Seated In Action

In the first half of the episode, your hosts talk about the issue of moral reframing as presented in Rob Willer’s Ted Talk, “How to Have Better Political Conversations,” which asks a difficult question: why do we attempt to persuade someone by employing arguments that we find compelling (as opposed to arguments that our interlocutors might find compelling)? In doing so, they talk about how to reconfigure political arguments within other moral matrices. Does this sound Machiavellian? Yeah, maybe it’s a little Machiavellian, but the conversations need to take place, and our messages, whatever they might be, need to be palatable to another person before they can hope to accept said arguments as valid.In the second half of the episode, Andrew further explains how moral matrices are, to some extent, genetically predetermined; that is, moral frameworks are dispositional in nature, and, thus, an individual’s genetics and their environment push them towards one moral matrix over another. They then extend this notion