Ageing well is the elephant in the room when it comes to aged care
I recently came across a quote from philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, talking about what it means to live well:
“To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life. Men have been buried at one hundred who have died at their birth.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found myself nodding sagely along as I read. Because life isn’t something we have, it’s something we do. It is a set of activities that we can fuse with meaning. There doesn’t seem much value to living if all we do with it is exist. More is demanded of us.
Rousseau’s quote isn’t just sage; it’s inspiring. It makes us want to live better – more fully. It captures an idea that moral philosophers have been exploring for thousands of years: what it means to ‘live well’ – to have a life worth living.
Unfortunately, it also illustrates a bigger problem. Because in our current reality, not everyone is able to live the way Rousseau outlines as being the gold standard for Really Good LivingTM.
This is a reality that professionals working in the aged care sector should know all too well. They work directly with people who don’t have full use of their organs, their faculties or their senses. And yet when I presented Rousseau’s thought to a room full of aged care professionals recently, they felt the same inspiration and agreement that I’d felt.
That’s a problem.
If the good life looks like a robust, activity-filled life, what does that tell us about the possibility for the elderly to live well? And if we don’t believe that the elderly can live well, what does that mean for aged care?
If you have been following the testimony around the Aged Care Royal Commission, you’ll be aware of the galling evidence of misconduct, negligence and at times outright abuse. The most vulnerable members of our communities, and our families, have been subject to mistreatment due in part to a commercial drive to increase the profitability of aged care facilities at the expense of person-centred care .
Absent from the discussion thus far has been the question of ‘the good life’. That’s understandable given the range of much more immediate and serious concerns facing the aged care sector, but it is one that cannot be ignored.
In 2015, celebrity chef and aged care advocate Maggie Beer told The Ethics Centre that she wanted “to create a sense of outrage about [elderly people] who are merely existing”. Since then she has gone on to provide evidence to the Royal Commission, because she believes that food is about so much more than nutrition. It’s about memory, community, pleasure and taking care and pride in your work.
Consider the evidence given around food standards in aged care. There have been suggestions that uneaten food is being collected and reused in the kitchens for the next meal; that there is a “race to the bottom” to cut costs of meals at the expense of quality, and that the retailers selling to aged care facilities wildly inflate their prices. The result? Bad food for premium prices.
We should be disturbed by this. This food doesn’t even permit people to exist, let alone flourish. It leaves them wasting away, undernourished. It’s abhorrent. But what should be the appropriate standard for food within aged care? How should we determine what’s acceptable? Do we need food that is merely nutritious and of an acceptable standard, or does it need to do more than that?
Answering that question requires us to confront an underlying question:
Do we believe aged care is simply about providing people’s basic needs until they eventually die?
Or is it much more than that? Is it about ensuring that every remaining moment of life provides the “sentiment of existence” that Rousseau was concerned with?
When you look at the approximately 190,000 words of testimony that’s been given to the Royal Commission thus far, a clear answer begins to emerge. Alongside terms like ‘rights’, ‘harms’ and ‘fairness’ –which capture the bare minimum of ethical treatment for other people – appear words such as ‘empathy’, ‘love’ and ‘connection’. These words capture more than basic respect for persons, they capture a higher standard of how we should relate to other people. They’re compassionate words. People are expressing a demand not just for the elderly to be cared for, but to be cared about.
Counsel assisting the Royal Commission, Peter Gray QC, recently told the commission that “a philosophical shift is required, placing the people receiving care at the centre of quality and safety regulation. This means a new system, empowering them and respecting their rights.”
It’s clear that a philosophical shift is necessary. However, I would argue that what’s not clear is if ‘person-centred care’ is enough. Because unless we are able to confront the underlying social belief that at a certain age, all that remains for you in life is to die, we won’t be able to provide the kind of empowerment you felt reading Rousseau at the start of this article.
There is an ageist belief embedded within our society that all of the things that make life worth living are unavailable to the elderly. As long as we accept that to be true, we’ll be satisfied providing a level of care that simply avoids harm, rather than one that provides for a rich, meaningful and satisfying life.
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BY Matthew Beard
Matt is a moral philosopher with a background in applied and military ethics. In 2016, Matt won the Australasian Association of Philosophy prize for media engagement. Formerly a fellow at The Ethics Centre, Matt is currently host on ABC’s Short & Curly podcast and the Vincent Fairfax Fellowship Program Director.
Courage isn’t about facing our fears, it’s about facing ourselves
What was your first lesson in courage? The first time someone told you to be brave – or explained to you that fear was something to be overcome, not something that should control you?
I can’t remember the very first moment I encountered the idea of courage, but the first I can remember – and the one that has stayed with me the longest – is this: “being brave doesn’t mean we looking for trouble.”
It is, of course, from Disney’s The Lion King. Mufasa, moments after saving his son, Simba, from ravenous hyenas, chastises his boy for putting himself and his friend in danger.
Simba’s journey in The Lion King is really a treatise on courage. From a reckless, thrill-seeking child, Simba loses his father and, believing himself responsible, flees from the social judgement that might bring.
Simba takes his father’s lesson too far: he doesn’t look for trouble, but when it finds him, he runs from it. He lives as an exile in a hedonistic paradise. Comfortable, apathetic, safe. For all his physical prowess, Simba is a coward.
Of course, by the end of the film Simba has found courage. He accepts his identity as the true king, admits his shame publicly, defeats Scar (his true enemy) and takes his place in the circle of life, complete with staggering musical accompaniment.
As well as having a soundtrack that’s jam-packed with bangers, it turns out the Lion King has a strong philosophical pedigree.
Courage as a virtue
The Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that courage was as virtue – a marker of moral excellence. More specifically, it was the virtue that moderated our instincts toward recklessness on one hand and cowardice on the other.
He believed the courageous person feared only things that are worthy of fear. Courage means knowing what to fear and responding appropriately to that fear.
For Aristotle, what mattered isn’t just whether you face your fears, but why you face them and what it is that you fear.
There is something important here. Your reasons for overcoming fear matter. They can be the difference between courage, cowardice and recklessness.
For instance, in Homer’s Iliad, the Trojan prince Hector threatens to punish any soldier he sees fleeing from the fight. In World War I, soldiers who deserted were executed.
Were these soldiers courageous? The only reason they risk death from the enemy is because they’re guaranteed to be killed if they don’t. The fear of death is still what drives them.
More courageous, says Aristotle, is the soldier who freely chooses to fight despite having no personal reason to do so besides honour and nobility. In fact, for Aristotle, this is the highest form of courage – it faces the greatest fear (death) for the most selfless reason (the nation).
Of course, Aristotle was an Ancient Greek bloke, so we should take his prioritising of military virtue with a grain of salt. Is death at war really to be so highly prized?
For one thing, in a culture like Ancient Greece or Troy, the failure to be an excellent warrior would be met with enormous dishonour. How many soldiers went to war for fear of dishonour? Is dishonour something to be rightly feared? And if so, whose dishonour should we fear?
Surely not that of a society whose moral compass prioritises victory over justice – risking your life to support a cause like that is reckless.
If courage means fearing dishonour from those who are morally corrupt, then a courageous enemy is worse than a cowardly one. Courage becomes like a superpower – making some people into heroes and others villains.
But there’s a deeper reason to doubt Aristotle’s idea of the highest courage. Whilst most of us do fear death, it’s not clear that it’s the thing we fear most. Even if we do fear death, we have a range of different reasons for doing so.
Our deepest fears
Perhaps my most visceral fear is of drowning. The thought of it is enough to make me feel short of breath. Perhaps that’s because of an experience when I was younger – when I was overseas I learned that my Dad nearly drowned. It was perhaps the first time I really had to come to grips with the fact he was mortal – and so was I – and all that I loved.
Today, I fear death because it would mean never seeing my children grow up. Never holding them one last time. Seeing my son’s first days at school. Hearing my daughter’s first words.
Worse, I wouldn’t be sure that they were safe and flourishing. If someone could guarantee that, perhaps I’d be less fearful of death. It’s not the death I fear; it’s what it represents: an incomplete life, failed commitments, unending love brought to a close.
Aristotle didn’t consider courage in the face of existential anxieties like these. What does it mean to live courageously in a world where all our loves, passions and projects expose us to pain and loss? To live is to have a nerve constantly exposed to the world – always vulnerable to suffering.
The French psychoanalyst and philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle argues that risk is an inherent part of living fully in the world. Risk-free living, she argues, is not living at all. Courage is as much about living despite knowing the exposed nerve of love and passion could trigger chest-tightening pain at any moment.
Yet so often we close ourselves from the world to keep ourselves safe. We self-censor not because we think we might be wrong, but because we fear upsetting the wrong person. We withdraw from relationships because we don’t want to be the one to take the leap. We tell ourselves stories in the shower of all the things we could do – could be – if only the world let us.
Existentialist philosophers have a name for this kind of self-deception: bad faith – a kind of failure to engage with the world as it really is and accepting ourselves as we are and as we could be.
Too often we think of courage purely as facing up to our fears. What that misses is how deeply connected our fears are with deeper beliefs about who we are, who we want to be, who we love and what we wish the world was.
A courageous truth
Maybe the truth of courage is that it’s all about truth. It’s about looking reality in the face and having the force of will not to turn away, despite the pain, the unpleasantness and the risk.
Maybe it’s about looking for long enough to see the joy in the pain; the beauty in the ugliness and the comfort that lies in the little risks we take every day.
Perhaps it’s only then we can know what’s worth dying for – and what’s worth living for. Certainly, Dufourmantelle gives us some hope of this. In 2017, she died in rough seas off the coast of France, having swum out to rescue two children caught in the surf.
The children survived, but how many of us would have dived in? How many would have hoped for a lifeguard? A stronger swimmer? For the children to rescue themselves?
I want to encourage you to think: are there rough waters you’re not jumping into for fear of the waves? Do you tend to dive in without counting the costs?
Dr Matt Beard was the host of The Ethics of Courage, alongside Saxon Mullins and Benjamin Law at The Ethics Centre on 21 August. This is a transcript of his opening address.
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BY Matthew Beard
Matt is a moral philosopher with a background in applied and military ethics. In 2016, Matt won the Australasian Association of Philosophy prize for media engagement. Formerly a fellow at The Ethics Centre, Matt is currently host on ABC’s Short & Curly podcast and the Vincent Fairfax Fellowship Program Director.
Look at this: the power of women taking nude selfies
The continuing moral panic over women’s naked selfies is fundamentally misframed. By emphasising the potential for women to be made victims, we ignore the ways a woman’s body can be an expression of power.
According to the prevailing moral panic of the day, young women take naked selfies in order to please others and not themselves. This, we’re told, leaves them vulnerable to exploitation because women must always be vulnerable.
It’s as though the only mystery afforded to women is not their thoughts or talents but what lies underneath their clothes. Go no deeper than the skin. Deny any complexity that might present her as a human with needs separate from what men may want.
This seems to be a narrative we teach teenagers. My daughter was taught that not only was there no legal recourse for photos shared without consent (untrue) but that the effects on women were so catastrophic that they should never send a naked photo (also, untrue). This happened on International Women’s Day, as if to remind us of our to-do list.
Inevitably, they learn what we teach. When I worked with teens on a short film, they told me how boys pestered every girl in their class for naked selfies. The girls didn’t even think it was sexual; more of a competitive collection like Pokemon Go but for undeveloped breasts. The requests were thought of as frustrating but normal, because “that’s just how they are”. Yet despite the mundanity of such a frequent request, the same teens sincerely believed leaked selfies would hound a woman to her grave.
Naked selfies carry many gendered clashes. I’ve always gasped at the difference between gendered aesthetics: I’ll rush to clean my room, groom and put on makeup before getting into an appropriate outfit of sorts before painstakingly composing shots; men just send a close-up photo of their cock jutting from a thicket of pubes.
It’s an effective example of the differences between the male and female gaze. A woman prepares because she is conditioned to know what men find attractive and that she is expected to deliver that. Men, conditioned to expect immediate access regardless of merit, put almost zero thought into their selfies. In the rare case they do, they project an image of themselves they want to see, rather than women who mirror what men want to see.
This positioning reinforces the power dynamic in heterosexual sexting. Men expect entertainment and women entertain at threat of exposure (also expected).
But why does the power lie with men?
On image sharing site Imgur, men enthusiastically share photos of naked women, even creating themed days for certain ‘types’ of women. But the images presented reflect the male gaze – photos taken of women, not by women.
Generally, whenever women posted selfies on Imgur, sexualised or not, she was immediately inundated with caustic remarks to stop being an exhibitionist (a polite euphemism for attention whore). That these are the same men who think nothing of going into a woman’s DMs to ask for naked photos is just another layer to it all. There is a clear mode of production, where women are the object and men remain in control of when and how they are seen. This is where the phrase “tits or get the fuck out” shows its intent: give us the body parts, not the entire body.
Perhaps this is because it is easier to sexually appreciate an object that has not been humanised or seen as an individual. When things are anonymised or presented in such a volume that they lose all semblance of individuality, they become an object that can be appreciated or abused without shame.
The power balance still rests with men – naked women are objects men readily expect, and demand to be presented in anticipated service of them. In this position of power, men expect women to arouse them, yet rarely consider whether women are aroused. Amazingly, we rarely discuss whether women find joy or pleasure in taking naked selfies, whether for themselves or others because we can’t move past women’s seemingly inevitable victimhood.
I’ve taken naked selfies for well over a decade. I first worried if photos might leak but, somewhat ironically, this concern has disappeared as I do more work in public. In Doing It: Women Tell the Truth About Great Sex, an anthology about sex, I wrote of how selfies can become graphic storytelling that not only builds intimacy but also an understanding of my sexuality and my sexual aesthetic pleasure. It is a power I never want to give up, so the book also contains a naked photo of me I had taken for a lover. It is a deliberate attempt to interrupt the means of production and also claim space within my sexuality, one that is defined by myself, not others.
When the photo was republished (with consent) by SBS, I wrote that “this is not some wishy-washy Stockholm syndrome masquerading as empowerment – there is ferocity in my choice”. It remains true today. By claiming my agency as an individual who feels pleasure and expression, I realise that confidence is not only crucial for my personal survival under patriarchy framed solely for men, but it is also a political act I can define as I choose. It makes me aware that my body, choices and actions are decided by me without reference to others’ expectations and that I contain greater complexity the roles of servant or victim that society allows.
Around this time, Mia Freedman wrote an article entitled ‘The conversation we have to have: Stop taking nude selfies’. Promoting the article on Twitter, Freedman wrote “taking nude selfies is your absolute right. So is smoking. Both come with massive risks.” In response, I took another naked selfie, but this time with a cigarette draped from my mouth and ‘fuck off’ written on my chest in black lipstick. I posted it everywhere without care because – again – my body, choices and actions are decided by me. I made the choice that and every day is that I will not have victims presented as complicit in their abuse. Because the fault will always be with the abuser, not the abused.
An act of power
Despite their conflicting emotions, publishing naked selfies taken in either arousal or anger are fearsome in their power. They are as much a rejection of victimhood as they are an opportunity for retribution. People can try to weaponise my body against me, but I will do it first and use it against them because I know its power.
This is why patriarchal structures and men condition women into submissive disempowerment. Women’s bodies are defined narrowly as vessels for pleasures and service for others, not ourselves. Such narrow and compliant definitions intentionally belie the power and complexity we contain.
Stories abound throughout history of the malevolent power of women’s bodies, so profound was male unease surrounding bloods and births. Women were told their vaginas ruined ship rope or their menstruation damned success. This was an admission women’s bodies were terrifying in their otherness but was also an excuse to contain them to the home rather than out in the community where they might gain power or control.
But history tells us many women believed in the power of their bodies. Balkan women would stand out in the fields, flashing their vaginas to the sky to quell thunderstorms. The Finnish believed in the magic of harakointi, using their exposed bodies to bless or curse on whim. Sheela-na-gigs (carvings of women often found in European architecture) embraced their power by spreading their labia, not to please or welcome men, but scare off evil. Women would lift their skirts to make others laugh in feasts for Roman gods and goddesses or lure lovers. More recently, women have exposed their bodies to protest petroleum in Nigeria or civil war in Liberia in acts of political, angry anasyrma.
Reframing the dialogue
The continuing moral panic over women’s naked selfies is fundamentally misframed. Women are presented as passively-defensive vessels in a state of perpetual victimhood. We are tasked with hiding our shameful-yet-coveted nakedness from people who expect to see us but only under their strict conditions.
A truer representation is that power exerts in all manners of life, including how we sexually communicate as equal, consenting partners. The moral panic should focus on when power corrupts that balance and how to correct it, not how to maintain the same corruption.
Join us as on 18 September for an an intimate conversation with Sexologist, Nikki Goldstein and art curator Jackie Dunn to unwrap the ethical dimensions of being nude. Get your ticket to The Ethics of Nudity here.
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BY Amy Gray
Amy Gray is a Melbourne-based writer interested in feminism, popular and digital culture and parenting. follow her on twitter @_AmyGray_
Should you be afraid of apps like FaceApp?
Until last week, you would have been forgiven for thinking a meme couldn’t trigger fears about international security.
But since the widespread concerns over FaceApp last week, many are asking renewed questions about privacy, data ownership and transparency in the tech sector. But most of the reportage hasn’t gotten to the biggest ethical risk the FaceApp case reveals.
What is FaceApp?
In case you weren’t in the know, FaceApp is a ‘neural transformation filter’.
Basically, it uses AI to take a photo of your face and make it look different. The recent controversy centred on its ability to age people, pretty realistically, in just a short photo. Use of the app was widespread, creating a viral trend – there were clicks and engagements to be made out of the app, so everyone started to hop on board.
Where does your data go?
With the increasing popularity comes increasing scrutiny. A number of people soon noticed that FaceApp’s terms of use seemed to give them a huge range of rights to access and use the photos they’d collected. There were fears the app could access all the photos in your photo stream, not just the one you chose to upload.
There were questions about how you could delete your data from the service. And worst of all for many, the makers of the app, Wireless Labs, are based in Russia. US Minority Leader Chuck Schumer even asked the FBI to investigate the app.
The media commentary has been pretty widespread, suggesting that the app sends data back to Russia, lacks transparency about how it will or won’t be used and has no accessible data ethics principles. At least two of those are true. There isn’t much in FaceApp’s disclosure that would give a user any sense of confidence in the app’s security or respect for privacy.
Unsurprisingly, this hasn’t amounted to much. Giving away our data in irresponsible ways has become a bit like comfort eating. You know it’s bad, but you’re still going to do it.
The reasons are likely similar to the reasons we indulge other petty vices: the benefits are obvious and immediate; the harms are distant and abstract. And whilst we’d all like to think we’ve got more self-control than the kids in those delayed gratification psychology experiments, more often than not our desire for fun or curiosity trumps any concern we have over how our data is used.
Should you be worried?
Is this a problem? To the extent that this data – easily accessed – can be used for a range of goals we likely don’t support, yes. It also gives rise to a range of complex ethical questions concerning our responsibility.
Let’s say I willingly give my data to FaceApp. This data is then aggregated and on-sold in a data marketplace. A dataset comprising of millions of facial photos is then used to train facial recognition AI, which is used to track down political dissidents in Russia. To what extent should I consider myself responsible for political oppression on the other side of the world?
In climate change ethics, there is a school of thought that suggests even if our actions can’t change an outcome – for instance, by making a meaningful reduction to emissions – we still have a moral obligation not to make the problem worse.
It might be true that a dataset would still be on sold without our input, but that alone doesn’t seem to justify adding our information or throwing up our arms and giving up. In this hypothetical, giving up – or not caring – means abandoning my (admittedly small) role in human rights violations and political injustice.
A troubling peek into the future
In reality, it’s really unlikely that’s what FaceApp is actually using your data to do. It’s far more likely, according to the MIT Technology Review, that your face might be used to train FaceApp to get even better at what it does.
It might use your face to help improve software that analyses faces to determine age and gender. Or it might be used – perhaps most scarily – to train AI to create deepfakes or faces of people who don’t exist. All of this is a far cry from the nightmare scenario sketched out above.
But even if my horror story was accurate, would it matter? It seems unlikely.
By the time tech journalists were talking about the potential data issues with FaceApp, millions had already uploaded their photos into the app. The ship had sailed, and it set off with barely a question asked of it. It’s also likely that plenty of people read about the data issues and then installed the app just to see what all the fuss is about.
Who is responsible?
I’m pulled in two directions when I wonder who we should hold responsible here. Of course, designers are clever and intentionally design their apps in ways that make them smooth and easy to use. They eliminate the friction points that facilitate serious thinking and reflection.
But that speed and efficiency is partly there because we want it to be there. We don’t want to actually read the terms of use agreement, and the company willingly give us a quick way to avoid doing so (whilst lying, and saying we have).
This is a Faustian pact – we let tech companies sell us stuff that’s potentially bad for us, so long as it’s fun.
The important reflection around FaceApp isn’t that the Russians are coming for us – a view that, as Kaitlyn Tiffany noted for Vox, smacks slightly of racism and xenophobia. The reflection is how easily we give up our principled commitments to ethics, privacy and wokeful use of technology as soon as someone flashes some viral content at us.
In Ethical by Design: Principles for Good Technology, Simon Longstaff and I made the point that technology isn’t just a thing we build and use. It’s a world view. When we see the world technologically, our central values are things like efficiency, effectiveness and control. That is, we’re more interesting in how we do things than what we’re doing.
Two sides of the story
For me, that’s the FaceApp story. The question wasn’t ‘is this app safe to use?’ (probably no less so than most other photo apps), but ‘how much fun will I have?’ It’s a worldview where we’re happy to pay any price for our kicks, so long as that price is hidden from us. FaceApp might not have used this impulse for maniacal ends, but it has demonstrated a pretty clear vulnerability.
Is this how the world ends, not with a bang, but with a chuckle and a hashtag?
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BY Matthew Beard
Matt is a moral philosopher with a background in applied and military ethics. In 2016, Matt won the Australasian Association of Philosophy prize for media engagement. Formerly a fellow at The Ethics Centre, Matt is currently host on ABC’s Short & Curly podcast and the Vincent Fairfax Fellowship Program Director.
The role of the ethical leader in an accelerating world
Dr Simon Longstaff, Executive Director of The Ethics Centre, opened the recent AGSM Professional Forum: Ethical Leadership in an Accelerating World by acknowledging today’s leaders are confronted with a pace of change that is increasingly rapid, complex and deep in its implications.
They are grappling with multiple dynamic forces as they make strategic business decisions, uncover new market opportunities, and maintain their sense of purpose.
And, as we move into the Age of Purpose, they must measure up to the moral expectations of their employees, stakeholders and the public – while building trust in an increasingly sceptical environment.
As one of Australia’s leading ethicists and philosophers, Dr Longstaff said he believes ethics need to be intrinsic within leaders, especially in a time where civilisation is going through enormous change. And this starts with leaders in the boardroom. “I’d like to reframe leadership itself as an ethical practice. You can’t just add ethics into leadership. If that’s what you’re doing, you’ve misunderstood what leadership is,” he said.
Strengthening the decision-making muscle
Historically, decision-making in organisations has been heavily regulated – and Dr Longstaff says that makes it due for an overhaul. Only then can more robust ethical practices flourish throughout organisations.
“For 30 years or more, leaders have been trying to manage the rate, complexity and depth of change through the exercise of control,” said Dr Longstaff. “In this country the most prolific regulators are not in parliaments or at APRA. They’re in the boardrooms of Australia.”
He says the system has been so finely meshed that no one can choose to do anything wrong. And as a result we’ve begun to create new forms of systemic risk.
“Inside corporations, there are measures designed to make it safe. But if you create a world in which no one can choose to do anything wrong, it also means no one can choose to do anything right,” said Dr Longstaff. “If you don’t choose – you comply. And like any skill, if this muscle isn’t used and flexed, it withers away.”
This systemic impact was most clearly demonstrated in the findings of the recent Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry. The findings uncovered the implications of inaction and the way leadership behaviour can detrimentally impact stakeholder sentiment and damage trust in an organisation.
“In many cases of a compliant culture, when asked why a certain decision has been made, the answer is ‘that’s the way things have always been done’,” said Dr Longstaff. “But the fact we can do something doesn’t mean we should do it. To do so is a sign of a cultural failure, where ethical restraint should have been exercised.”
This is what Dr Longstaff calls ‘unintended negative strategic effect’: Something that can only be rectified by progressive and collaborative leaders.
“People are inherently good,” he said. “Leaders don’t wake up thinking ‘today I’m going to see how much hypocrisy I can engage in’. They are susceptible to the greater threat of unthinking custom and practice. And this must change,” he said.
Leading with moral courage and strategic vision
To create more ethical practices, Dr Longstaff suggests leaders guide their organisations through a process of ‘constructive subversion’ – to break the cycle of ‘going with the flow’ and embedding reflective practice within its culture.
“To subvert unthinking custom and practice, decision-making processes need to come back to the notion of purpose, values and principles,” says Dr Longstaff.
An organisation must have the right intent if it is to achieve its goals. To manage this, Dr Longstaff says leaders need these three key qualities:
- Moral courage – “Leaders need to have courage at the right time in the right way to offer the practice and skills to subvert unthinking.”
- Imagination – “Great leaders can imagine what it’s like to be somebody else, whether friend or foe, and understand how they see the world.”
- Strategic vision – “Leaders need the capacity to invent or discover inflection points – knowing when it’s time to action significant change.”
If leaders can set an organisation’s intention to realise its purpose-led potential, then their people can exercise their own discretion once they adopt this belief. This breaks the cycle of unthinking practice that leads to distrust from stakeholders and shareholders.
“Trust is not hard to build or sustain – there’s no real mystery about it. It’s created when individuals or organisations can declare publicly ‘this is who we are and this is what we stand for’ and act in a manner that is consistent with that’,” said Dr Longstaff.
In his keynote’s conclusion, Dr Longstaff came back to purpose and the existing structures that are in need of an overhaul.
“What is the purpose of a bank? A corporation? A market? Limited liability? All of them have purposes – and almost all of these have been forgotten,” said Dr Longstaff.
“As a society of citizens and colleagues, when we think about ethical leadership, we have to ask ourselves what we want and what will we settle for? A world of control, compliance and surveillance? Even if that was to work, would it diminish who we are as human beings?”
This article was originally published by UNSW, republished with permission.
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BY Simon Longstaff
After studying law in Sydney and teaching in Tasmania, Simon pursued postgraduate studies in philosophy as a Member of Magdalene College, Cambridge. In 1991, Simon commenced his work as the first Executive Director of The Ethics Centre. In 2013, he was made an officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for “distinguished service to the community through the promotion of ethical standards in governance and business, to improving corporate responsibility, and to philosophy.”
If you condemn homosexuals, are you betraying Jesus?
The controversy surrounding Israel Folau’s Instagram posts has tended to focus on questions of free speech, religious freedom and employers’ rights. But I want to ask a deeper question: is Folau’s position consistent with the teachings and example of Christianity’s founder, Jesus of Nazareth?
In thinking about how one might answer this question, I make the following assumptions:
- that, as the incarnation of the divine, Jesus was incapable of error;
- that Jesus’s life and teachings are the ultimate source of authority for Christians;
- that the words and deeds of Jesus, as recorded in the four canonical Gospels, take precedence over those of any other theologian or interpreter (including Paul the Apostle); and
- that the New Testament has priority over the Old Testament ― to the extent that there is any disagreement.
So, what is the essence of Jesus’s life and teaching as revealed in the Gospels? Traditionally, the focus has been on Jesus’s offer of unconditional love and the associated blessing of healing ― both physical and spiritual (the latter through forgiveness of sins).
Jesus does not present himself as breaking with Judaism. He says explicitly that he has not come to overturn the Mosaic Law of his Jewish forebears, but to bring it to its fulfilment, to reveal its essence. On two occasions ― during the Sermon on the Mount and at the Last Supper ― Jesus speaks directly of the core principles on which the Torah is founded. On the earlier occasion, Jesus explicitly states that all of the law is expressed in the two “greatest” commandments: to love God with all one’s heart; to love one’s neighbour as oneself.
However, in the Gospel of John, Jesus goes one step further. John writes that, at the Last Supper, Jesus presents to his immediate disciples a final encapsulation of all his teaching. Affirming his direct connection with the Father, telling them that he is to ascend to heaven but will send a guide in the form of the Holy Spirit, Jesus issues his disciples with a new commandment. This is what John (13:33-35) reports Jesus to have said:
Whither I go, ye cannot come; so now I say to you. A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.
Unlike the great commandment, with its appeal to the self-love of each person, the new standard for agape (the non-erotic love one bears for another) is to be Jesus’s love for his disciples ― his friends ― and, presumably, for humanity at large.
If the claims of Christians are to be accepted, then Jesus’s new commandment is not a mere act of prophecy, no matter how inspired. It is not an interpretation of a revelatory experience. If you accept the Gospel of John (as I think Christians do), then Jesus has uttered a direct commandment from God; inscribed not on stone but in the hearts and minds of those present. Jesus’s new law is to “love one another as I have loved you.” How then does Jesus love others?
First, each of the Gospels present Jesus as loving unconditionally. Not once does he set a threshold to be crossed before he bestows his love. He heals people without requiring them to become his disciples. He forgives without first requiring a renunciation of sin. He may counsel a better life, but does not make that a precondition of his love. Indeed, he specifically cautions “the righteous” to avoid judging others ― to refrain from casting the first stone.
This is not to say that Jesus is indifferent to sin. In common with the Jewish tradition, Jesus recognises sin as a form of ‘moral servitude’, a loss of freedom. However, there is nothing in the Nazarene’s ministry that condemns homosexuals to eternal damnation ― nor anyone else. Jesus even prays for the forgiveness of those who have ordered and undertaken his torture at Calvary.
Most importantly, Jesus does not merely tolerate those whom others hold in contempt ― he cosies up to them. He touches them. He shares meals with them. He defies the rituals and customs of ‘purity’, even those prescribed in the Old Testament. In doing so, Jesus offends the prevailing piety and invites the censure of those who withdraw from all that is deemed to be ‘unclean’.
How, then, does Christianity in our time become a religion so quick to judge and condemn, and so reluctant to love others without qualification? How do Christians, like Israel Folau, come to invoke contempt for others, to believe it acceptable to cast the first stone ― from the safe distance of a social media account? Would not a Christian follow Jesus’s example and offer hospitality to those who others treat with disgust ― share a meal, feel their humanity, offer companionship, without any strings attached?
Why, in other words, are many Christians ignoring Jesus? Perhaps interpreters and theologians, like the Apostle Paul, were more eloquent. Perhaps preachers have come to enjoy a measure of success by playing to the underlying prejudices of their audience. Perhaps human beings find it too hard to embrace Jesus’s message of radical love and forgiveness. As Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor explains ― somewhat apologetically ― in The Brothers Karamazov, if Jesus was to walk the earth today, he would have to be destroyed all over again. The world ― including his church – finds Jesus just too difficult to cope with.
Or, perhaps the truth is something darker. Has a deep and ingrained sense of disgust ― about sex in general, and homosexuality in particular ― bound some Christians in chains even stronger than sin?
While I understand that there is no monolithic “Christian” point of view about homosexuality, I am genuinely confused by the notion that any Christian can see matters as Israel Folau does. This is not to doubt the sincerity of Folau and his Christian supporters. But sincerity does not excuse fundamental error.
Surely modern Christians can grasp that a person’s sexual orientation is not something simply chosen. We are born “hard wired” with our preferences. To say that a homosexual person is destined for hell is to claim that each such person is born an abomination in the sight of God. That is an obscene suggestion ― not only in the eyes of a secular society, but, if the Gospels are to be believed, in the eyes of the founder of Christianity itself. Not once does Jesus indicate contempt for any person.
So, again I ask, how is it that a church founded on the commitment to unconditional love has become home to the demons of righteous indignation? In whose name has that been done? Don’t tell me it is Jesus. If unconditional love, free from any condemnation, is offered to the man who nails you to a cross, then how can it be withheld from someone whose only sin is to have not been born a heterosexual?
In the same spirit, perhaps it’s time to call a truce in the proxy war over free speech and religious freedom. It’s time for his detractors to practice what Jesus preached and reach out to Israel Folau; to extend to him friendship and understanding; to share a meal with him and offer him unconditional forgiveness ― for he knows not what he does.
This article was originally published by ABC , republished with permission.
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BY Simon Longstaff
After studying law in Sydney and teaching in Tasmania, Simon pursued postgraduate studies in philosophy as a Member of Magdalene College, Cambridge. In 1991, Simon commenced his work as the first Executive Director of The Ethics Centre. In 2013, he was made an officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for “distinguished service to the community through the promotion of ethical standards in governance and business, to improving corporate responsibility, and to philosophy.”
Injecting artificial intelligence with human empathy
The great promise of artificial intelligence is efficiency. The finely tuned mechanics of AI will free up societies to explore new, softer skills while industries thrive on automation.
However, if we’ve learned anything from the great promise of the Internet – which was supposed to bring equality by leveling the playing field – it’s clear new technologies can be rife with complications unwittingly introduced by the humans who created them.
The rise of artificial intelligence is exciting, but the drive toward efficiency must not happen without a corresponding push for strong ethics to guide the process. Otherwise, the advancements of AI will be undercut by human fallibility and biases. This is as true for AI’s application in the pursuit of social justice as it is in basic business practices like customer service.
Empathy
The ethical questions surrounding AI have long been the subject of science fiction, but today they are quickly becoming real-world concerns. Human intelligence has a direct relationship to human empathy. If this sensitivity doesn’t translate into artificial intelligence the consequences could be dire. We must examine how humans learn in order to build an ethical education process for AI.
AI is not merely programmed – it is trained like a human. If AI doesn’t learn the right lessons, ethical problems will inevitably arise. We’ve already seen examples, such as the tendency of facial recognition software to misidentify people of colour as criminals.
Biased AI
In the United States, a piece of software called Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (Compas) was used to assess the risk of defendants reoffending and had an impact on their sentencing. Compas was found to be twice as likely to misclassify non-white defendants as higher risk offenders, while white defendants were misclassified as lower risk much more often than non-white defendants. This is a training issue. If AI is predominantly trained in Caucasian faces, it will disadvantage minorities.
This example might seem far removed from us here in Australia but consider the consequences if it were in place here. What if a similar technology was being used at airports for customs checks, or part of a pre-screening process used by recruiters and employment agencies?
“Human intelligence has a direct relationship to human empathy.”
If racism and other forms of discrimination are unintentionally programmed into AI, not only will it mirror many of the failings of analog society, but it could magnify them.
While heightened instances of injustice are obviously unacceptable outcomes for AI, there are additional possibilities that don’t serve our best interests and should be avoided. The foremost example of this is in customer service.
AI vs human customer service
Every business wants the most efficient and productive processes possible but sometimes better is actually worse. Eventually, an AI solution will do a better job at making appointments, answering questions, and handling phone calls. When that time comes, AI might not always be the right solution.
Particularly with more complex matters, humans want to talk to other humans. Not only do they want their problem resolved, but they want to feel like they’ve been heard. They want empathy. This is something AI cannot do.
AI is inevitable. In fact, you’re probably already using it without being aware of it. There is no doubt that the proper application of AI will make us more efficient as a society, but the temptation to rely blindly on AI is unadvisable.
We must be aware of our biases when creating new technologies and do everything in our power to ensure they aren’t baked into algorithms. As more functions are handed over to AI, we must also remember that sometimes there’s no substitute for human-to-human interaction.
After all, we’re only human.
Allan Waddell is founder and Co-CEO of Kablamo, an Australian cloud based tech software company.
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BY Allan Waddell
Allan Waddell is founder and Co-CEO of Kablamo, an Australian cloud based tech software company.
Parenting philosophy: Stop praising mediocrity
I spent this weekend hearing from all corners what a wonderful Dad I am. It was quite lovely, and I’d very much like for it to happen more often.
This weekend I was effectively a sole parent as my wife was rendered bedridden by illness. For two days, I was in charge of a seven-week-old baby and almost three-year-old toddler.
Miracle of miracles – they didn’t die. In fact, I managed to feed and bath them, plus made sure they slept. I even packed them both up in the car and took them to a birthday party and back again.
An uneven playing field?
This is the Herculean labour that earned me torrents of praise. In fact, it didn’t just earn me praise – people messaged my bed-ridden wife not only with well-wishes, but to tell her how lucky she was. Oh, to have a co-parent like him!
I can’t imagine how frustrating these messages are for her to receive. I spend four days a week at work, which means she has the kids solo for those four days. In that time, she takes them to doctors appointments, libraries, playgrounds, feeds them, does an enormous amount of housework and manages, somehow, to keep herself alive.
What I did this weekend amounts to about 50% of what she does week in, week out. Guess how many people have texted me to say how lucky I am?
Less effort but more praise?
The double-standards here are staggering. They’re also incredibly unfair. To see someone receive more praise for less effort is profoundly invalidating – something about which women have been increasingly outspoken. It also makes social progress difficult – the more we see men’s modest contributions as incredibly generous and praiseworthy, the harder it is for women to ask more (even though what they’re asking for is entirely reasonable – lest we forget the last census, which reports that one in four men do zero housework).
What’s been less widely addressed is just how bad this double-standard is for men. I, and I would imagine most dads, want to be a great parent and partner. But that’s not helped by receiving praise for every little thing I do – it gives a false impression of exactly where I am on the spectrum: am I doing a great job, a terrible one, or just a mediocre one? It’s hard to tell through all the well-intended, generous praise.
Praise can be a double-edged sword
Praise is a powerful tool for behavioural change and moral growth. It can be used to help encourage people to do the right thing, remind them when they’ve slipped up and point out whose behaviour is a good example to follow. But that only works if the people offering praise have a clear idea of what’s actually worth praising – the praise in itself means nothing if it’s not properly calibrated.
And this is why the kind of praise I received is a problem. Taking care of your children is not exceptional, parenting-wise. It’s just what you’re supposed to do. Ditto, doing the laundry, cooking for the family, organising tradesmen to come and fix the house, planning birthday parties and all the other domestic activities that women do thanklessly and men do heroically. Or, at least, some men – again, one in four do no chores.
The sheer mass of men not pulling their weight makes it so easy for mediocrity to look amazing. The comedian Hannah Gadsby talks about how there is a line in the sand between ‘good men’ and ‘bad men’, but how it tends to be men who determine where that line is drawn. Similarly, as a dad I can always find a dad who isn’t doing quite as much as me and use that to determine how much I’m contributing. And, good news, I’m likely to have my self-image reinforced by praise and gratitude at every turn.
What’s more, there’s a social message embedded in that praise. Just as the text message said, women are told they should be grateful to have a partner who is not one of those who does no housework. Maybe he doesn’t do much – but it’s not nothing, so lucky you. Obviously, these narratives are very bad for equality.
They’re also, as I said, very bad for men who want to be great partners, parents and people. The school of ethical thought that most focusses on the kinds of questions I’m asking here is known as ‘virtue ethics’. Virtue ethics focusses on the kinds of character traits that are most likely to make people good and the kinds of activities that are likely to develop and model those characteristics.
Thinking in this way, we might be inclined to say that being a good parent requires the development of a bunch of different character traits – like compassion – and then practising those character traits by, say, holding a child gently while they have an emotional meltdown.
However, one the key ways we learn the virtues is by emulating role models. That means who we single out as role models is really important and – as we’ve said – what counts as ‘exemplary’ parenting can, for dads, be a pretty low bar. Not only does this leave a lot of cleaning up for the co-parents of men who have been sold this story, it undermines their ability to become who they really want to be: great dads.
What do we do about this? Well, for one thing, we should stop giving blokes a cookie just because they showed up. Reserve our praise for when it’s really deserved – and then hand it out equally. Great parenting is great parenting – just because it’s more common to see women in that role doesn’t mean they’re unworthy of praise.
Second, I think men have got to be critical about the kinds of feedback they receive. Before letting it stoke our egos, we need to consider whether or not it’s warranted. In an age of allyship and leaning in, social brownie points are pretty easy to come by for men. But we need to hold ourselves to a higher standard. As the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah writes, “a person of honour cares first of all not about being respected but about being worthy of respect.”
Matt Beard is a tired, okay dad.
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BY Matthew Beard
Matt is a moral philosopher with a background in applied and military ethics. In 2016, Matt won the Australasian Association of Philosophy prize for media engagement. Formerly a fellow at The Ethics Centre, Matt is currently host on ABC’s Short & Curly podcast and the Vincent Fairfax Fellowship Program Director.
Israel Folau: appeals to conscience cut both ways
Israel Folau’s now infamous post in which he called on a range of “sinners” to repent, turn to Jesus Christ and thus be saved from an eternity in Hell has had more consequences than I suspect he anticipated.
It has led to his loss of employment. It has elevated his status to that of a champion for conservative Christian beliefs.
Finally, it has prompted widespread debate about the intersection between religious belief and the world of work.
It is this last issue that deserves further discussion.
Religious freedom comes in four basic forms: freedom of belief, freedom of worship, freedom to act in good conscience (which includes freedom from coercion in matters of religion) and finally freedom to proselytise (which includes the right to educate one’s children in the faith). Folau’s case involves the third and fourth of these freedoms.
What Folau believes and how he worships have not been challenged. Rather, he has been sanctioned for what he has done and said — not as a believer, but in his role as an elite rugby player representing Australia. However, can the two roles of “believer” and “contracted player” be so easily separated? That is the question at the heart of this issue.
What are Folau’s rights?
As a committed Christian, Folau obviously feels compelled to act on his beliefs — in this case by posting tweets and instagram posts directed at those who risk damnation. Within his world view, he is simply following the scriptural injunction to: “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. Whoever believes and is baptised will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.” (Mark16:15)
So, we might ask if it is right and proper that a person of such sincere religious beliefs has lost his job and been denied at least one platform for fundraising to defend his interests before the courts.
As a general rule, there is only one group of employers — faith groups — who claim a right to dismiss people from employment because of their religious beliefs. For example, a number of religious organisations have argued that their schools should be allowed to deny employment to otherwise competent people who do not practise their religion. It follows from this that employees who renounce the faith of the school would be open to dismissal.
No other employer may discriminate against a person based on their religious beliefs. So, given that rugby is not a religion (despite what some claim), how did Folau come to lose his lucrative employment — a risk that is now faced by his wife, Maria Folau, one of Australasia’s preeminent netball athletes and a Christian who supports her husband’s views?
Brands have a right to protect their interests
In order to broaden the debate, let’s consider the case of a Christian who believes that the Pope is the Antichrist and that Roman Catholics are all destined for Hell. Such views are not “hypothetical”. They were openly held by the Northern Ireland religious and political leader, the Reverend Ian Paisley.
In 1958, he condemned Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother for “committing spiritual fornication and adultery with the Antichrist” after they met with Pope John XXIII. Thirty years later, Paisley denounced Pope John Paul II as the Antichrist — to his face — while the latter addressed the European Union Parliament.
Now suppose an employee is of a mind similar to Paisley — so publishes a tweet attacking the head of the Catholic Church and all of its adherents in equivalent terms. Suppose the employee does so on the basis of what he considers to be a well-founded and sincere religious belief. However, in this case, it’s not just a vulnerable minority group who’s affected — but more than a billion Roman Catholics and their immensely wealthy and powerful church.
Let’s suppose that the “Paisleyite” employee is a prominent brand ambassador working for a major bank. After the tweet, all hell breaks loose. Upset employees threaten to resign, customers threaten to close their accounts, investors begin to dump the stock, etc.
Would an employer be justified in calling such a person to account? Or should the bank respect the expression of sincere, religious belief and defend the right of the brand ambassador to express such views — no matter what damage is done?
It seems reasonable that employers be free to take steps to protect themselves from the kind of strategic risk caused by well-intentioned, loose cannons like the hypothetical brand ambassador sketched above.
This should allow employers to put in place measures designed to protect their interests — and then ask their employees to act accordingly.
Employees have a right to choose too
There is an important point to be noted here. The employer has a right to define how its interests are to be protected. However, it falls to the employee to accept (or not) the relevant conditions of employment.
Any person who truly feels unable to accept those conditions should either not accept an offer of employment or if already part of the organisation, then they should consider resigning in order to find a place of employment better aligned with their moral compass.
This brings us back to the ethical core of the problem raised by the Folau case. Is it ever right for an employer to demand that an employee leave their conscience at the door? I think that the answer is no.
However, if the conscience of an employee should be respected, then so should that of the employer. No individual or organisation is required to be complicit in conduct that it sincerely believes to be wrong.
This is the ground on which Rugby Australia and GoFundMe have both stood. They have decided not to enable the propagation of views that they hold to be ethically objectionable. Rugby Australia’s employment of Folau as one of Australia’s elite sportsmen afforded him (and his views about sin) a prominence that others do not enjoy. They have denied him access to the platform they had provided to him.
Folau was never just a player. He has always been, in part, a brand ambassador. GoFundMe denied Folau its platform after he allegedly violated its terms of service.
Folau chose religion
What both sides of this debate need to consider are the requirements for even-handedness and proportionality. Those who act in the name of conscience — employees and employers — need to be sincere. They need to protect their position with the minimal restrictions necessary. They need to be even-handed — treating like issues and persons in a like manner. And they need to accept the reasonable consequences of their actions.
Folau must have known that labelling homosexuals (among others) as sinners destined for Hell would be incendiary — and risk damaging Rugby Australia.
After all, this was not the first time he had been vocal in his views. In the end, his choice was between what he understood to be his duty to his employer and what he understood to be his duty to his God. Folau chose to put his religion first.
Conscience is not a convenient friend. It often comes with consequences; some good, some ill.
Neither Rugby Australia nor GoFundMe has silenced Folau. He is still acting and speaking in accordance with his religious beliefs. He is still able to raise funds for his defence — as demonstrated by the swift offer of support provided by the Australian Christian Lobby. Folau still has a public platform — which he continues to utilise, as is his right.
Kicked out of the temple, Israel Folau remains free to preach in the public square.
Dr Simon Longstaff originally wrote this piece for ABC News. Photo credit: David Molloy
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BY Simon Longstaff
After studying law in Sydney and teaching in Tasmania, Simon pursued postgraduate studies in philosophy as a Member of Magdalene College, Cambridge. In 1991, Simon commenced his work as the first Executive Director of The Ethics Centre. In 2013, he was made an officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for “distinguished service to the community through the promotion of ethical standards in governance and business, to improving corporate responsibility, and to philosophy.”
We need to talk about ageism
There’s growing evidence of change afoot in attitudes toward age, ageing and older people and it’s about time.
After decades of pondering – and usually catastrophising – about the impact on society of the dreaded ‘ageing population’, we may just be reaching a tipping point.
This term, tipping point, is described by Malcolm Gladwell in his bestselling book of that title as the “magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behaviour crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire”.
US ageism activist, Ashton Applewhite, suggests we might be there. She is the author of This Chair Rocks – A Manifesto Against Ageism and will be visiting Australia in November this year.
“The Guardian has just appointed a Longevity Reporter, for example,” she said, “who interviewed me at length and kept asking whether the culture was at a turning point”.
Applewhite argues most people are looking to cash in on the ‘longevity economy’ by selling products and services to a generation that controls most of the disposable income in the developed world.
“But there are also a zillion conversations going on about intergenerational initiatives, older women coming into our power, teaching medical students about age bias, incorporating age into diversity and inclusion training, fetishising of the old-and-fashionable, and many more domains.”
This is happening because people everywhere are waking up to the fact that no domain – from healthcare, to entertainment, to business, technology, the built environment – will be unaltered by the permanent, global and unprecedented phenomenon of population ageing. It carries fascinating social, economic, and ethical implications.
The big lag
One of the biggest challenges of population ageing stems from the fact that the roles and institutions around us – with all their underpinning assumptions, attitudes and behaviours – were created when lives were shorter and very different. And they haven’t had time to properly catch up.
A coalition of diverse Australian organisations and individuals have committed to address this lag with EveryAGE Counts, a long term advocacy campaign to change these destructive, outdated, yet deeply engrained attitudes and assumptions about ageing and older people. The coalition includes the Australian Human Rights Commission, COTA Australia, National Seniors, the Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils, and the Regional Australia Institute.
“Research shows that many of society’s views about older people – the views and assumptions that drive all the negativity around ageing – are based on outdated myths and stereotypes that simply do not apply in this era of prolonged good health and increased longevity,” says EveryAGE Counts campaign co-chair, Robert Tickner.
“People are being prevented from living the productive, healthy, engaged lives they want to live as they get older because our society tends to devalue and marginalise older people,” he says.
“And these negative stereotypes are so pervasive and deeply ingrained – in our language, in representations in the media and in popular culture – that many of us have bought into them without question. So we actually contribute to our own marginalisation as we grow older. It’s why ageism is often described as prejudice and discrimination against your future self!”
The EveryAGE Counts campaign aims to end ageism. It is working to make it as unacceptable as other forms of prejudice and discrimination in our community.
“Terms like sexism, racism and homophobia are well understood and have become embedded in our societal norms. Ageism is not. Racist, sexist and homophobic behaviours are easy to spot, ageist behaviours, less so,” said Tickner.
Ageism is a bit different to other ‘isms’. Racist or sexist attitudes and behaviours, for example, are usually based on prejudices and assumptions about a person or a group that is ‘different’ to us – a different race, a different gender.
“The great irony is that ageism can affect us all, regardless of race, gender, religion, size, shape or our favourite music! It is discrimination against yourself, albeit your future self, for each and every one of us… should we be fortunate to live beyond our youth,” Tickner said.
There have been some great efforts in the last couple of decades, in Australia and internationally, to raise consciousness levels about ageism and its many negative impacts. Applewhite is trying to do this by urging us to swap ‘women’ for ‘older people’ when thinking about some of our attitudes and assumptions. Would you use a sweeping generalisation for an entire gender? Do you think ‘older people’ who may span 30 to 50 years in age, are all the same?
Many are comfortable calling out racism, sexism or homophobia. Yet jokes about older people are less likely to attract reprimand. I encourage you to check out the EveryAGE Counts campaign, take the ‘Am I Ageist?’ quiz and sign our campaign pledge:
I/we stand for a world without ageism where all people of all ages are valued and respected and their contributions are acknowledged. I/we commit to speak out and take action to ensure older people can participate on equal terms with others in all aspects of life.
