Big Thinker: Joanna Bourke
Joanna Bourke (1963 – present) is an historian, academic and philosopher who specialises in understanding the history of social and cultural phenomena. Her work has profoundly shaped our understanding of many fundamental aspects of human experience.
Joanna Bourke was born in New Zealand, and lived in Zambia, Solomon Island, and Haiti as a young child. She graduated from Auckland University with a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts in history, and went on to complete her PhD at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra.
The dark parts of human experience
After writing her dissertation, titled Husbandry to Housewifery: Rural Women and Development in Ireland, 1890-1914 (1989), Bourke became interested in the experiences of men and women during wartime. Her work as a social and cultural historian has led her down a path of dealing with some of the less pleasant parts of being human, including topics such as pain, killing, war, violence, fear and rape. Bourke has been drawn to these elements of human experience because she feels that “these are the disciplines that have the most to offer us in terms of intellectual responses to current crises.”
Bourke’s book An Intimate History of Killing (1999) asks the question: what are the factors within society and in a war that turn a regular person into a good killer, or more politely, a good soldier? To answer her question, she uses excerpts from diaries, letters, memoirs and reports of Australian, British and American veterans of WWI, WWII and the Vietnam war. Bourke concludes that ordinary, gentle human beings can (and often do) become enthusiastic killers during a war because the structure of war encourages soldiers to feel pleasure from killing.
Some of her writing is also born out of personal experience. After a massive operation and a broken morphine drip, Bourke started thinking about pain and how difficult it is to describe in the English language. In her book The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers (2014), she concludes that “it is useful to think about pain in adverbial terms” because “it describes the way we experience something, not what is experienced.” As well as tracing the history of pain from the 1800s to present, she also details how factors such as race, class, gender and age have influenced the medical treatment of pain and often resulted in cruel abuse and neglect.
“Life’s too short for second editions.”
Joanna Bourke’s academic interests are vast. She has written 13 books and published over 100 articles, often tackling controversial and taboo topics.
In her recent book Loving Animals: On Beastiality, Zoophilia and Post Human Love (2020), Bourke argues that we should take a more nuanced approach to how we understand loving relationships between humans and non-human animals. When we take this more nuanced approach, Bourke finds that we are able to gain a clearer understanding of the nature of relationships, love and what we owe each other.
“I will be suggesting that animals are actors in society. This serves to challenge the anthropocentrism of history, human exceptionalism, and the idea that ‘culture’ is an entirely human preserve.”
Bourke begins by pointing out that “studies suggesting a link between bestiality and psychosis should be treated with caution due to sampling bias, because they were conducted on people already within the penal system, rather than a cross-section of the population.” She calls us to think about how we can so freely say that we love our pets, but turn a blind eye to slaughterhouses and factory farming. Bourke wants us to ask: what does it mean to love a non-human animal, and more broadly, what does it mean to love?
When we remove human exceptionalism from our understanding of human-animal relationships (which Bourke urges that we must), we can begin to think more about what we owe animals and how moral attitudes such as care, compassion, affection and pleasure are not unique to human beings.
Current work
Bourke is currently a professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London in England. She is also the Principal Investigator for a project called SHaME, or Sexual Harms and Medical Encounters. The project explores the medical and psychiatric aspects of sexual violence, with the aim of moving beyond the shame of sexual assault and address it as a global health crisis.
Her newest book Disgrace: Global Reflections on Sexual Violence, which has been partially motivated by her work with SHaME, will be available for purchase in Australia on August 15.
Joanna Bourke presents The Last Taboo as part of Festival of Dangerous Ideas 2022. Tickets on sale now.
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Finance businesses need to start using AI. But it must be done ethically
Banking and finance businesses can’t afford to ignore the streamlining and cost reduction benefits offered by Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Your business can’t effectively beat the competition marketing any product in the 21st century without using big data and AI. Given the immense amount of consumer data available – and the number of channels, segments and competitors – marketers need to use AI and algorithms to operate successfully in the online environment.
But AI must be used prudently. Business managers must be meticulous in setting up rules for the algorithms’ decision making to prevent AI, which lacks a human’s inherent moral and ethical guiding force, from targeting ads towards unsuitable or vulnerable customers, or making decisions that exacerbate entrenched racial, gender, age, socio-economic, or other disparities and prejudices.
The Banking and Finance Oath’s 2021 Young Ambassadors recognised a gap in the research and delivered report: AI driven marketing in financial services: ethical risks and opportunities. It unravels the complexities of AI’s impact across the financial services industry and government, and establishes a framework that can be applied to other contexts.
In a marketing environment, AI can be used to streamline processes by generating personalised content for customers or targeting them with individual offers; leveraging customers’ data to personalise web and app pages based on their interests; enhancing customer service with chatbots; and supporting a seamless purchasing journey from phone to PC to in-person at a storefront.
Machine learning algorithms draw from immense data pools, such as customers’ credit card transactions and social media click-throughs to predict the likelihood of customers being interested in a product, whether to show them an ad and what ad to show them. But there are ethical risks to navigate at every step – from the quality of the data used to how well the developers and business managers understand the business objectives.
Using AI for marketing in financial services comes with two significant risks. The first is the potential for organisations to be seen as preying on people in vulnerable circumstances.
AI has no moral oversight or human awareness – it simply crunches the numbers and makes the most advantageous and profitable decision to lead to a sales conversion.
And if that decision is to target home loan ads at people going through a divorce or a loved one’s funeral, or to target credit card ads at people who are unemployed or living with addiction, without proper oversight, there’s nothing to stop it.
The other risk is the potential for data misuse and threats to privacy. Customers have a right to their own data and to know how it’s being used – and what demographics they’re being placed in. If your data’s out of date or inaccurate, or missing in sections, you’ll be targeting the wrong people.
All demographics – including racial background, socio-economic status, and individual psychological profile – have the potential to be misused by AI to reinforce gender, racial, age, economic and other disparities and prejudices.
Most ethical failings in AI-driven marketing campaigns can be traced back to issues with governance – poor management of data and lack of communication between developers and business managers. These data governance issues include: siloed databases that don’t share definitions; datasets that don’t refresh quickly enough and become outdated; customer flags that are incorrect or missing; and too many people being designated as data owners, resulting in the deferral of responsibility.
In human driven decision making, there’s a clear line of command, from the Board, to management, to the frontline team. But in AI-driven decision making, the frontline team is replaced by two teams – the AI developers and the team of machines.
Communication gaps emerge where management may not be familiar with instructing AI developers and the field’s highly technical nature, and the developers may not be familiar with the jargon of the business. Training across the business can act to fill these gaps.
Before any business begins to integrate AI into its marketing (and overall) strategy, it’s crucial that it adopt a set of basic ethical principles, these being:
- Beneficence (or do good): personalise products to improve the customer’s experience and improve their financial literacy by delivering targeted advice.
- Non-maleficence (or do no harm): ensure your AI marketing doesn’t target customers in inappropriate or harmful ways.
- Justice: ensure your data doesn’t discriminate based on demographics and exacerbate racial, gender, age, socio-economic or other disparities or stereotypes.
- Explicability: you need to be able to explain how your AI system makes the decisions it does and the relation between its inputs and outputs. Experts should be able to understand its results, predictions, recommendations and classifications.
- Autonomy: at the company level, governance processes should keep humans informed of what’s happening; and at a customer level, responsible decision making should be supported through personalisation and recommendation tools.
The reality is that no business can afford to ignore the benefits AI offers, but the risks are very real. By acknowledging the ethical issues, businesses can seize the opportunities while mitigating the risks, benefiting themselves and their customers.
Download a copy of the report here.
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We are being saturated by knowledge. How much is too much?
We’re hurtling into a new age where the notion of evidence and knowledge has become muddied and distorted. So which rabbit hole is the right one to click through?
Our world is deeply divided, and we have found ourselves in a unique moment in history where the idea of rational thought seems to have been dissolved. It’s no longer as clear cut what is right and just to believe….So what does it mean to truly know something anymore?
According to Emerson, the number one AI chat bot in the world, “rational thought is the process of forming judgements based on evidence” which sounds simple enough. It’s easy to form judgements based on evidence when the object of judgement is tangible — this cheese pizza is delicious, a cat playing a keyboard wearing glasses is funny. These are ideas on which people from all sides of the political spectrum can come to some form of agreement (with a little friendly debate).
But what happens when the ideas become a little more lofty? It’s human nature to believe that our one’s ideas are rational, well reasoned, and based on evidence. But what constitutes evidence in these information rich times?
We’re hurtling into a new age where even the notion of “evidence” has become muddied and distorted.
So where do we even begin — which news is the real news and what’s the responsible way to respond to the news that someone as intelligent as you, in possession of as much evidence as you, believes a different conclusion?
Philosopher Eleanor Gordon-Smith suggests, “There are many, many circumstances in which we decline to avail ourselves of certain beliefs or certain candidate truths because we’re being very Cartesionally responsible and we’re declining to encounter the possibility of doubt. And meanwhile, those of us who are sort of warriors for the enlightenment of being very epistemically polite and trying to only believe those things that we’re allowed to do so on. The conspiracy theorists, meanwhile, consider themselves a veil of knowledge, which then they deploy in a very different way.”
Who gets to be smart?
Before the Enlightenment, the common man had no real business in the pursuit of knowledge, knowledge was very fiercely guarded by the Church and the Crown. But once it dawned on those honest folk that they could in fact have knowledge, it almost became a moral imperative to seize it, regardless of the obstacles.
Nowadays avoiding knowledge is an impossibility impossible. Access to information has been wholly democratised, if you’ve got a smart phone handy, any Google search will result in billions of possible pages and answers. It’s now your choice to determine which rabbit hole is the right one to click. To the untrained eye, there’s no differentiating between information that is thoroughly researched and fact checked and fake news. And according to Eleanor Gordon-Smith it is this saturation of knowledge has come to define our generation. So much so that the value of knowledge “has been subject to a kind of inflation”.
She asks, “how do you restore the emancipatory potential of knowledge that the Enlightenment founders saw? How do you get back the kind of bravery, the self development, the political resistance, the independence in the act of knowing in this particular moment…is there a way to restore the bravery and the value of knowledge in an environment where it’s so cheap and so readily available?”
It is this saturation of knowledge has come to define our generation. So much so that the value of knowledge “has been subject to a kind of inflation”.
Philosopher Slavoj Žižek suggests that perhaps our mistake is putting the Englightment on a pedestal, that those involved in the Enlightment’s pursuit of knowledge mischaracterised those who came before them as naive idiots. “Modernity is not just knowledge. It’s also on the other side, a certain regression to primitivity. The first lesson of good enlightenment is don’t simply fight your opponent. And that’s what’s happening today.”
Perhaps ignorance really is bliss
In the age of disinformation, misinformation and everything in between, admitting you don’t know something almost feels like an act of rebellion. American philosopher Stanley Cavell, boldly asked “how do we learn that what we need is not more knowledge but the willingness to forgo knowledge” (it’s worth noting that this line of questioning saw his publications banned from a number of American university libraries).
Sometimes it is better to be ignorant because, “true knowledge hurts. Basically, we don’t want to know too much. If we get to know too much about it, we will objectivise ourselves, we will lose our personal dignity, so to retain our freedom it’s better not to know too much.” – Žižek
Žižek however admits that we are in a the middle of the fight. We are not at the end of the story. We cannot afford ourselves this retroactive view in the sense of: who cares what is done is already done? “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, we have to change it. We tried to change the world too quickly without really adequately interpreting it. And my motto would have been that 20th century leftists were just trying to change the world. The time is also to interpret it differently. That’s the challenge.”
When the AI chat bot Emerson is asked, “how can you know if something is true” it responds, “truth is a matter of opinion” and given these tumultuous and divided times we are living through, there is perhaps no truer statement.
To delve deeper into the speakers and themes discussed in this article, tune into FODI: The In-Between The Age of Doubt, Reason and Conspiracy.
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Is debt learnt behaviour?
Debt means different things to different people. While some are confident to juggle huge amounts of debt spread across a few credit cards, others start hyperventilating at the mere notion of paying a bill a day late.
Debt is also intrinsically linked to our emotional state of mind. Purchasing a new outfit using Buy now, pay later services might trigger an immediate dopamine hit, and leave the trouble of those four pesky payments to a future version of yourself. Or on the larger scale, buying an apartment means taking on the biggest debt most will take on in their lifetime, but it marks a momentous life milestone.
Why is debt so emotional? And what hidden psychological forces shape our attitudes and relationships towards it?
Keep it in the family
Our attitudes towards debt are largely inherited from our family, according to Jess Brady, a financial advisor at Fox and Hare Financial and founder of online community Ladies Talk Money. Brady says debt is not just numbers on a spreadsheet, but rather a complex emotional relationship informed by how we saw our families and friends interact with their finances when we were kids. “It might be shaped by parents separating and having to move from middle class life, to potentially a period where things became really tight from a monetary perspective. And so now, fear and insecurity drive decision making in your money, beliefs or behaviour.”
“It might be that you watched your parents make reckless decisions, which has made you quite fearful about making any decisions. Or quite the opposite that you’re used to having a lot of money and a lot of freedom. Meaning that you spend money without really considering what the consequences are so often it is what we did or didn’t see in a home life environment.”
What’s clear is, there’s no rulebook when it comes to debt and financial management. Whether you’ve grown up with examples of responsible spending or not, the moment you get your first job and your own bank account – you’re on your own, which is why Brady thinks it’s important to supercharge your financial literacy.
“We wrap so much shame and guilt around debt.” If we’re going to start normalising talking about money, then the lessons of accepting and reflecting on the decision-making that got you to this point are valuable.
Jess Brady’s key financial messages for getting ahead of debt and improving financial literacy are:
- Stop identifying as someone who is, “bad with money”: this negative self-talk creates a belief system around excusing bad behaviour.
- The buck stops with you: don’t offload large financial decisions onto others whether that be a partner or a parent.
- Working 9-5: Take responsibility for your own income and embrace the mantra “I decide where and how to spend my own money.”
It’s all about the sell
For some, accumulating debt can feel like sacrificing freedom while for others it’s exactly the opposite. For a lot of people debt is an opportunity, it’s the promise of more, being one step closer to your dreams. Our differing perceptions of taking on debt has a lot to do with how it is marketed.
Taking on debt to go to university, to buy a car or an apartment are all seen as responsible debt associated with big life milestones, but debt is no longer just about buying your dream home, or taking out a credit card for the frequent flyer points. It’s about wanting a new pair of shoes… And thanks to Buy now, pay later services, getting them immediately.
According to Adam Ferrier, a behavioural psychologist and co-founder of Sydney based advertising agency, Thinkerbell, money is marketed with a sledgehammer. “Money used to be marketed by a promise of aspiration. But it feels like that aspirational side of money has been chipped away at, and it’s almost a bit gauche to promise an aspirational lifestyle with money. Debt in this country is marketed very much as an issue and something that you have to get out of and create a sense of urgency, often targeting the less financially literate people in the marketplace.”
But all debt was not created equal, and it’s the rise of Buy now, pay later type debts amongst the younger generations that have a number of financial advisors and writers concerned. According to Jonathan Shapiro, journalist and author of Buy now pay later, the extraordinary story of Afterpay, these services didn’t exactly set out to be unethical. “I think what’s happened is that we convinced ourselves that they are providing some sort of a win-win solution and they are of the belief that something so good and so popular cannot be bad.”
The introduction of companies like Afterpay to the financial lending market means it’s never been easier to fall into the red. And because of the clever way they’re marketed as payment services rather than lenders means they have largely dodged regulation, leading to heavy ethical scrutiny.
“A lot of its success is built around a behavioural hack. If something is $100, it might intimidate a consumer. But if it’s leading to $25 payments over six weeks, it makes it more palatable.”
The dangers of these services are that consumers will spend way more than they had originally intended because when a large price tag is divided over the span of six weeks it feels more manageable. “It’s put the burden on consumer groups to educate themselves. Those who use Afterpay need to be mindful of the risks of booting up a debt trap. Now they might not fall into a debt trap in the same way someone using a credit card might. But what tends to happen is Buy now, pay later users that have overextended themselves sign up for a myriad of other providers, or they stop paying other bills that are more important.”
What’s important is that we begin to normalise conversations about money, about investments, and about debt. We’re living in a time where the way debt is marketed is shifting dramatically, so it’s imperative to improve our financial literacy because our critical thinking skills and understanding what’s right for us has never felt more important.
Life and Debt is available to listen to on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
This podcast is a project from the Young Ambassadors in The Ethics Centre’s Banking and Finance Oath initiative. Our work is made possible by donations including the generous support of Ecstra Foundation – helping to build the financial wellbeing of Australians.
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8 questions with FODI Festival Director, Danielle Harvey
After a two-year hiatus, the Festival of Dangerous Ideas (FODI), is returning live and unfiltered to Sydney from 17–18 September at Carriageworks.
Ahead of the eleventh festival’s program release, we sat down with Festival Director, Danielle Harvey to get a sneak peek into the 2022 program and what it takes to create Australia’s original disruptive festival.
Our world has so rapidly changed over the past few years. How do you determine what makes an idea truly dangerous in this climate?
The thing with dangerous ideas is that they react and change with what’s going on in the world. When we consider FODI programming we always look to talk about the ideas that perhaps we’re not addressing in the mainstream media enough. The quiet, wicked ideas, that will be snapping at our heels before we know it!
FODI is about creating a space for unconstrained enquiry — for both audiences and speakers, so we aim to find different ways of talking about things; a different perspective or angle — whether that comes from putting people from different backgrounds or disciplines together or encouraging speakers to push their idea as far as it could possibly go.
The 2022 program will explore an ‘All Consuming’ theme. How do you feel this reflects our world at the moment?
This year’s theme responds to and critiques an age consumed by environmental disaster, disease, war, identity, political games and 24/7 digital news cycle.
It considers the constant demands for our attention and our own personal habits formed to deal with an avalanche of information, opportunity, and distraction. In an all-consuming time where there is so much vying for our attention, what exactly should we give it to?
How do you ensure a balance of ideas when putting a program together?
Our team has such a range of diverse roles and practices that provide us access to a very complementary range of experts across the arts, academia, business and politics. Some of us have worked together for over a decade which has meant we’ve developed an enduring dialogue that facilitates building a program in an exciting and agile manner.
After 10 festivals, we also have a fabulous and engaged speaker alumni network who keep us informed of any interesting developments in their respective fields.
FODI has been dubbed as Australia’s original disruptive festival, what is it about disruption that makes it important to base a festival around?
Progress happens when we are bold enough to interrogate ideas — when we’re able to have uncomfortable conversations and be unafraid to question the status quo. Holding the space open for critique without censure is incredibly important. It’s your choice if you come, if you want to sit in the uncomfortable, if you want to be curious about the world around you.
This year the festival will be held at Carriageworks. How does the festival align with this choice of site?
FODI has been privileged to have been housed in so many iconic Sydney venues, from Sydney Opera House to Cockatoo Island and Sydney Town Hall. Carriageworks is now a new home for FODI, that has empowered us to be bolder and provides a fantastic canvass for creating a truly ‘All Consuming’ experience for audiences, speakers and artists.
How would you reflect on the festival’s journey over the past few years to where it is now?
Obviously coming out of COVID in the last couple of years we’ve had some time to reflect, and perhaps the 2020 theme ‘Dangerous Realities’ was a little too prophetic! During that time we were one of the first festivals to turn that program digital, which aired over one weekend. We ended up having 10,000 people tune in live and then another 15,000 and a few days after it. I don’t think I’ve really seen any other festival that moved online and get those sorts of numbers that quickly. It’s a real credit to the FODI team and audiences.
Then in 2021 we embarked on a special audio project, ‘The In-Between’ which saw us pair unlikely people together to have a conversation about what this moment — pandemic, global power shifts, social shifts — might mean. That more open questioning was really enlightening, with some feeling afraid — like it is the end of an era. While others were more hopeful or unconvinced that it is anything new at all.
We’ve also been mining many of our FODI archival talks and released them as podcast episodes, which now have over 165,000 listens globally. It’s been fantastic to be reminded of how eerily relevant so many of these ideas were and how often we should look to the past in order to look forward.
As a result of our great digital programming and on demand content, we’ve now got this huge extended audience now and it’s been a joy to engage with people who weren’t physically able to join us previously.
What’s the most dangerous idea out there for you right now?
For the past two years we’ve been told that being with other humans is one of the most dangerous things you can do! So, I’m excited to see us come together, in person, this year and connect in a festival setting.
And finally, what are you most excited to see at FODI this year — what do you think sets this year’s program apart from others?
2022 heralds a return to public gatherings. We’re thrilled to support the arts and a return to live events and cultural activity after a very challenging time for so many in NSW and nationally.
I’m excited by bringing so many international speakers to Sydney, to hear some deep global analysis and different voices. The experiential elements we are planning will also provide another fabulous reason to get out of the house and back into our unique festival setting.
The Festival of Dangerous Ideas returns 17–18 September 2022. Program announcement and tickets on sale in July. Sign up to festivalofdangerousideas.com for latest updates.
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Big Thinker: Matthew Liao
Matthew Liao (1972 – present) is a contemporary philosopher and bioethicist. Having published on a wide range of topics, including moral decision making, artificial intelligence, human rights, and personal identity, Liao is best known for his work on the topic of human engineering.
At New York University, Liao is an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Director of the Center for Bioethics, and holds the Arthur Zitrin Chair of Bioethics. He is also the creator of Ethics Etc, a blog dedicated to the discussion of contemporary ethical issues.
A Controversial Solution to Climate Change
As the climate crisis worsens, a growing number of scientists have started considering geo-engineering solutions, which involves large-scale manipulations of the environment to curb the effect of climate change. While many scientists believe that geo-engineering is our best option when it comes to addressing the climate crisis, these solutions do come with significant risks.
Liao, however, believes that there might be a better option: human engineering.
Human engineering involves biomedically modifying or enhancing human beings so they can more effectively mitigate climate change or adapt to it.
For example, reducing the consumption of animal products would have a significant impact on climate change since livestock farming is responsible for approximately 60% of global food production emissions. But many people lack either the motivation or the will power to stop eating meat and dairy products.
According to Liao, human engineering could help. By artificially inducing mild intolerance to animal products, “we could create an aversion to eating eco-unfriendly food.”
This could be achieved through “meat patches” (think nicotine patches but for animal products), worn on the arm whenever a person goes grocery shopping or out to dinner. With these patches, reducing our consumption of meat and dairy products would no longer be a matter of will power, but rather one of science.
Alternatively, Liao believes that human engineering could help us reduce the amount of food and other resources we consume overall. Since larger people typically consume more resources than smaller people, reducing the height and weight of human beings would also reduce their ecological footprint.
“Being small is environmentally friendly.”
According to Liao, this could be achieved several ways for example, using technology typically used to screen embryos for genetic abnormalities to instead screen for height, or using hormone treatment typically used to stunt the growth or excessively tall children to instead stunt the growth of children of average height.
Reception
When Liao presented these ideas at the 2013 Ted Conference in New York, many audience members found the notion of wearing meat patches and making future generations smaller to be amusing. However, not everyone found these ideas humorous.
In response to a journal article Liao co-authored on this topic, philosopher Greg Bognar wrote that the authors were doing themselves and their profession a disservice by not adequately considering the feasibility or real cost of human engineering.
Although making future generations smaller would reduce their ecological footprint, it would take a long time for the benefits of this reduction in average height and weight to accrue. In comparison, the cost of making future generations smaller would be borne now.
As Bognar argues, current generations would need to devote significant resources to this effort. For example, if future generations were going to be 15-20cm shorter than current generations, we would need to begin redesigning infrastructure. Homes, workplaces and vehicles would need to be smaller too.
Liao and his colleagues do, however, recognise that devoting time, money, and brain power to pursuing human engineering means that we will have fewer resources to devote to other solutions.
But they argue that “examining intuitively absurd or apparently drastic ideas can be an important learning experience, and that failing to do so could result in our missing out on opportunities to address important, often urgent issues.”
While current generations may resent having to bear the cost of making future generations more environmentally friendly, perhaps it is a cost that we must bear.
Liao says, “We are the cause of climate change. Perhaps we are also the solution to it.”
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Ethics Explainer: Social philosophy
Social philosophy is concerned with anything and everything about society and the people who live in it.
What’s the difference between a house and a cave, or a garden and a field of wildflowers? There are some things that are built by people, such as houses and gardens, that wouldn’t exist without human intervention. Similarly, there are some things that are natural, such as caves and fields of wildflowers, that would continue to exist as they were without humans. However, there is a grey area in the middle that social philosophers study, including topics like gender, race, ethics, law, politics, and relationships. Social philosophers spend their time parsing what parts of the world are constructed by humans and what parts are natural.
We can see the beginnings of the philosophical debate of social versus natural through Aristotle’s and Plato’s justifications for slavery. Aristotle believed that some people were incapable of being their own masters, and this was a natural difference between a slave and a free person. Plato, on the other hand, believed that anyone who was inferior to the Greeks could be enslaved, a difference that was made possible by the existence of Greek society.
Through the Middle Ages, attention turned to questioning religion and the divine right of monarchs. During this era, it was believed that monarchs were given their authority by God, which was why they had so much more power than the average person. British philosopher John Locke is well known for arguing that every man was created equally, and that everyone had an equal right to life, liberty, and pursuit of property. His conclusion was that these fundamental rights were natural to everyone, which contradicted the social norms that gave almost unlimited power to monarchs. The idea that a monarch naturally had the same fundamental rights as someone who worked the land would have to fundamentally change the structure of society.
During the 19th century, some philosophers began to question social categories and where they came from. Many people at the time held that social classes, or groups of people of the same socioeconomic status, were a result of biological, or natural, differences between people. Karl Marx, known for his 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto, proposed his own theory about social classes. He argued that these socioeconomic differences that formed social differences were a result of the type of work that someone did and therefore social classes were socially, not biologically, constructed.
Today social philosophers are concerned with a variety of questions, including questions about race, gender, social change, and institutions that contribute to inequality. One example of a social philosopher who studies gender and race is Sally Haslanger. She has spent her time asking what are the defining characteristics of gender and race, and where these characteristics come from. In other cases, social philosophy is blended with cognitive psychology and behavioural studies, asking which of our behaviours are influenced by the society we live in and which behaviours are “natural,” or a product of our biology.
Social philosophy and ethics
Many of the questions social philosophers are concerned with are intertwined with ethics. Part of living in a society requires an (often unwritten) ethical code of conduct that ensures everything functions smoothly.
Thomas Hobbes’ social contract theory spells out the connection between a society and ethics. Hobbes believed that instead of ethics being something that existed naturally, a code of ethics and morality would arise when a group of free, self-interested, and rational people lived together in a society. Ethics would arise because people would find that better things could come from working together and trusting each other than would arise from doing everything on their own.
Today, much of how we act is determined by the societies we live in. The kinds of clothes we wear, the media we interact with, and how we talk to each other change depending on the norms of our society. This can complicate ethics: should we change our ethical code when we move to a different society with different norms? For example, one culture may say that it’s morally acceptable to eat meat, while a different culture may not. Should a person have to change the way they act moving from the meat-eating culture to the non-meat-eating culture? Moral relativists would say it is possible for both cultures to be morally right, and that we should act accordingly depending on which culture we are interacting with.
A significant reason that social philosophy is still such a nebulous field is that everyone has different life experiences and interacts with society differently. Additionally, different people feel like they owe different levels of commitment to the people around them. Ultimately, it’s a serious challenge for philosophers to come up with social theories that resonate with everyone the theory is supposed to include.
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It’s time to talk about life and debt
It’s no secret that things are getting more expensive.
Over the last few months Google searches for “the cost of living” have increased by 10 fold, and it’s no surprise. The price of vegetables has increased by almost 30%, some used cars are up over 45%, petrol is at the highest rate in history, and a string of interest rate rises have hit for the first time in more than a decade. Millions of Australians are feeling the financial stress of keeping a roof over their head, keeping the lights on and putting food on the table. So what’s going on?
The answer is… it’s complicated. We have found ourselves in the perfect storm of frequent extreme weather events, the effects of climate change on crop production, pandemic-affected supply chains, and a war in Ukraine. And as a result of all of these factors which are very much out of our control, we are experiencing rocketing inflation and a cup of coffee will now set you back over $5. So how can young people, whose wages have been stagnating for years weather this storm and better understand their finances?
Let’s talk about debt
For as long as we have ascribed value to little disks of metal, we’ve been conditioned to believe that accumulating debt is a bad thing, and that we should aspire to have money squirrelled away for a rainy day. After all, the majority of us are paying off some form of debt whether it be a mortgage, a business loan, or a student debt – so owing money certainly shouldn’t be taboo.
Which is why our latest podcast, Life and Debt says it’s time we stopped demonising debt and started thinking of it as a part of life.
Created by the Young Ambassadors from our Banking and Finance Oath (The BFO) initiative, this four– part podcast series takes a deep dive into debt, what role it has in our lives and how we can make better decisions about it. According to Young Ambassador, Cameron Howlett we need to rethink our relationships with being in the red. “We wanted to encourage people to think, discuss and engage with the topic because if you’re uncomfortable with debt, you’ll never really have a healthy relationship with it.”
Howlett hopes the podcast will encourage a more nuanced discussion about debt, “we all have some good experiences and bad, but what we have found consistently was that we were all a bit nervous about debt.” The series, which features financial advisors, journalists, finfluencers, psychologists and historians hopes to debunk the shame and stigma around debt especially for younger listeners. Cameron continues, “we want to get people from that step of being too terrified of debt or credit to be able to think whether or not it’s right for them”, so how can we be a little more discerning when it comes to different types of debt?
“If you’re uncomfortable with debt, you’ll never really have a healthy relationship with it.”
The good the bad and the ugly debt
During the pandemic, we all did our share of online shopping. Buy now, pay later services made it easy for us to get that instant gratification hit that comes with receiving parcels in the mail, without the ensuing depression that results from looking at one’s negative bank balance. These services posted huge profits during the pandemic, and because they’re so easy to set up and use, people are now using apps like AfterPay and ZipPay to purchase everything from a new outfit for the weekend, to groceries, and childcare. Unlike credit cards and banks, Buy now, pay later companies don’t ask any questions about whether their customers can actually afford to make the repayments, and as a result a lot of young people are racking up thousands of dollars in debt using these financial services.
So what exactly is good debt and bad debt, and how can we differentiate between the two?
According to Iqra Bhatia, a Young Ambassador from the Banking and Finance Oath initiative, “attitudes towards debt are changing, young people need to educate themselves more on debt and be aware of the resources available”. Instead we need to shift our thinking, “Afterpay is not that different from credit cards – it’s essentially the credit card of our generation.”
“Attitudes towards debt are changing, young people need to educate themselves more on debt and be aware of the resources available.”
It’s not all doom and gloom
It’s clear we need to start understanding money from a younger age. While lessons in financial management traditionally consisted of a few pointers offered by parents at the dinner table, we are now starting to see financial literacy programs introduced in the high school curriculum. But more work needs to be done.
Debt is something that, at different points throughout all our lives we will all encounter and take on, whether it be small, like agreeing to buy the next round at the pub, or a little more daunting like taking on a HECS debt at university or taking out a mortgage to buy an apartment.
Debt can be emotional, it can feel like you’re signing away a little piece of your freedom, but it can also be empowering and necessary. And debt is changing, we’re grappling with the buy now, pay later industry now, and what form debt will take over the next few years. Which is why it’s important to stay educated and in touch with our values so we can make decisions for our bank balances and our futures.
Life and Debt is available to listen to on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
This podcast is a project from the Young Ambassadors in The Ethics Centre’s Banking and Finance Oath initiative. Our work is made possible by donations including the generous support of Ecstra Foundation – helping to build the financial wellbeing of Australians.
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Meet Joseph, our new Fellow exploring society through pop culture
From The Matrix to Euphoria, writer, philosopher and poet Joseph Earp has profiled some of the greatest philosophers, TV shows, films, music and pop culture moments to date, discussing what they can tell us about ourselves and the world.
Which is why we’re excited to share we’ve recently appointed Joseph as an Ethics Centre Fellow. Currently undertaking his PhD at The University of Sydney, studying the work of David Hume, we sat down with Joseph for a brief get-to-know-you chat to discuss ethics, his favourite philosophers, and the role of pop culture in society.
Tell us, what attracted you to becoming a philosopher?
You learn the language of institutional philosophy by reading it, and – as long as your financial and geographical circumstances allow for it – by studying it in an academic setting. But the central questions that drive philosophical work are innate to almost all people, regardless of academic study.
I am a pragmatist, so I don’t believe that philosophers hold insight that stretches beyond the understanding of those who haven’t studied the discipline. As philosophers, we are merely using a certain vocabulary to ask our questions. I grew to love that vocabulary in my late twenties through university study, under the guidance of my honours and PhD supervisor, Anik Waldow and those academics I studied closely with throughout my undergraduate degree. Most notably, these academics include Caroline West, who I believe to be one of our country’s most unique, inspired, and challenging thinkers – even and especially as I disagree with her – and David Macarthur. My study with these people is what drew me to being a philosopher in the strictest sense. But I think we philosophers are, thankfully, just doing what everyone else is doing.
Do you specialise in any key areas?
Generally, I write about popular culture, emotion, and virtue ethics, but my key area of specialisation is the philosophy of sex. I think that we sadly retain, in many cultures, a suspicion and fear of sex – one that infringes on our ability to self-describe and live our most flourishing lives.
I often think of a story about Pablo Picasso. Towards the end of his life, he was so rich and famous that he could draw any object in the world, whether it be a Ferrari or a mansion, and his drawing would be worth more than the object itself. He could sell a sketch of an object, and use the accrued capital to buy that object – which is a way of saying he could create changes by charting what he felt had already changed. It seems to me that’s the potential, and the potential harm, of philosophical thinking. We construct the world by calling it what we think it is, and for a long time, our views on sexuality have created a world that contains a lot of fear and sexual repression, both internally and externally maintained.
Your honours thesis focuses on emotional contagion. What place does emotion have when it comes to ethics?
Personally, I think it’s emotion all the way down when it comes to ethics, as with most things. David Hume is the philosopher that much of my work has operated in the framework of, and I agree with Hume that when we talk about “rationality” – a word that is sometimes conceived as being opposed to emotion – we are really just talking about a certain kind of emotional work.
What have you been working on this year?
One of the most profound experiences of both my intellectual and personal life has been connecting with a community of thinkers whom I met largely through my university work – all of them world-class philosophers, some of them write for, and work with, the Ethics Centre; and some of them no longer consider themselves strictly philosophers at all. In particular, Georgia Fagan, Danielle Turnbull, Finola Laughren, Eleanor Gordon-Smith, Grace Sharkey, Oscar Sannen, Mitch Flitcroft, Alexi Barnstone, Elle Lewis, Mitchell Stirzaker, Henry Barlow, Zach Wilkinson, Finn Bryson, and Henry Hulme.
All of these people have work that you can, and should, find online through an easy Google search, and work which I believe in every case benefits the world, and drives real change. What else is philosophy for? I am continually astonished by the intellect and bravery of these collaborators and friends. I consider myself useless without them. When I think about the real work that I have done this year, it is not anything I have written, but conversations with these people, and the ways I have learnt from them.
Do you have a favourite philosopher or writer?
Hume is the philosopher whose writing I know best, but I believe the thinker you apply the greatest amount of study to is usually the one who you have the strangest, most frequently frustrated relationship with. So my favourite – as in, the philosopher who serves as the background to almost all of what I think and do, and who I have the most uncomplicated connection to – is the pragmatist Richard Rorty. It’s Rorty who cuts through the chaff by asking, again and again, one of the simplest questions: what is the real-world application of our work? And it’s Rorty who tells us that we should remember we can make ourselves whoever we want to be.
Your writing covers a lot of tv series, films and music. Why is pop culture important?
Again – it’s Rorty. Rorty believed that social change isn’t led by philosophers, particularly those analytic philosophers who consider their work to be sorting through “falsehoods” and “truths”. For Rorty, philosophers inspire prophets and poets, and prophets and poets are the ones who do the work of change. That is, for me, the importance of pop culture. That form of art is guided by philosophical questions, and led by prophets and poets, and represents a way of understanding a culture and a vocabulary. It’s how lives are changed, and possibilities for self-description are opened up
What are you reading, watching or listening to at the moment?
The poetry collection The Cipher, by Molly Brodak, a writer who means a great deal to me; the pornographic film Corruption by perennial sadsack and visionary Roger Watkins, which I try to return to every month or so; and the song ‘Lark’ by Angel Olsen, often enough that I should probably take a break.
Let’s finish up close to home. What does ethics mean to you?
We all play the game of ethics, and we all want to play it better, and we’ll never play it well. That, in fact, is the joy – the trying, and the starting again.
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Ethics Explainer: Trust
Trust forms the foundation for relationships, cooperation, social interaction and the development of societies, but it is equally important as it is dangerous.
From hunter-gatherers to globalised societies, trust is the essential lubricant of social functioning at any scale.
Imagine something as simple as driving to get groceries. You leave your house, get in your car and drive to the shops. In doing so, you’re relying on several overlapping layers of trust that are engrained in our society. You trust that:
- your neighbours won’t break into your house while you’re gone
- the police will deal with them appropriately if they do
- the insurance company will deal with you fairly if they do
- the manufacturer of your car was responsible and competent
- the other drivers on the road will all obey the traffic laws
- your money has retained its value and that the shopkeeper will take it
and so on. Almost every aspect of our lives depends on these underlying relationships of trust with the people around us, and when they are betrayed – especially repeatedly – they can crumble and leave behind instability.
When we trust others, we’re depending on them to fulfil expectations that aren’t guaranteed to be met and that leaves us vulnerable or at risk.
Vulnerability is an important aspect of trust; it creates a tricky tension between our need to rely on others and our need to protect ourselves from risk and harm. To avoid vulnerability and guard against betrayal, we might decide not to trust anyone, but that leads to a miserable life: a life devoid of friendship or intimacy, and ultimately of convenience too, as we need to trust strangers on an almost daily basis, from taxi drivers to teachers to police.
So, we must trust others and learn how and when to be vulnerable to live a fulfilling life.
We trust people by giving them the space and freedom to do what they have been trusted to do, without necessary observation or oversight, with the expectation that they’re:
- Competent enough to do what they have been trusted to do and
- Willing to do it.
“Trust is an ability to rely on somebody to do what they have said they will do, even when no one is watching them” – Simon Longstaff AO
Trust and trustworthiness
An important distinction is the difference between trust and trustworthiness. Trust is an attitude that we have towards others (or sometimes ourselves!) that indicates our hope or expectation that the object of our trust is trustworthy.
Trustworthiness is a property or characteristic of others and in ideal situations has a reciprocal relationship with trust. That is, ideally, trust is an attitude towards trustworthy people, and trustworthy people will be trusted.
Of course, we have all experienced that we don’t live in an ideal world. Often untrustworthy people are perceived to be trustworthy because of lies, clever marketing or overwhelming charisma. Equally, trustworthy people can often be misrepresented to appear untrustworthy.
Interpersonal trust and institutional trust
There are two kinds of trust, the most common and intuitive kind being interpersonal trust – that is, trust between individuals. We might trust our friends with secrets or trust our family with babysitting or trust other drivers with our lives on the road.
A trickier kind of trust is that of institutions and government. They’re not as directly accessible as individual people
Nevertheless, we can and do trust institutions and governments to do as they say they will do, or what they are supposed to do: act in the interests of their people. This is a hallmark of society. But when this trust is eroded, we are left with an eroded society.
The ethics of trust
One of the first practical problems is knowing whom to trust. It’s easy to rely on perceived authority figures in our lives, and often we will simply need to trust that the people who are close to us are looking out for us, but in general we should be on the lookout for consistent moral behaviour.
Ultimately, there is no way to know whom to trust with certainty, but there are many indicators we can use to decide. Are they an honest person? Have they been reliable in the past? Are they self-centred or do they concern themselves with the wellbeing of others? Answering questions like these can help to minimise the risk you take on if you choose to trust someone.
- How do we rebuild trust?
- How should we act if we don’t trust someone?
- If someone breaks our trust, should we distrust them?
- When or how often should we re-examine our trust of someone?
- When is trust a good thing? When is it bad?
- What’s so important about vulnerability?
Answering these questions involves a complex mix of knowing how trust works, knowing the habits, motives and values of others, and knowing ourselves.
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