What do you do when a crucial knowledge system is under-resourced, highly valued, and is having its integrity undermined? That’s the question facing those working in academic research and publishing. There’s a risk Australians might lose trust in one of the central systems on which we rely for knowledge and innovation.

It’s one of those problems that defies easy solutions, like obesity, terrorism or a tax system to suit an entire population. Academics call these “wicked problems” – meaning they’re resistant to easy solutions, not that they are ‘evil’.

Charles West Churchman, who first coined the term, described them as:

That class of social system problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision makers with conflicting values and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing.

The wicked problem I face day-to-day is that of research and publication ethics. Though most academics do their best within a highly pressured system I see many issues, which span a continuum, starting with cutting corners in the preparation of manuscripts and ending with outright fraud.

It’s helpful to know whether the problem we are facing is a wicked one or not. It can help us to rethink the problem, understand why conventional problem-solving approaches have failed and encourage novel approaches, even if solutions are not readily available.

Though publication ethics, which considers academic work submitted for publication, has traditionally been considered a problem solely for academic journal editors and publishers, it is necessarily entwined with research ethics – issues related to the actual performance of the academic work. For example, unethical human experimentation may only come to light at the time of publication though it clearly originates much earlier.

Given the pressure editors are under, the system is vulnerable to subversion.

Consider the ethical issues surrounding peer review, the process by which academic experts (peers) assess the work of others.

Though imperfect, formalisation of peer review has become an important mark of quality for a journal. Peer review by experts, mediated by journal editors, usually determines whether a paper is published. Though seemingly simple, there are many points where the system can be gamed or even completely subverted – a major one being in the selection of reviewers.

As the number of academics and submissions to journals increase, editors face a logistical challenge in keeping track of an ever-increasing number of submissions needing review. However, as the rise in submissions has not corresponded with a rise in editors – many of whom are volunteers – these journals are overworked and often don’t have a big enough circle of reviewers to call on for the papers being submitted.

A simple approach to increase the pool of reviewers adopted by a number of journals is to allow authors to suggest reviewers for their paper via the online peer review system. These suggestions can be valuable if overseen by editors who can assess reviewers’ credentials. But they are already overworked and often handling work at the edge of their area of expertise, meaning time is at a premium.

Given the pressure editors are under, the system is vulnerable to subversion. It’s always been a temptation for authors to submit the name of reviewers who they believed would view their work favourably. Recently, a small number took it a step further, suggesting fake reviewer names for their papers.

These fake reviewers (usually organised via a third party) promptly submitted favourable reviews which led to papers inappropriately being accepted for publication. The consequences were severe – papers had to be retracted with consequent potential reputational damage to the journal, editors, authors and their institutions. Note how a ‘simple’ view of a ‘wicked’ problem – under resourced editors can be helped by authors suggesting their reviewers – led to new and worse problems than before.

Removing the ability of authors to suggest reviewers … would be treating a symptom rather than the cause.

But why would some authors go to such extreme ends as submitting fake reviews? The answer takes us into a related problem – the way authors are rewarded for publications.

Manipulating peer review gives authors a higher chance of publication – and academic publications are crucial for being promoted at universities. Promotion often provides higher salary, prestige, perhaps less teaching allocation and other fringe benefits. So for those at the extreme, who lack the necessary skills to publish (or even firm command of academic English), it’s logical to turn to those who understand how to manipulate the system.

We could easily fix the problem of fake reviews by removing an author’s ability to suggest reviewers but this would be treating a symptom rather than the cause. Namely, a perverse reward system for authors.

Removing author suggestions does nothing to help overworked editors deal more easily with the huge amount of submissions they receive. Nor do editors have the power to address the underlying problem – an inappropriate system of academic incentives.

There are no easy solutions but accepting the complexity may at least help to understand what it is that needs to be solved. Could we change the incentive structure to reward authors for more than merely being published in a journal?

There are moves to understand these intertwined problems but all solutions will fail unless we come back to the first requirement for approaching a wicked problem – agreement it’s a problem shared by many. So while the issues are most notable in academic journals, we won’t find all the solutions there.

A recent article in ABC Religion by Steve Fuller described philosophy being “at the crossroads”. The article explores philosophy’s relationship to universities and what living a “philosophical life” really looks like.

Reading it, my mind whisked me back to some of my earliest days at The Ethics Centre. Before returning to Sydney, I enjoyed the good fortune to complete my doctorate at Cambridge – one of the great universities of the world. While there, I mastered the disciplines of academic philosophy. However, I also learned the one lesson that my supervisor offered me at our first meeting – I should always “go for the jugular”. As it happens, I was quite good at drawing blood.

Perhaps this was a young philosopher’s sport because, as I grew older and read more deeply, I came to realise what I’d learned to do was not really consistent with the purpose and traditions of philosophy at all. Rather, I had become something of an intellectual bully – more concerned with wounding my opponents than with finding the ‘truth’ in the matter being discussed.

This realisation was linked to my re-reading of Plato – and his account of the figure of Socrates who, to this day, remains my personal exemplar of a great philosopher.

The key to my new understanding of Socrates lay in my realisation that, contrary to what I had once believed, he was not a philosophical gymnast deliberately trying to tie his interlocutors in knots (going for the jugular). Rather, he was a man sincerely wrestling, with others, some of the toughest questions faced by humanity in order to better understand them. What is justice? What is a good life? How are we to live?

The route to any kind of answer worth holding is incredibly difficult – and I finally understood (I was a slow learner) that Socrates subjected his own ideas to the same critical scrutiny he required of others.

In short, he was totally sincere when he said that he really did not know anything. All of his questioning was a genuine exploration involving others who, in fact, did claim to ‘know’. That is why he would bail up people in the agora (the town square) who were heading off to administer ‘justice’ in the Athenian courts.

Surely, Socrates would say, if you are to administer justice – then you must know what it is. As it turned out, they did not.

The significance of Socrates’ work in the agora was not lost on me. Here was a philosopher working in the public space. The more I looked, the more it seemed that this had been so for most of the great thinkers.

So that is what I set out to do.

One of my earliest initiatives was to head down to Martin Place, in the centre of Sydney, where I would set up a circle of 10 plastic chairs and two cardboard signs that said something like, “If you want to talk to a philosopher about ideas, then take a seat”. And there I would sit – waiting for others.

Without fail they would come – young, old, rich, poor – wanting to talk about large, looming matters in their lives. I remember cyclists discussing their place on our roads, school children discussing their willingness to cheat in exams (because they thought the message of society is ‘do whatever it takes’).

Occasionally, people would come from overseas – having heard of this odd phenomenon. A memorable occasion involved a discussion with a very senior and learned rabbi from Amsterdam – the then global head (I think) of Progressive Judaism. On another occasion, a woman brought her mother (visiting from England) to discuss her guilt at no longer believing in God. I remember we discussed what it might mean to feel guilt in relation to a being you claimed not to exist. There were few answers – but some useful insights.

Anyway, I came to imagine a whole series of philosophers’ circles being dotted around Martin Place and other parts of Sydney (and perhaps Australia). After all, why should I be the only philosopher pursuing this aspect of the philosophical life. So I reached out to the philosophy faculty at Sydney University – thinking (naively as it turned out) I would have a rush of colleagues wishing to join me.

Alas – not one was interested. The essence of their message was that they doubted the public would be able to engage with ‘real philosophy’ – that the techniques and language needed for philosophy would be bewildering to non-philosophers. I suspect there was also an undeclared fear of being exposed to their fellow citizens in such a vulnerable position.

Actually, I still don’t really know what led to such a wholesale rejection of the idea.

However, I think it was a great pity other philosophers should have felt more comfortable within the walls of their universities rather than out in the wider world.

I doubt that anything I write or say will be quoted in the centuries to come. However, I would not, for a moment, change the choice I made to step outside of the university and work within the agora. Life then becomes messy and marvellous in equal measure. Everything needs to be translated into language anyone can understand (and I have found that this is possible without sacrificing an iota of philosophical nuance).

I think it was a great pity other philosophers should have felt more comfortable within the walls of their universities rather than out in the wider world.

You constantly need to challenge unthinking custom and practice most people simply take for granted. This does not make you popular. You are constantly accused of being ‘unethical’ because you entertain ideas one group or another opposes. You please almost nobody. You cannot aim to be liked. And you have to deal with the rawness of people’s lives – discovering just how much the issues philosophers consider (especially in the field of ethics) really matter.

This is not to say that ‘academic’ philosophy should be abandoned. However, I can see no good reason why philosophers should think this is the only (or best) way to be a philosopher. Surely, there is room (and a need) for philosophers to live larger, more public lives.

You constantly need to challenge unthinking custom and practice most people simply take for granted. This does not make you popular.

I have scant academic publications to my name. However, at the height of the controversy surrounding the introduction of ethics classes for children not attending scripture in NSW, I enjoyed the privilege of being accused of “impiety” and “corrupting the youth” by the Anglican and Catholic Archbishops of Sydney. Why a ‘privilege’? Because these were precisely the same charges alleged against Socrates. So far, I have avoided the hemlock. For a philosopher, what could be better than that?

“This is a worldwide phenomenon in which men die at four times the rate of women. The four to one ratio gets closer to six or seven to one as people get older.”

That’s Professor Brian Draper, describing one of the most common causes of death among men: Suicide.

Suicide is the cause of death with the highest gender disparity in Australia – an experience replicated in most places around the world, according to Draper.

So what is going on? Draper is keen to avoid debased speculation – there are a lot of theories but not much we can say with certainty. “We can describe it, but we can’t understand it,” he says. One thing that seems clear to Draper is it’s not a coincidence so many more men die by suicide than women.

If you are raised by damaged parents, it could be damaging to you.

“It comes back to masculinity – it seems to be something about being male,” he says.

“I think every country has its own way of expressing masculinity. In the Australian context not talking about feelings and emotions, not connecting with intimate partners are factors…”

The issue of social connection is also thought to be connected in some way. “There is broad reluctance by many men to connect emotionally or build relationships outside their intimate partners – women have several intimate relationships, men have a handful at most,” Draper says.

You hear this reflection fairly often. Peter Munro’s feature in the most recent edition of Good Weekend on suicide deaths among trade workers tells a similar story.

Mark, an interviewee, describes writing a suicide note and feeling completely alone until a Facebook conversation with his girlfriend “took the weight of his shoulders”. What would have happened if Mark had lost Alex? Did he have anyone else?

None of this, Draper cautions, means we can reduce the problem to idiosyncrasies of Aussie masculinity – toughness, ‘sucking it up’, alcohol… It’s a global issue.

“I’m a strong believer in looking at things globally and not in isolation. Every country will do it differently, but you’ll see these issues in the way men interact – I think it’s more about masculinity and the way men interact.”

Another piece of the puzzle might – Draper suggests – be early childhood. If your parents have suffered severe trauma, it’s likely to have an effect.

“If you are raised by damaged parents, it could be damaging to you. Children of survivors of concentration camps, horrendous experiences like the killing fields in Cambodia or in Australia the Stolen Generations…”

It comes back to masculinity – it seems to be something about being male.

There is research backing this up. For instance, between 1988 and 1996 the children of Vietnam War veterans died by suicide at over three times the national average.

Draper is careful not to overstate it – there’s still so much we don’t know, but he does believe there’s something to early childhood experiences. “Sexual abuse in childhood still conveys suicide risk in your 70s and 80s … but there’s also emotional trauma from living with a person who’s not coping with their own demons.”

“I’m not sure we fully understand these processes.” The amount we still need to understand is becoming a theme.

What we don’t know is a source of optimism for Draper. “We’ve talked a lot about factors that might increase your risk but there’s a reverse side to that story.”

“A lot of our research is focussed predominantly on risk rather than protection. We don’t look at why things have changed for the better … For example, there’s been a massive reduction in suicides in men between 45-70 in the last 50 years.”

“Understanding what’s happened in those age groups would help.”

It’s pretty clear we need to keep talking – researchers, family, friends, support workers and those in need of support can’t act on what they don’t know.

If you or someone you know needs support, contact:

• Lifeline 13 11 14

• Men’s Line 1300 78 99 78

• beyondblue 1300 224 636

• Kids Helpline 1800 551 800

It seems as if three successive waves of feminism haven’t resolved the chronic mismatch between the ideal of the ‘good’ and ‘happy’ mother and the realities of women’s lives.

Even if you consciously reject them, ideas about what a mother ought to be and ought to feel are probably there from the minute you wake up until you go to bed at night. Even in our age of increased gender equality it seems as if the culture loves nothing more than to dish out the myths about how to be a better mother (or a thinner, more fashionable, or better-looking one).

It’s not just the celebrity mums pushing their prams on magazine covers, or the continuing dearth of mothers on TV who are less than exceptionally good-looking, or that mothers in advertising remain ubiquitously obsessed with cleaning products and alpine-fresh scents. While TV dramas have pleasingly increased the handful of roles that feature working mothers, most are unduly punished in the twists of the melodramatic plot. They have wimpy husbands or damaged children, and of course TV’s bad characters are inevitably bad due to the shortcomings of their mothers (serial killers, for example, invariably have overbearing mothers or alcoholic mothers, or have never really separated from their mothers).

It seems we are living in an age of overzealous motherhood. Indeed, in a world in which the demands of the workplace have increased, so too the ideals of motherhood have become paradoxically more – not less – demanding. In recent years, commonly accepted ideas about what constitutes a barely adequate level of mothering have dramatically expanded to include extraordinary sacrifices of time, money, feelings, brains, social relationships, and indeed sleep.

In Australia, most mothers work. But recent studies show that working mothers now spend more time with their children than their non-working mothers did in 1975. Working mothers achieve this extraordinary feat by sacrificing leisure, mental health, and even personal hygiene to spend more time with their kids.

This is coupled with a new kind of anxious sermonising that is having a profound impact on mothers, especially among the middle class. In Elisabeth Badinter’s book The Conflict, she argues that an ideology of ‘Naturalism’ has given rise to an industry of experts advocating increasingly pristine forms of natural birth and natural pregnancy, as well as an ever-expanding list of increasingly time-intensive child rearing duties that are deemed to fall to the mother alone. These duties include most of the classic practices of 21st century child rearing, including such nostrums as co-sleeping, babywearing and breastfeeding-on-demand until the age of two.

It seems we are living in an age of overzealous motherhood.

Whether it is called Intensive Mothering or Natural Parenting, these new credos of motherhood are wholly taken up with the idea that there is a narrowly prescribed way of doing things. In the West, 21st century child rearing is becoming increasingly time-consuming, expert-guided, emotionally draining, and incredibly expensive. In historical terms, I would be willing to hazard a guess that never before has motherhood been so heavily scrutinised. It is no longer just a question of whether you should or should not eat strawberries or prawns or soft cheese, or, heaven forbid, junk food, while you are pregnant, but so too, the issue of what you should or should not feel has come under intense scrutiny.

Never before has there been such a microscopic investigation of a pregnant woman’s emotional state, before, during and after birth. Indeed, the construction of new psychological disorders for mothers appears to have become something of a psychological pastime, with the old list of mental disorders expanding beyond prenatal anxiety, postnatal depression, postpartum psychosis and the baby blues, to include the baby pinks (a label for a woman who is illogically and inappropriately happy to be a mother), as well as Prenatal and Postnatal Stress Disorder, Maternal Anxiety and Mood Imbalance and Tokophobia—the latter being coined at the start of this millennium as a diagnosis for an unreasonable fear of giving birth.

The problem with the way in which this pop psychology is played out in the media is that it performs an endless re-inscription of the ideologies of mothering. These ideologies are often illogical, contradictory and – one suspects – more often dictated by what is convenient for society and not what is actually good for the children and parents involved. Above all else, mothers should be ecstatically happy mothers, because sad mothers are failed mothers. Indeed, according to the prevailing wisdom, unhappy mothers are downright unnatural, if not certifiably insane.

Never before has motherhood been so heavily scrutinised.

Little wonder there has been an outcry against such miserable standards of perfection. The same decade that saw the seeming triumph of the ideologies of Intensive and Natural mothering, also saw the rise of what has been called the ‘Parenting Hate Read’ — a popular outpouring of books and blogs written by mothers (and even a few fathers) who frankly confess that they are depressed about having children for no better reason than it is often mind-numbing, exhausting and dreadful. Mothers love their children, say the ‘Parenting Hate Reads’, but they do not like what is happening to their lives.

The problem is perhaps only partly about the disparity between media images of ecstatically happy mummies and the reality of women’s lives. It is also because our ideas about happiness have grown impoverished. Happiness, as it is commonly understood in the western world, is made up of continuous moments of pleasure and the absence of pain.

These popular assumptions about happiness are of comparatively recent origin, emerging in the works of philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham, who argued in the 18th century that people act purely in their self-interest and the goal to which self-interest aspires is happiness. Ethical conduct, according to Bentham and James Mill (father to John Stuart), should therefore aspire to maximise pleasure and minimise pain.

Our ideas about happiness have grown impoverished.

This ready equation of goodness, pleasure and happiness flew in the face of ideas that had been of concern to philosophers since Aristotle argued that a person is not made happy by fleeting pleasures, but by fulfilment stemming from meaning and purpose. Or, as Nietzsche, the whirling dervish of 19th century philosophy, put it, “Man does not strive for happiness – only the Englishman does”.

Nevertheless, Western assumptions about happiness have remained broadly utilitarian, giving rise to the culturally constructed notion of happiness we see in TV commercials, showing families becoming happier with every purchase. Or by life coaches peddling the dubious hypothesis that self-belief can overcome the odds, whatever your social or economic circumstance.

Unless you are Mother Teresa, you have probably been spending your life up until the time you have children in a reasonably independent and even self-indulgent way. You work hard through the week but sleep in on the weekend. You go to parties. You come home drunk. You see your friends when you want. Babies have different ideas. They stick forks in electric sockets, go berserk in the car seat, and throw up on your work clothes. They want to be carried around in the day and wake in the night.

If society can solve its social problems then maybe parenting will cease to be a misery competition. Mothers might not be happy in a utilitarian or hedonistic sense but will lead rich and satisfying lives. Then maybe a stay-at-home dad can change a nappy without a choir of angels descending from heaven singing ‘Hallelujah’.

This is an edited extract from “On Happiness: New Ideas for The 21st Century” UWA Publishing.

“What do we say to the god of death?” swordsman Syrio Forel asks Arya Stark in George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones (and in HBO’s TV series). “Not today.”

This short refrain marks the beginning of a sustained exploration of humanity’s relationship with death told through Arya’s experiences. She becomes a murderer and later, in ‘The House of the Undying’ where death is seen as a god to be worshipped, an assassin and servant to that god.

Watching Arya’s story unfold, it seemed to me she’d never forgotten her former (you guessed it, now dead) teacher’s lesson – the only response to death is denial.

According to many thinkers, this isn’t surprising at all. Arya isn’t alone in running from death. Denying the reality of human mortality is a near universal behaviour. In The Antidote: Happiness for people who can’t stand positive thinking, Oliver Burkeman considers the writing of Ernest Becker, whose arguments Burkeman surmises. “Your life is one relentless attempt to avoid [thinking about death] – a struggle so elemental that … for much of the time you succeed.”

Becker believed to avoid confronting our mortality people invest in “immortality projects”. Art, family, business, nations, war, charity, and so on… Immortality projects aim to overcome physical death by ensuring our continued existence through symbols or ideas.

The late David Bowie promised “We can be heroes”, and that’s precisely Becker’s point. Immortality projects are attempts to become heroes, thereby avoiding the emptiness of death.

But research suggests the common instinct to avoid thinking about our mortality might be worth pushing against. In a paper entitled ‘Deliver us from Evil’, researchers found that mortality avoidance can cloud our judgements about life and death issues, leading to unreflective decisions in high-stakes situations.

The study asked two groups of people to undertake a long and generally dull questionnaire and then to read a short essay and tell researchers how strongly they agreed with it. The essay was a strong statement of support for the controversial policies of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. It included lines like “It annoys me when I hear other people complain that President Bush is using his war against terrorism as a cover for instituting policies that, in the long run, will be detrimental to this country … Mr. Bush has been a source of strength and inspiration to us all. God bless him and God bless America”.

The only difference between the two groups was that one questionnaire forced subjects to consider their own mortality. The “mortality salience” group were asked to “briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you” and to “jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die, and once you are physically dead”.

For some, even the idea of answering these questions might feel uncomfortable, as it did for the subjects in the experiment. Researchers found the “mortality salient” subjects invested more strongly in the nearest immortality project to hand – the war in Iraq. Subjects from the mortality salience group agreed strongly with the essay. By contrast, the control group generally disagreed with the essay’s sentiments.

When we’re forced to confront our own mortality, our default reaction may not be the product of rational thinking but an impulsive rejection of death.

This tells us something important – especially in a time when we are continually confronted with the threat and reality of terrorism and domestic violence nearly every day. When we’re forced to confront our own mortality our default reaction may not be the product of rational thinking but an impulsive rejection of death. The researchers argued similarly:

The fact that reminders of death and the events of 9/11 enhanced support for President Bush in the present studies may not bode well for the philosophical democratic ideal that political preferences are the result of rational choice based on an informed understanding of the relevant issues.

This poses a challenge for ethical behaviour – some of the most serious ethical decisions people face are made when they are confronted with death. Most obviously these include healthcare and political decisions with serious implications for the general populous. Is it possible to overcome mortality avoidance and make decisions based on moral values and principles instead?

Researchers weren’t optimistic on this point, but Burkeman indirectly suggests a way forward. His interest lay in whether thinking about death might enable us to live a happier life. He presents evidence that regular contemplation of death can enable us to avoid horror and shock when it ultimately arrives. “The more you become aware of life’s finitude, the more you will cherish it and the less likely you will be to fritter it away on distraction”.

The same might be true for our mortality avoidance in decision making. If regular acquaintance with death can remove some of its shocking strangeness, perhaps we will be less likely to invest in immortality projects as a way to distract ourselves from its reality. By making our peace with the fact we are all going to die, we will be less likely to make decisions based in our fear of death. If ‘Deliver us from Evil’ is any indication, this might also save lives in the long run by ensuring serious decisions are made reasonably and not from fear.

Plus, doing so might also make you happier.