The Minefield

Ego-centrism is a form of inattentiveness, a failure to be responsive to the moral reality of another person. In this second instalment in our Ramadan series, we explore how such i…

What does it mean to be intellectually humble? How might such humility be cultivated? What are its benefits — both to ourselves and to those around us?

Now that John Cleese has announced that the iconic series will return, it’s worth examining what made Fawlty Towers a masterpiece — and whether its interaction with the political c…

What made the Online Compliance Initiative — better known as the Robodebt scheme — so egregious is the way it was designed to treat those purported to be “welfare cheats” with utte…

Even though we rarely frame it in these terms, it is hardly inappropriate to refer to the relationship between a parent and a child as a moral relationship. Professor Luara Ferraci…

There are good political and philosophical reasons for seeing free and equal access to early childhood education as an expression of our shared commitment to justice.

Dr Lauren Gurrieri joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens to discuss the sophisticated ways sports gambling operators are targeting new clientele — through targeted ads and by parasit…

Professor Naomi Baron joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens to discuss whether ChatGPT and its soon-to-be-released competitors, with their lure of efficiency and ease, are threatenin…

Professor Maryanne Wolf joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens to discuss whether we are entering an age of widespread moral illiteracy — an incapacity to engage in the processes that…

Professor Mark McKenna discusses with Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens why any proposal to change the Australian Constitution must navigate Australians’ conservative disposition and u…

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 i…

Perhaps no “moral emotion” in our time is more reviled than shame. It is regarded, certainly in the West, as uniquely destructive to a healthy sense of self, as psychologically dam…

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 exhaustin…

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, th…

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 remin…

In November 2022, Scott Stephens delivered the 20th annual Simone Weil Lecture on Human Value hosted by the Australian Catholic University. His topic was the moral conditions of de…

Over the next few weeks, we are bound to be in the same space with some most disagreeable company. Is this a prospect we should dread?

Does Stanley Kramer's 1967 film, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner", have to make too many sacrifices in order to be morally palatable to its white audience?

Jealousy is one of those rare emotions whose presence or evidence is almost always looked down upon, but whose total absence is also viewed with a certain suspicion, even disdain.…

Ever since the advent of “ready-to-wear” mass-produced clothing, the brands and prevailing fashions they establish hold out a kind of “idealised” body to which wearers must conform…