The Harvard Brief

Between Fixed and Fickle: Why Our Moral Views Keep Changing (Harvard UP, 2026), a psychologist explains why—and how—moral views change across different life stages, situations, and historical eras.

We like to believe that moral truths are obvious and unchangeable: cheating is wrong, killing is wrong, slavery is wrong. Yet people have often cheated, killed, and enslaved without regret. The acts that feel glaringly wrong to us in the here and now can seem fine to someone who is younger, or faces different circumstances, or lived a century ago.

Why does morality appear so unstable? The popular explanation is that emotions, self-interest, and social pressure easily divert people from moral concerns because they lack sincere moral commitment. But the evidence shows otherwise. Drawing on studies of young children, adolescents, and adults, Audun Dahl argues that human morality is neither immutable nor capricious, neither fixed nor fickle. Rather, people change their moral views when they believe they have good reasons to—reasons that they can articulate to themselves and would endorse for others.

The science of moral change cannot resolve our ethical dilemmas: it does not tell us what’s morally right or wrong. But it can help us understand why we have moral views in the first place, why those views keep changing, and why moral views that seem obvious to us aren’t obvious to everyone else. Separating moral psychology from moralizing, Between Fixed and Fickle reveals what’s behind our changing agreements and disagreements as we travel toward shared and hard-won moral truths.
Host: Renee Garfinkel
Guest: Audun Dahl

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From the beginning of the seventeenth century, French colonies and trading posts sprawled across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In the first pan-imperial history of the early French Empire in the English language, Mélanie Lamotte shows how an increasingly cohesive legal culture came to govern the lives of enslaved and free people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent. She also illuminates the important role played by these populations in the development of the empire, from Louisiana to Guadeloupe, Senegambia, Madagascar, Isle Bourbon, and India.

The early French Empire has often been portrayed as a fragmented conglomerate of isolated colonies or regions. Yet Lamotte shows that racial policies issued by the metropole, as well as by officials in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, significantly influenced one another. Rather than focusing on the actions of administrators, however, Lamotte also reveals the extensive influence of people on the ground—especially those of non-European descent. Through their sexuality and their labor, along with their socio-economic and political endeavors, they played a critical role in building the empire and setting its limits. As they sought justice for themselves, strove to protect their kin, and aimed to improve their social conditions, these individuals also pushed against the advancement of white dominion in unexpected ways.

Archivally rich and rigorously documented, By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire (Harvard UP, 2026)illuminates the transoceanic connections that united the French colonial world—and recasts people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent as key actors in the story of empire-building.

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The story of Polish Jewry, pre-Holocaust Europe’s largest Jewish community, is often told as one of creativity and contestation. In his new book, An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland, University of Chicago professor Kenneth B. Moss traces instead a complex and painful story of Polish Jewish reckoning with diasporic vulnerability, nationalism’s terrible potencies, Zionism’s promises, and the necessity of choice. Moss examines the works of Polish Jewry’s most searching thinkers as they confronted political irrationality, state crisis, and the limits of resistance. He reconstructs the desperate creativity of activists seeking to counter despair where they could not redress its causes. And he recovers a lost grassroots history of critical thought and political searching among ordinary Jews, young and powerless, as they struggled to find a viable future for themselves – in Palestine if not in Poland, individually if not communally.

Join Kenneth Moss in conversation with Stanford professor Steven Zipperstein for a discussion on this new publication and the history it unveils.

Buy the book: here

This book talk originally took place on March 2, 2022.

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The strategic landscape of the Cold War generated political support for a permanent US military force of unprecedented scale. Faced with the problem of managing this behemoth, leaders of the defense bureaucracy looked to private industry for inspiration: since the military now resembled a huge industrial conglomerate, they reasoned, it should be run like a business. In Pentagon Capitalism: How the Cold War US Military Modeled Itself on Private Business (Harvard UP, 2026), Dr. A. J. Murphy explores the profound consequences of translating military structures of command, logistics, and warfare into capitalist terms.
In the realm of budgeting and finance, defense reformers refashioned the supply process as a buy-and-sell transaction between units, requiring officers to express their need for equipment and labor in dollar terms. Bureaucrats embraced Taylorist work measurement to supervise everything from clerical filing to the production of massive weapons systems. The services even engaged management consultants to establish officer-training academies modeled on the Harvard Business School.
After the Vietnam War, many military leaders pushed back, questioning “managerialism” and calling for a return to traditional concepts of command. Civilian critics also chimed in, protesting the callousness of the business-minded secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, who famously measured success and failure in body counts. By this time, however, the language and values of management had thoroughly infiltrated the military’s institutional structure and daily operations. As Pentagon Capitalism makes clear, the reorganization of the defense bureaucracy along the lines of a for-profit firm durably altered the experience of military work and facilitated the lasting privatization of US national security.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) was one of the foremost European
intellectuals of the twentieth century. He published hundreds of
articles on modern history and culture, and his books became canonical
works and bestsellers on both sides of the Atlantic. His crystal-clear
writing, vast erudition, and ability to make his Marxist analysis
digestible to a wide audience brought him worldwide renown. Yet Hobsbawm
was no academic hermit. Through his globetrotting journalism, he was
embedded in an extraordinary web of politicians, activists, and fellow
intellectuals across Europe, South Asia, and the Americas, including
Manmohan Singh, Che Guevara, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Fernand Braudel,
E. P. Thompson, Arno Mayer, and Salvador Allende.

In The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian (Harvard University Press, 2026), Emile Chabal
traces the origins of Hobsbawm’s ideas and most famous writings by
exploring his scholarly foundations, delving deep into the archives to
uncover hidden links and unexpected conversations that shaped his
pathbreaking work. Going well beyond the Ages series of modern
history books for which Hobsbawm is best known, Chabal offers the first
substantial interpretation of Hobsbawm’s entire body of writing. Indeed,
The Age of Hobsbawm is also a trove of unique insights into
the generations of Marxist writers with whom Hobsbawm was in
conversation—authors whose work continues to shape political debates
globally.

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