The Philosophy and Therapy Podcast · John T Maier

Episode #24: Shane McLoughlin

·1 hr 1 min·4 clips

A UK sample of about 1,000 people showed moral relativism correlated with moral transgressions above 0.8.

John T. Meyer opens by introducing Shane McLaughlin. McLaughlin is a lecturer in character education at the Jubilee Center for Character and Virtues at the University of Birmingham, with research centered on designing and testing interventions that help people clarify their values and act in line with them. The conversation starts wide. Meyer asks how McLaughlin would describe the heart of his research and its relevance to clinical practice, and McLaughlin responds by tracing a path that has shifted over time rather than staying locked in one framework. He begins with relational frame theory. From there he moves toward value clarification, acceptance and commitment therapy, and the empirical testing of tools meant to shape how people relate to their goals and commitments. The interview keeps returning to measurement. Rather than treating value-based work as a vague therapeutic ideal, the discussion asks how researchers can tell whether an intervention truly changes the things people say they value and the actions they are willing to take. That opens into moral psychology. McLaughlin describes a project aimed at developing a psychometric measure of a particular aspect of moral behavior or moral judgment, and he uses that project to separate moral relativism from the specific ways people justify wrongdoing. The examples are concrete. He names dehumanizing others, distorting consequences, euphemistic labeling, and diffusion of responsibility as some of the mechanisms by which people can rationalize moral transgression or slide around moral responsibility altogether. The discussion gets more technical here. McLaughlin explains that the team also measured moral relativism with items such as whether something could still be wrong in absolute terms even if everyone agreed it was moral, and he points to historically familiar counterexamples like slavery to show why the distinction matters. The work was carried out in a nationally representative sample, which gives the findings more weight than a narrow convenience dataset would have. The measures of moral relativism and moral transgression correlated above 0.8, a level he describes as virtually unheard of and notably strong. The closing turns back to significance. The conversation emphasizes that the findings are still part of an active research program, but the episode already makes the practical and conceptual stakes of the work feel clear.

As heard by us

A patient conversation about values, responsibility, and how philosophy meets clinical practice.

Shane McLaughlin's interview takes its time, and that patience suits the material. It traces how values turn into action, then follows the hard edge of the discussion into moral relativism and the smaller mechanics of excuse-making, where euphemistic labeling, dehumanization,…

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Why you'd press play

If you want a careful map from values talk to moral judgment, press play.

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