act in dishonest ways. And, occasionally, they think it's acceptable for themselves or somebody else to act in dishonest ways. So morality is actually everywhere, and the point of this research is to show that even when people seem to act in violations of general principles, such as, you know, be honest, don't cheat, they're still taking those principles into account. They're still, deciding, well, on the one hand, cheating is wrong. On the other hand, this is a really unusual situation. And in this, situation, think it's okay to make an exception. Sometimes we see students thinking, Yeah, maybe it's okay to cheat in the situation, but I still feel horrible about it because I don't like cheating. These are ways in which people remain concerned with integrity, with honesty, even in situations where they decide to cheat. So I think of this as sort of as a human being as a much more hopeful picture than the picture that people are simply dressing up their actions and moral language. What I think we're showing is that people are genuinely concerned with right and wrong, and we're we're showing it even in situations that seem to go against those early principles. The fact it's the fact that people are often or most of the time refraining from cheating or lying, and that even when they are cheating or lying, they're still considering the reasons against cheating or lying that's that makes us different from from other animals. So I guess I

00:26:42 Andrew Keen: have to admit, I'm not convinced. What about the this issue of guilt? As you suggest, we partly, I guess, concoct morality or invent morality or have morality, as a way of avoiding feeling bad about ourselves, of feeling guilty. In terms of your research, and in this new book, Between Fixed and Fickle, what's the role of guilt? Does that drive how we think not just about ourselves, but about others? I mean, in the old days, in the age of religion, people assume that if someone was immoral, they'd be punished in another world. They'd go to hell. These days, most of us don't believe that.

00:27:30 Audun Dahl: Right. But we are, punished in this life in part, because we often feel guilty about it. And this is, this is another kind of hallmark of human morality, this ability to, think poorly of ourselves. And so if you imagine, like, the stereotypical psychopath who doesn't care about moral principles, has no reason to feel, guilty. Right? And yet we see even in the very young children, three year olds, four year olds are showing signs of guilt after having done something and will often try to repair, the damage they've done. For example, if they, you know, damage somebody's favorite toy and then, then the person comes back and say, Oh, you damaged my toy. The these kids, two year olds, three year olds, will try to repair. So and we see this also in the research on cheating that people are genuinely conflicted and feel bad about, their actions very often, especially when they feel like it's affected somebody else, like, they disappointed the teacher, for example. So guilt is another along with our ability to show moral outrage about situations that, you know, don't concern that don't directly concern us, like, we can be outraged at an at injustice elsewhere. Guilt is one of those things that marks us as some as people who are concerned with something more than our self-interest that are concerned with doing the right thing. So I think of the, guilt as, yeah, another another thing that makes me personally very hopeful about human morality, that we have this capacity.

00:28:58 Andrew Keen: You say that people don't cheat very often. You teach at Cornell, as you know, as well as anybody and all academics. Everybody at university now is using AI. Not everybody, but the vast majority of students are using it probably to, quote, unquote, cheat. Who knows what the difference is between using AI and cheating? What's your sense of the role of new technology in all this? Do people use that? An excuse as well saying, well, we're not allowed to use AI. We're not supposed to use AI, but it's everywhere, and everyone else is using it. So I'm going to

00:29:39 Audun Dahl: So and to clarify when I said, like, people don't cheat very often. What I mean is that, statistically, if you look at any sort of particular kind of action, for example, submitting an assignment, most of the time, most people do not, you know, cheat in that assignment. But most people at the same time do cheat at least once during their academic careers. And why is that happening? I like so now with, with ChatGPT and other, you know, AIs that can help people do their academic work, we are entering a zone of a whole new source of ambiguity. Right? So, one of the things we know this is not new. One of the things we know about cheating is that it tends to happen more often when people don't realize they're cheating or when they're unsure that they're that they're cheating. Right? So when we have a new technology that sort of that blurs the boundaries and makes it less clear whether this is permitted or not, we have new opportunities for people to do things that they may think is legitimate but isn't, because, for example, the teachers haven't been on haven't been clear and so forth. The other thing that's happening, of course, as you say, is that when people, when students think that everybody else is using it, then suddenly using, the ChatGPT, for example, it no longer seems like it gives them an unfair advantage. It actually, the lack of or then you not using ChatGPT becomes an unfair disadvantage in their eyes. So that's another way in which the availability of ChatGPT or another, similar services can or platforms can, increase cheating, for sure or increase, violations of the policies that the universities and the teachers tries to institute.

00:31:14 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I don't think many people are particularly outraged by the use or the nonuse of AI, but people are horrified now. You brought up we talked about Jefferson earlier. Jefferson being an example of a man who, on the one hand, spoke about universal human rights, wrote the wrote the Declaration of Independence, and at the same time, was a slave owner himself. What does your book tell us about characters like Jefferson? Are they consciously I mean, you mentioned McConnell. I mean, he's a rather boring old Republican. I mean, Jefferson, on the one hand, is considered a founding father, and on the other hand, by many people, particularly, African Americans, he's considered a supreme American hypocrite. What does your theory in between fixed and fickle tell us about Jefferson? Or are people like Jefferson, particularly in the early history? Jefferson wasn't alone amongst the founding fathers in being a slave owner.

00:32:16 Audun Dahl: No. No. He was he was absolutely not. And, of course, here I'm relying, not on my own research. I never had a chance to interview Jefferson, but, on historical research, especially biographies of Jefferson, and by including one by by Joseph Ellis. And the thing to in order to make sense of how this is possible, how the way to make sense of an otherwise incomprehensible character like Jefferson, is to try to delve into his psychology and understand what exactly did he believe about why slavery was wrong, why humans had inalienable rights, and how we might be able to end slavery. And he, in particular, might be able to free his slaves. And when we do that, we recognize that he did live in a somewhat different psychological and social world than than we did. So not so much that it's unrecognizable, but different enough that his moral dilemma was slightly different from from ours. So, for example, Jefferson, was convinced that, black and white people, especially after the end of slavery, would not be able to live peacefully, alongside each other. So for him, the sort of the end of slavery was a kind of a practical problem that he saw no resolution to. And this, of course, stemmed from his deep racist beliefs that black people, were fundamentally different from white people. And this, by the way, is a belief that many other not just the founders, but later people like like Lincoln too also held extremely racist beliefs in this regard and was very doubtful that black and white people could live together peacefully in the South after the end of slavery. So and, of course, another, con contributor to Jefferson's hypocrisy was his own personal finances, which were very, very dependent on his slaves. And, or so all these factors meant that Jefferson's dilemma, was a, different one from the one we have and in a sense a harder one. I mean, for us, it seems obvious that we could just, you know, we could end slavery today or yesterday, ten years ago, and, people could get along without, you know, and without entering into to bloodshed. But for Jefferson, this was a part of the dilemma. All that said, of course, it's I have no, you know, personally no problems with condemning Jefferson one of the things that makes it so easy to condemn Jefferson is that he himself knew that slavery was wrong. He wrote this. You know, he was very, very aware that what he was engaged in was immoral. He just couldn't find a way out of it in his lifetime. So

00:34:53 Andrew Keen: So maybe, you know, coming back to Jefferson, as you know, he slavery suited him. He recognized it was wrong. He lived with it, and he lived very well. He even, you know, had sexual relations and children with one of his slaves. Is one way to think about this, comparing, say, Jefferson, who remained sane all his life, comparing him to somebody like Robert McNamara? We did a show on McNamara, couple of months ago with his biographer. McNamara, of course, was, the former US secretary of defense. Back then, it was called defense, not war, in charge of Vietnam. And he got sucked into the war. He told a lot of lies, and eventually, he went crazy, and LBJ fired him. Is one way of thinking about this, and I'm thinking out loud here, or that we should admire McNamara more than Jefferson because because McNamara recognized the profound hypocrisy and kinda went crazy, whereas Jefferson didn't.

00:36:02 Audun Dahl: Well, I think Jefferson did, from everything I've read anyways, records Jefferson did recognize the hypocrisy as well. I don't know if that means he deserves our admiration, but, it I guess it creates another parallel between them. I don't know exactly how he was able to live, with, that hypocrisy. I haven't, you know at least I don't recall that specifically being discussed, or maybe we don't have sources on that, but he certainly was very, very aware of the hypocrisy. And the I guess the trick for me with Jefferson, maybe more than, McNamara, is it possible, still to appreciate, some of the, contributions he made to both the political realities and also the idea the ideas of, The United States and also the world more broadly? Is it possible still to admire the ideas about freedom, about the rights to liberty, as something that he articulated and can deserve credit for? There is a historian, Lynn Hunt, who wrote this book about inventing human rights, you know, pointed out this thing which I thought was quite compelling that it was because of people like Jefferson that we were able to even call it hypocrisy. It was because he actually did articulate principles that eventually motivated, the end of slavery that we can point out as some hypocrisy. And that for that, I see some basis for admiring him as a as a human that he was No.

00:37:35 Andrew Keen: He didn't know. I mean, it wasn't as if he was consciously doing this hunt, taught history for a while at Berkeley. I remember taking a class with her. She was an expert on the French revolution. But, I mean, couldn't you I don't wanna drag the Nazis into this, but I'm going to because I can't resist, I guess. Couldn't you say the same thing? I mean, George Steiner wrote a book about Hitler in Israel suggesting that from from a Jewish point of view, Hitler should be considered a pretty good guy because he, and he wasn't, of course, serious. It was just a polemical, strategy in a play that he wrote. But, Hitler enabled the state of Israel in the same way as maybe Jefferson eventually through his action or his hypocrisy, enabled free blacks and the civil war and all the rest of it?

00:38:26 Audun Dahl: Well, I think there's a there's a big difference between Jefferson if we believe that he truly endorsed these principles of liberty, meaning he did actually want, in on some level, a want of liberty to become a reality even though he didn't do as much as he could to bring in about.

00:38:43 Andrew Keen: A bit mildly in terms of I mean, the I think you're some people are gonna be very angry with the way you're presenting Jefferson. I mean, he could've stopped having slaves. It's not that hard, and many people in his generation did.

00:38:57 Audun Dahl: Sure. Now and I think he should've. I mean, the that I there's no, you know, hesitation about me about condemning you.

00:39:04 Andrew Keen: I know. I'm not suggesting that you're in favor of slavery, but I'm suggesting your treatment of Jefferson is overly sympathetic, my sense is.

00:39:16 Audun Dahl: I mean, I don't know if it's overly sympathetic, because, I guess I'm wondering whether it's possible, and I think it is possible, to admire him for the principles he articulated while at the same time condemning him for the things that he ought to have, or he failed to do that he ought to have done and he knew he ought to have done. And I think that's, so, I do think that's a very different situation though from the different situation with Hitler, who certainly had no, you know, desire to promote a Jewish nation or the Jewish people and then who wanted the very opposite. So that parallel, whereas most parallels with Hitler, it seems to me to fall apart. With Jefferson, I my point is not to try to excuse him at all, but to try to make sense of him. And, again

00:40:07 Andrew Keen: I take your point. So let let's just, I could resurrect Jefferson for you. What would you what's the key question in your research? You put your research lab on. You switch on your recorder. What would you ask Jefferson?

00:40:22 Audun Dahl: Well, if I could influence him, I would try to get him to see the folly of his fear about black and white people living together. And I would try to inquire into those beliefs so as to show him that those beliefs were faulty. And because those beliefs were faulty, he had, no reason to oppose the ending of slavery, or he lacked that reason as well as the other all the other reasons he knew. And I guess if I were simply trying to understand him, I would, you know, ask him, you know, where where does this fear come from? Why is he so convinced that this wasn't Okay.

00:41:00 Andrew Keen: So let let's say you found a fear. You're a psychologist. Maybe it was a fear of his mother or his father or going to hell or whatever he came up with. What does that tell you about his morality or absence of morality? Isn't it all self-serving?

00:41:16 Audun Dahl: Well, if he was truly, only concerned with, serving himself, he wouldn't have had to express his opposition to slavery, nor his, voice these very general ideas of universal, freedom. So, I think he again, you know, coming back to the, case of student cheating, for example, the if people really, wanted to act in accordance with their own self-interest, they would cheat and lie much more often than they actually do, and they would not show the kinds of guilt and the kinds of outrage they show, around cheating. So the I'm not, you know, buying the dire picture that people are simply doing whatever they can get away with and dressing it up in moral language. And I think the case of Jefferson, is much more is much more complicated than that. He wasn't simply doing everything he could to promote his own self-interest. But again, my goal here is not so my goal is not at all to try to excuse him. I actually think the excusing him is kind of uninteresting. I think the condemnation of him is kind of obvious. The reason why I talk about Jefferson in the book, so to the extent I do, is to try to make sense of, like, how is it possible, that the same creatures, the same creatures we see today, also lived, two hundred, two fifty years ago. What are the continuities in our moral sense underneath the very obvious and dramatic changes that have happened since then? And I think, you know, approaching it that way, you can sort of you can see the kinds of dilemmas that we face today that we are aware of that structurally, you know, maybe not in severity, but structurally looks somewhat like the problems that Jefferson was grappling with and was unable to resolve. You know, I think there are things we know today that we know the future will condemn us for, that, for example, around climate change, or among the treatments of people who are lower income or otherwise struggle in society. And we know these are things that we do, that will not be looked kindly on by the future, and yet we persist in these practices.

00:43:37 Andrew Keen: Although not everyone would agree with that. What about generational morality? I'm particularly interested in Bobby Kennedy, and of course RFK Jr. seems the other side of the moral coin to Bobby Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968. I'm not sure if you've looked much at either RFK Jr. or Robert F. Kennedy, but does morality get passed down from generation to generation, and within a very prominent political moral family like the Kennedys, can we see some of the ideas on historical change and continuity and morality that you address in Between Fixed and Fickle?

00:44:26 Audun Dahl: Sure. So I wanna be cautious about saying too much about the Kennedys because I don't know — certainly not, or I know neither RFK that well. But in general, it's certainly true that, of course, parents do a great deal to shape the moral views of their —

00:44:50 Andrew Keen: You mean their children?

00:44:51 Audun Dahl: Yes, yes. But of course, in this case, Bobby died so early — Bobby Kennedy died so early that, of course, that limits his influence. But in general, of course, families do pass on moral views and values to the next generation. But at the same time, every new generation has an ability, a psychological ability to question, to challenge, to criticize, and sometimes abandon the values of their predecessors. And so in that sense, the kids wouldn't simply escape the responsibility for the moral views they do take. And this is why, of course, we also see moral change from one generation to the next. We see that the children are rejecting many of the moral views of their parents.

00:45:39 Andrew Keen: And so Well, claiming a hypocrisy. They often in the sixties in particular, they claim that the hypocrisy of the parents and that they were living their parents' real values and that the parents and a lot of young people say that today, I think, in their, say, over Israel where everyone talks about discrimination, and yet when it comes, at least in some people's minds, to the crime of Israel, you're not allowed to criticize because you're accused of being anti Semitic.

00:46:08 Audun Dahl: Right. And in this kind of generational tension, to me, we see the kind of creative, restless energy of morality, this ability of each of us to take the kind of moral views we receive from society and say, hey. I don't agree with this. You know, I think that this is unfair or unjust. This is, you know, why it was possible for humanity to eventually to ban slavery across the world, even though it was practiced once, you know, almost everywhere. And it's why today we see the similar kinds of moral clashes where new generations trying to push the world towards a better place.

00:46:43 Andrew Keen: Finally, I couldn't resist this one, Audun. Your namesake I know he's not a relative. Roald Dahl, a very prominent, English writer of children's books. He's perhaps most famous for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But he was also a notorious antisemite, what some people define it perhaps rather euphemistically as having a stern morality. Certainly, many people saw his dark side. When it comes to teaching morality, do we have to be moral? I mean, can someone like Dahl, who was clearly a rather unpleasant man, can he be as good a teacher of morality, especially for young people, as someone who is less blemished than Dahl?

00:47:37 Audun Dahl: Well, this is, I think, where, again, this kind of the creative force of children, of young generations, come in. So you talk about Roald Dahl as a fiction author, as a teacher morality, but I think think fiction does a lot more than simply sort of tell us which values to, adopt. It explores questions of morality, and then it's on us to draw lessons from that. And in that case, certainly an immoral person could write literature and certainly has written literature, that we can draw moral lessons from. But the moral lessons aren't simply happening because we are adopting the views of the author. They are happening, because we are learning things from what the author did. So I think it's it's perfectly possible to derive insight psychological insight. In fact, and to some extent, perhaps, the people who are in a difficult or selfish, or in otherwise have moral flaws can teach us, more about morality, and the human mind, than somebody we totally agree with about everything, because it's that difference between who they are and who we are that teaches something new.

00:48:48 Andrew Keen: So finally, fascinating conversation, Audun. Do we want more or less morality in the world? I mean, I know you're a research scientist. You don't have to fall back on the science. In your view, just as Audun Dahl, father, husband, citizen, should we have more or less morality these days? Is it good that we all think in such extreme moral ways? We all seem so unforgiving, although perhaps some of us actually live up to our principles. Should we be compounding our morality or challenging it, questioning it?

00:49:27 Audun Dahl: What I would wish first of all, now in our polarized times is that we learn more about the morality of other people, that we have a better understanding of why the other side disagrees with us. And secondly, I'm reminded of the novels by Hilary Mantel about Thomas Cromwell —

00:49:49 Andrew Keen: Thomas Cromwell.

00:49:50 Audun Dahl: Cromwell. And, didn't when did I get my Cromwell wrong? and how if we read Mantel, if we read Machiavelli, we see that humans used to live in a time when there was very little room for asking what the right thing was to do because so much was about survival. So I would like us to live in a world where there is more room, when we have more elbow room to make decisions based on not what we need to do to survive or get by, but what we think is right. So those are my two wishes. And if that adds up to more morality, then, yeah, let's say more morality.

00:50:24 Andrew Keen: More morality from, Audun Dahl, author of a really interesting new book, Between Fixed and Fickle, Why Our Moral Views Keep Changing. I don't think you're justifying cheating at college, Audun, because otherwise, your students will come into your room and say, well, you said it was okay for me to cheat.

00:50:43 Audun Dahl: I absolutely did not say that. Yes. But I would like to understand why they make the decisions they do, and that's what we why we do our research.

00:50:50 Andrew Keen: Well, there you have it. Fascinating conversation, Audun. Congratulations on the book. It's out. Important read. Important subject. Thank you so much.

00:50:58 Audun Dahl: Thank you.