The Minefield
Episodes
Persuasion — is it possible, or even desirable?
30 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Is Julian Assange entitled to a “free speech” defence?
23 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Julian Assange’s defenders claim that the free speech protections afforded to news organisations should apply to Assange as well — and that his i...
What’s the point of political comedy?
16 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
While political comedy has long been a distinguishing feature of truly democratic cultures, one of the more notable shifts over the past two decades ...
What would a First Nations Voice mean for Australia?
09 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Five years after the historic gathering at the red centre, Anthony Albanese used his election night victory speech to “commit to the Uluru Statemen...
The ethical dilemmas of crowd-funding platforms
02 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Social media platforms have been the objects of unrelenting public and political scrutiny over the past decade. Rather less attention has been paid t...
What is the significance of Australia’s federal election?
26 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Does the 2022 federal election tell us anything about the future of Australian democracy? We know that the Coalition was resoundingly defeated. But d...
How do you solve a problem like housing affordability?
19 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
There is an inescapable conflict that any policy meant to address housing affordability must contend with: in order to make home-ownership more achie...
Is it ethical to be ambivalent?
12 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We live in a time when “hot” emotions prevail. It could be that an alternative sentiment, in some ethically complex circumstances, is ambivalence...
Sovereignty, security, and the Solomon Islands
05 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
By turning the Solomon Islands into a federal election “issue”, Australia has emphasised the national security implications of their agreement wi...
Purification and the Moral Life: The Ethics of Hunger and Eating
28 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Purification and the Moral Life: Disciplining the Eyes
21 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 g...
Purification and the Moral Life: Chastening Speech
14 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 satur...
Purification and the Moral Life: Transforming Desire
07 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 be...
Is anger corrosive to the moral life? A conversation with Christos Tsiolkas
31 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 worl...
Live from WOMADelaide: Should children get the vote?
24 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The question of whether the franchise should be extended to children has become an increasingly pressing topic in political theory. But why would we ...
What's at stake in the conflict in Ukraine?
17 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 a...
What’s worse in politics — lying or hypocrisy?
10 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Lying has become so commonplace in politics that it has almost become expected — if not quite accepted. Many politicians who are notoriously promis...
"Succession" — A Theatre of Cruelty
03 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Does Australia have a concept of “solidarity”?
24 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Two years ago Scott Morrison raised the drawbridge, effectively sealing “Fortress Australia” off from the rest of the world. What effect has the ...
Was the Religious Discrimination Bill destined to fail?
17 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The debate over the Religious Discrimination Bill has exposed a tension at the heart of the liberal vision of a pluralistic society, in which citizen...
How essential is compulsory voting to Australia’s democratic culture?
10 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The practice of compulsory voting, along with the two other pillars of Australia’s electoral system — preferential voting and non-partisan electi...
Are we suffering from too much moral language?
03 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 p...
Novak and Boris — why have they elicited such strong public emotions?
27 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Over the past two months, the conduct of two prominent figures have evoked fierce expressions of public emotion. What explains the intensity of feeli...
Why don’t we talk more about class?
20 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 men...
What are we doing when we "quote"?
13 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
How might we avoid bad faith quotations, served up in vain interests, and locate ourselves, our hearers, our readers, in a community of mutual intere...
Emojis: Universal language, or harbinger of an age of moral illiteracy?
06 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
They seem innocuous, but since their invention more than two decades ago, emojis have come to permeate our forms of online communication. Indeed, the...
Should journalists stay away from social media?
30 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Is "opinion" doing more harm than good?
23 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Opinion writing plays a disproportionate role in our media eco-system: it drives online traffic, fuels emotion, feeds the forces of polarisation, and...
“Prestige television” and the moral life
16 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
One of the most notable cultural changes to have taken place over the past two decades is the emergence of “prestige television” — wh...
Should wealthy nations be procuring booster doses?
09 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Now that vaccines are enjoying widespread coverage among wealthy nations, and with the recent emergence of the Omicron variant and rapidly rising rat...
The ethics of “sh*t-stirring”
02 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In a time when so many opinions are clamouring for views in our debauched attention economy, “sh*t-stirring” has become an irresistible strategy ...
Melbourne’s protests — last gasp or harbinger of things to come?
25 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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...
The ethics of political U-turns
18 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
How much leeway should we give politicians to change, if not their minds, then at least their positions? Under what circumstances are political “U-...
Why don’t we talk more about class?
11 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 men...
Should we enjoy sports that ruin athletes' lives?
04 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 as...
What are we doing when we “quote”?
28 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
How might we avoid bad faith quotations, served up in vain interests, and locate ourselves, our hearers, our readers, in a community of mutual intere...
How much should we care about climate change?
21 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 a...
Persuasion — is it possible, or even desirable?
14 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 gi...
Has the pandemic shown the unassailability of utilitarianism — or its inherent limitations?
07 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
As the philosopher Bernard Williams anticipated, utilitarianism has largely disappeared from public view, not because it is no longer adhered to, but...
Has democratic politics become too contemptuous of everyday life?
30 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In modern politics and moral philosophy, what is most meaningfully human is regularly ignored in the interests of solving “real problems”. While ...
Should we avoid humiliating the unvaccinated?
23 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
If levels of strident “vaccine hesitancy” in Australia are extremely low, and the push to help the population reach the necessary vaccination thr...
From Abu Ghraib to Nakhon Sawan — why does torture persist?
16 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 Ab...
Australian politics – is the divide geographical, not ideological?
09 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the face of the latest COVID-19 outbreaks, there is little that has differentiated the governing strategies of Liberal and Labor state governments...
Should journalists stay away from social media?
02 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Was US failure in Afghanistan inevitable?
26 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Does the swift collapse of the US-backed Afghan government suggest that places like Afghanistan are ungovernable by anything other than brute force a...
The ethics of dobbing
19 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Snitching, ratting, dobbing, grassing — these are all words for behaviour that we are taught, at a very young age, to find reprehensible. Is our re...
How much dissent is permissible in a public health emergency?
12 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in a wave of “emergency politics”, in which the normal processes of democratic deliberation and public accounta...
Can national shame lead to political change?
05 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Could the full acknowledgement of the extent of our complicity in the injustices of the past, constitute a galvanising principle, the basis upon whic...
The ethics of space tourism
29 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
A new “space race” is underway – except this time, it’s not between the United States and Russia, or even China and India. Instead, billionai...
Myanmar — what are the limits of political violence?
22 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The military coup, which overturned the results of last November’s national election, has plunged Myanmar into a cycle of escalating violence. This...
Is COVID-19 bringing the worst out of Australian politics?
15 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
What is the prolonged experience of the pandemic showing us about the nature of Australian politics, the limits of executive power, the role of exper...
Is nihilism compatible with the moral life?
08 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In moral philosophy and mass culture alike, “nihilism” has a bad name. And little wonder. It is most often associated with meaninglessness, pessi...
Has justice been done to George Floyd?
01 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Is the conviction and sentencing of Derek Chauvin something to be celebrated as an indication of moral progress? Can the shared horror over George Fl...
What's so bad about laughter?
24 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Philosophy’s concern with laughter is as old as philosophy itself. The association of laughter with derision and contempt runs through the concerns...
What are we doing when we make promises?
17 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Should we be bound by the constraints of our former self, and the promises we have made in the past? Is moral progress a matter of consistency with o...
Are there ethical limits to vaccination incentives?
10 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Should certain privileges be afforded to those who have received a COVID-19 vaccine (from international travel to attending sports venues and restaur...
Aged care: How do we honour our obligations to the elderly?
03 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The Royal Commission into Aged Care and the ravages of COVID-19 within aged care facilities have thrown a spotlight on the adequacy, the ethics and t...
Is it ever OK to abandon your team?
27 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Attachment to sporting clubs is one of our deepest and most emotionally charged forms of prejudice. But what about those moments when a fan decides s...
What are the conditions of co-existence in Israel-Palestine?
20 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The incommensurability of the claims in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict produces a kind of moral absolutism, whereby one side is entirely to blame a...
Fatigue – the emotional cost of the moral life?
13 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Fatigue is a fascinating moral phenomenon. It can be a consequence of attentiveness, a willingness to face the realities of the world. But it can als...