The Minefield

Is loyalty a virtue?

It is surely one of the more perverse achievements of modern marketing to have taken words that have a certain moral valence — which is to say, words that connote intimacy or an interpersonal bond — a...

2026-09-10

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Live from the Festival of Dangerous Ideas: Does longevity threaten the future?

It is suitably ironic that one of the most poignant, and pertinent, moments in Homer’s The Odyssey was airbrushed out of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation. The first time we meet Odysseus, th...

2026-09-03

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What response does Jason Arday’s life, and death, morally demand?

It is hard to imagine a series of events more tragic, more unseemly, more emblematic of the performativity and polarisation that dominate our time, than the premature rise, sudden fall and untimely de...

2026-08-27

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Is opposition to data centres good news for democracy?

At a time of profound polarisation, when the fracturing of media ecosystems has been so complete that any agreement on threats to our common life seems impossible, an issue has emerged capable of brin...

2026-08-20

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Should fat from cadavers be used for cosmetic procedures?

The widespread availability of GLP-1 based drugs has been lauded as a “revolution in weight loss” and as inaugurating the “end of obesity”. As we’ve discussed previously, health benefits aside, there ...

2026-08-13

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How to protect democratic politics from the malign influence of money?

Ever since Aristotle, it has been recognised that money poses a particular threat to the integrity of political office. Ever the realist, Aristotle knew that those who seek political office are invari...

2026-08-06

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What happens to our moral lives when we stop reading books?

According to every available metric, the number of people who read books across almost every demographic in countries like Australia and the United States has fallen precipitously over the last fiftee...

2026-07-30

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Do prediction markets enhance our understanding of the world or corrupt it?

Even for those who don’t gamble, the exponential growth of online sports betting since 2018 has made it impossible to avoid. Not only have odds and ads been seamlessly integrated into sports broadcast...

2026-07-23

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‘The Devil Wears Prada’ — high fashion or vision of hell?

It’s no mystery why David Frankel’s 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada was a hit. The movie had all the ingredients of a certain kind of success. Take a bestselling novel (by Lauren Weisberger) about a m...

2026-07-16

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Copyright theft is AI’s original sin — are we doomed to repeat it?

Essential to the profitability and widespread adoption of modern technologies is the need to conceal their costs — the human labour, the unjust or exploitative working conditions, the environmental de...

2026-07-09

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Last Words: ‘I’ve Been to the Mountaintop’ — Martin Luther King, Jr in Memphis

In 1967, after reaching the heights of social and political influence in 1963, after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and having been instrumental in the passage of the Civil Rights Act in...

2026-07-02

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Why the anxieties over multiculturalism? What’s the appeal of a monocultural society?

If One Nation leader Pauline Hanson managed to reignite a public debate with her assertion that Australia is “a multiracial society, but we must be monocultural” during her address last week to the Na...

2026-06-25

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One Nation is on the rise — but do we know what it means?

Over the last twelve months, there have been two conspicuous trends in federal politics. One is the precipitous decline in electoral support for the Liberal Party, which began before last year’s feder...

2026-06-18

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The ethics of ‘longtermism’ — what are our obligations to the future?

One of the criticisms often directed at democratic politics is that it is irresponsibly, even dangerously, short-term in its orientation. The wellbeing of future generations, to say nothing of the sus...

2026-06-11

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Last Words: The ‘Farewell Sermon’ of the Prophet Muhammad

It could be said that human beings reveal who they most truly are as they approach the end. For the end of one’s life is not simply its terminus ad quem; it is also its telos, its goal or meaning. A l...

2026-06-04

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The Problem of Nationalism, with David Moscrop — Live at the Sydney Writers’ Festival

It’s common these days to refer to “the return of nationalism”. But that assumes that nationalism receded for a time, like the tide, and here the world is, now, getting its pants legs wet. Such an ass...

2026-05-28

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What is the moral of Marlowe’s ‘Doctor Faustus’?

There are four stories that could justifiably be described as foundational to Western culture: the temptation of Eve in the Garden of Eden; Prometheus’s gift of fire to humanity; Doctor Faustus’s pact...

2026-05-21

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Does the budget have a coherent underlying philosophy?

The federal budget is, in many respects, the high point of Australia's political calendar. This federal budget is no exception. The public had been primed for weeks to expect a series of significant r...

2026-05-14

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Are ‘reaction videos’ dulling our ability to be genuinely responsive?

One of the by-products of digital technology’s pervasiveness in our lives is its seeming irresistibility. However much we try to remain conscientious objectors, to resist its allure, its promises of c...

2026-05-07

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NDIS reforms may be necessary, but they’re also morally fraught

In a speech to the National Press Club, Health Minister Mark Butler announced a series of sweeping changes that the federal government will make to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). In...

2026-04-30

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The Minefield

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