In a world marked by wicked social problems, The Minefield helps you negotiate the ethical dilemmas, contradictory claims and unacknowledged complicities of mod...
Poised as we are at the brink of our great annual festival of shopping, wrapping, giving and exchanging, we can sometimes forget just how ethically complicated the act of “gift-giving” is.In fact, those who recoil at the idea of receiving the “charity” of others, as well as those who are suspicious of the clandestine giving of gifts and doing of favours —suggesting a corrupt quid pro quo — are more attuned to this ethical complexity than those who take an unseemly delight in the prospect of “out-gifting” another.In its best forms, we like to think of gift-giving as an expression of a sense of gratitude that the other person is in the world, and that we get to share the world with them. What is meant to be communicated by such gifts, then, is the simple acknowledgement of their preciousness to us, and that our lives our bound together.Should gift-giving elicit a kind of reciprocity? After all, as Marcel Mauss recognised, gifts create forms of obligation, even indebtedness. So just as there is an ethics of gift giving, there is also an art to gift receiving. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “He is a good man, who can receive a gift well”.
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Bonus episode: Can democracy be saved with decency? A public lecture by Scott Stephens
Democracy is in retreat, authoritarianism on the rise. But this has happened before. So how did big thinkers of the past respond to the threats to democracy, and what can we learn from them?Scott Stephens delivered the Humanities Research Centre 50th Anniversary Distinguished Lecture at the Australian National University on 31 July 2024. It was recorded and subsequently broadcast as part of the SOS DEMOCRACY series on Big Ideas.After the lecture, Scott answers questions from Dr Kim Huynh, the Deputy Director of the Humanities Research Centre, and members of the audience.
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“The Godfather, Part II” — a parable of corruption and fall
In December 1974, “The Godfather, Part II” premiered in New York City. Following the unlikely success and unexpected acclaim that his 1972 adaptation of Mario Puzo’s bestselling novel received, Francis Ford Coppola was granted almost unlimited discretion to realise his cinematic vision for the sequel — and he used that discretion to greatest possible effect.In fact, “The Godfather” and “The Godfather, Part II” are rare instances of films that far outstrip, in both its narrative depth and its aesthetic form, the source material on which they are based.At the heart of the first two “Godfather” films is a stark contrast. Vito is virtuous within a cinematic universe in which legality and morality are not synonymous: the fact that his assassination of the tyrannical Don Fanucci is celebrated, that his “favours” are beneficent, that he is attentive to his wife and children — all suggest a kind of moral goodness. Whereas Michael, having begun as the most virtuous of Don Corleone’s sons, falls deeper than the others could have gone.Having begun alone, somewhat removed from the family, Michael ends the film utterly, existentially, morally, isolated.
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Is a “digital duty of care” enough to protect young people from social media’s harms?
Since the start of November, the Australian government has made two significant announcements aimed at preventing the harms that social media platforms are causing to the mental health of adolescents — but are these measures enough?
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How much control should corporations have over the speech of their employees?
Most of us are aware that the emergence of social media platforms and their omnipresence in our lives have fractured public discourse and undermined the conditions of democratic deliberation.But we are only now beginning to grapple with the way corporations — having already decided to make “values” and “ethics” central in their self-presentation to consumers — have become increasingly susceptible to public pressure to deal harshly with employees who express controversial, distasteful or simply divisive opinions.As a result, limitations on the speech of employees are being tolerated that would rarely be accepted within a democratic society.
In a world marked by wicked social problems, The Minefield helps you negotiate the ethical dilemmas, contradictory claims and unacknowledged complicities of modern life.
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