The Minefield 

In Jane Austen's novel Emma, we find an abiding concern with the demands, not just of propriety, but of morality, an attentiveness to the dangers of self-deception, and vivid reminders of the importance of friendship to progress in the moral life.

Far too much debate today is more like a play of competing monologues, or self-promotion designed to perform for one's tribe. Should we give up on the fantasy of persuasion through argumentation and cascading theses altogether?

Julian Assange's defenders claim that the free speech protections afforded to news organisations should apply to Assange as well — and that his impending extradition to the US therefore poses a threat to democracy. Professor Katharine Gelber joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens to discuss whether the free speech argument holds.

While political comedy has long been a distinguishing feature of truly democratic cultures, one of the more notable shifts over the past two decades has been the merger of comedy into political commentary. What has this done to the conditions of our common life?

Five years after the historic gathering at the red centre, Anthony Albanese used his election night victory speech to “commit to the Uluru Statement from the Heart in full”. Professor Megan Davis joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens on The Minefield to discuss some of the obstacles that stand in the way of a constitutional referendum, and how a First Nations Voice might transform the moral fabric of our politics.

Social media platforms have been the objects of unrelenting public and political scrutiny over the past decade. Rather less attention has been paid to their more benign cousins — so called “crowd-funding platforms” like GoFundMe. Until now. For what happens when one person's worthy cause is another's moral abomination?

Does the 2022 federal election tell us anything about the future of Australian democracy? We know that the Coalition was resoundingly defeated. But does Australia's new patchwork parliament hold out a surprising model for how some of the inherent limits of representative politics can be overcome?

There is an inescapable conflict that any policy meant to address housing affordability must contend with: in order to make home-ownership more achievable for some, the value of houses must decrease — thereby offending the way we have been urged to see houses as an instrument of financial accumulation. Professor Victoria Ong ViforJ joins The Minefield to discuss whether there is a solution.

We live in a time when “hot” emotions prevail. It could be that an alternative sentiment, in some ethically complex circumstances, is ambivalence — which is to say, a willingness to withhold judgment, to linger in the interval between two options.

By turning the Solomon Islands into a federal election “issue”, Australia has emphasised the national security implications of their agreement with China. PM Manasseh Sogavare has, in response, asserted their right to “manage our sovereign affairs”. ANU's Terence Wood joins The Minefield to discuss the tension between security and sovereignty, and what it all means for Solomon Island's democratic culture.

Few of life's activities are as morally complicated as eating. If food has become, in our time, a source of nourishment for what Iris Murdoch calls the “fat relentless ego”, what might it mean to transform food into a means of achieving companionability with others?

There are habits of seeing which can corrupt our moral lives, or clutter our vision, or defile our imaginations. Just as there is a “contemptuous gaze”, as Iris Murdoch puts it, there are also “eyes tempered by grace”. So what might it mean to undergo a “fast for the eyes” in order to see the world more clearly?

Of all the ways we interact with the world and with the moral reality of other persons, none is as fundamental as speech. In a time when we are saturated with words, what might it mean to purify our language?

What if the impediments to moral growth are not purely or even primarily external to us? During the month of Ramadan, we explore the inner tension between our tendency toward egotism, craving, and self-deception, and the task of cultivating the virtues of humility, self-restraint, and moral clarity.

There is no doubt that emotions like anger can be a proper response to the persistence of injustice or inequality or prejudice or cruelty in the world. But it can also be exhausting and insatiable in its desire for retribution, or to impose one's will upon the world. Should we, then, seek to renounce anger?

The question of whether the franchise should be extended to children has become an increasingly pressing topic in political theory. But why would we want them to vote? Is it in the interests of political equality? It is to achieve a specific outcome — say, more future-oriented, climate friendly policies? Or is it to cultivate the necessary democratic virtues?

It is hardly surprising that Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been met by fierce, swift, and unified opposition on the part of the West and their allies — who have offered strategic support to the Ukrainian military, and isolated Russia through an unprecedented regime of economic, diplomatic, and cultural sanctions. What might this mean for international responses to other such atrocities elsewhere?

Lying has become so commonplace in politics that it has almost become expected — if not quite accepted. Many politicians who are notoriously promiscuous with the truth even remain relatively popular. Whereas few things infuriate voters like hypocrisy. Should hypocrisy bother us as much as it does? Should we be quite as blasé about political lying as we seem to be?

Works of art, both high and low, can inform and inflect a moral vision of the world. It makes sense to approach works of art with an attentiveness to the light they shed on our lives and our life together. But does this still apply to the award-winning HBO series “Succession”, with its evident delight in cruelty, cunning, and almost virtuosic vulgarity?

Two years ago Scott Morrison raised the drawbridge, effectively sealing “Fortress Australia” off from the rest of the world. What effect has the act of separating Australian citizens and residents from the world and from each other had on our sense of national life, identity, and solidarity? “We” may be “all in this together” — but who, exactly, can be said to count among this “we”?

The debate over the Religious Discrimination Bill has exposed a tension at the heart of the liberal vision of a pluralistic society, in which citizens commit to living together despite their profound disagreement over matters of highest importance. What happens when disagreement becomes a cause of harm?

The practice of compulsory voting, along with the two other pillars of Australia's electoral system — preferential voting and non-partisan election administration — have kept Australian democracy remarkably stable over the past hundred years. But just how much can we rely on these formal elements of Australian democracy to safeguard Australia's democratic culture?

The misuse of moral language in public debate is nothing new. But in our social-media saturated age, this misuse has taken on a distinct and rather perfidious form. Morally weighted language is regularly used to grant excessive or abusive claims, and personal or categorical insults, an air of moral seriousness. This kind of language marks the end of conversation. Are we better off without it?

Over the past two months, the conduct of two prominent figures have evoked fierce expressions of public emotion. What explains the intensity of feeling? Have these emotions distorted the public's judgment, or have they granted that judgment a certain moral clarity?

It's become a sad commonplace in our time to hear the lines along which democratic societies are now divided. What is often absent, however, is mention of class. Why? Do Korean films like Bong Joon-ho's Parasite, or Hwang Dong-hyuk's smash hit Squid Game, have anything to teach us? Atlantic staff writer George Packer joins us.

How might we avoid bad faith quotations, served up in vain interests, and locate ourselves, our hearers, our readers, in a community of mutual interest and intellectual wonder — not so much using quotations, as exposing ourselves to their provocation?

They seem innocuous, but since their invention more than two decades ago, emojis have come to permeate our forms of online communication. Indeed, they are the perfect expression of what communication has become in a social-media saturated age.

Over the last year, there have been a number of high-profile cases where journalists have either landed themselves in legal trouble, or have sparked fierce backlash, due to their conduct on social media. This raises complex problems, not just for the public's perception of journalists, their impartiality and credibility, but also of the news organisations to which they belong.

Opinion writing plays a disproportionate role in our media eco-system: it drives online traffic, fuels emotion, feeds the forces of polarisation, and promotes an incapacity to understand one another. But is there a different way to think about opinion?

One of the most notable cultural changes to have taken place over the past two decades is the emergence of “prestige television” — which is to say, television as the visual equivalent of literature, and with similar ambitions. What has this shift done to our moral sensibilities, or to our understanding of the shape and demands and limits and possibilities of the moral life?

Now that vaccines are enjoying widespread coverage among wealthy nations, and with the recent emergence of the Omicron variant and rapidly rising rates of infection in the United States and throughout Europe, many states have begun implementing domestic booster campaigns. But this presents thorny ethical problems involving vaccine distribution and global equity.

In a time when so many opinions are clamouring for views in our debauched attention economy, “sh*t-stirring” has become an irresistible strategy to get oneself noticed. But it does so at a cost, not least to the reputational cost of those who practice it — including moral philosophers. So what is the difference between “sh*t-stirring” and something like virtuous provocation?

Over the last two weeks, we've seen a new wave public protests grow in both size and palpable anger in Victoria. With politicians already trying to make the most of these demonstrations in the lead-up to next year's federal election, what are their implications for representative politics in Australia?

How much leeway should we give politicians to change, if not their minds, then at least their positions? Under what circumstances are political “U-turns” not liable to condemnation or censure? When should they be met with suspicion, and when should they be received as a reflection of the hard realities of representative politics itself?

It's become a sad commonplace in our time to hear the lines along which democratic societies are now divided. What is often absent, however, is mention of class. Why? Do Korean films like Bong Joon-ho's Parasite, or Hwang Dong-hyuk's smash hit Squid Game, have anything to teach us? Atlantic staff writer George Packer joins us.

Every so often, fans are forced to reckon with the high price that sports can exact on the lives of athletes. In such moments, we are compelled to ask: Is our enjoyment worth the cost?

How might we avoid bad faith quotations, served up in vain interests, and locate ourselves, our hearers, our readers, in a community of mutual interest and intellectual wonder — not so much using quotations, as exposing ourselves to their provocation?

There is a growing evidence that people have accepted the reality of climate change and the need for action. But there is significant divergence in attitudes toward the salience of the problem — which is to say, how big a problem it is, how much it should matter to us, and where to rank climate change in a list of national priorities.

Far too much debate today is more like a play of competing monologues, or forms of self-promotion designed to perform for one's tribe. Should we give up on the fantasy of persuasion through argumentation and cascading theses, as some philosophers have, or do we need to rethink the conditions of persuasion altogether?

As the philosopher Bernard Williams anticipated, utilitarianism has largely disappeared from public view, not because it is no longer adhered to, but because it has become the “operating system” that governs most of our public decision-making. What the COVID-19 pandemic has done is make that hidden calculus explicit.

In modern politics and moral philosophy, what is most meaningfully human is regularly ignored in the interests of solving “real problems”. While this is often understandable, it also points to a certain debility, a malaise at the heart of the way forms of both representative politics and moral philosophy are often practiced: an inattention to the “everyday”.

If levels of strident “vaccine hesitancy” in Australia are extremely low, and the push to help the population reach the necessary vaccination threshold is more logistical than it is ideological, should we continue publicly to use language and to employ punitive measures which effectively humiliate or ostracise the unvaccinated?

Even in a scientifically enlightened, media-savvy age, conspiracy theories have proven strangely resilient. They just don't seem to want to go away, and many people seemingly can't get their fill. We've touched on the odd persistence of conspiracy theories on this show in the past, but now RN has devoted an entire series to what makes conspiracies attractive, how people find themselves swallowed up by them, and, perhaps most importantly, how people have found their way out.

The events of 9/11 are inseparable from the horrors of what was subsequently revealed about the use of torture against detainees in locations like Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. What does the persistence of torture say about political communities that continue to countenance its use?

In the face of the latest COVID-19 outbreaks, there is little that has differentiated the governing strategies of Liberal and Labor state governments — certainly not at the level of practice. Are we witnessing a more long-term scrambling of Australia's already unclear political divisions?

Over the last year, there have been a number of high-profile cases where journalists have either landed themselves in legal trouble, or have sparked fierce backlash, due to their conduct on social media. This raises complex problems, not just for the public's perception of journalists, their impartiality and credibility, but also of the news organisations to which they belong.

Does the swift collapse of the US-backed Afghan government suggest that places like Afghanistan are ungovernable by anything other than brute force and unimpeded corruption — or does it suggest that the ultimate folly of the post-9/11 wars was the conceit of “nation building” itself?

Snitching, ratting, dobbing, grassing — these are all words for behaviour that we are taught, at a very young age, to find reprehensible. Is our reticence to “dob” an expression of a worrying disposition toward non-intervention, or is it an expression, even if a perverse one, of a deeper moral principle?

The COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in a wave of “emergency politics”, in which the normal processes of democratic deliberation and public accountability have been suspended. In a public health crisis, is democratic dissent a problem to be solved, or a resource for a more sustainable, mutually beneficial outcome?

Could the full acknowledgement of the extent of our complicity in the injustices of the past, constitute a galvanising principle, the basis upon which a new political community is formed? Is shame really inimical to national pride, or is it rather one of its expressions?

A new “space race” is underway – except this time, it's not between the United States and Russia, or even China and India. Instead, billionaires Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson are spearheading the lucrative “space tourism” industry. Should this be seen as a source of hope, or simply one more expression of capitalism's dogma of infinite growth.