A parade of vices: Which Succession horror story are you?
There is a singular thrill that comes from watching very bad people do very bad things.
The anti-hero has been a staple of modern television and cinema for decades, made popular by Tony Soprano splashing about in a swimming pool with a brace of ducks, taking some much needed “me time” after overseeing a truly astonishing number of murders.
This kind of art might have some therapeutic aspects – it teaches us how not to be, so we might learn how to be – but that’s not its purpose. Its purpose is entertainment, the sick, giddy feeling that comes over us when we watch people throw off the entirely artificial rules of morality, and behave however they want.
Moreover, this kind of art is a way of teaching us the manners by which our moral outlooks are shaped by repetition: habit and practice. When we see someone like Soprano do the same evil things, over and over again, we learn about the compounding nature of vice, the way that one bad action spawns a myriad of others.
No show exemplifies that thrill better than Succession. Its characters are vicious, and in both meanings of the term: each week, they tear each other apart, sacrificing even familial bonds for the sake of victories that almost immediately sour in their mouths. They live in a world that is constantly in the process of ratifying, and, briefly, rewarding them; they are shaped by their wealth, and by the uneasy collective they form with each other, in which power is everything and weakness is to be avoided at all costs.
But this gaggle of do-badders are not alike in their foibles. Each principal member of the cast displays a different vice, and has a different way of working towards the same unpleasant ends. Here is a kind of “pick your horror” list of the show’s central players, outlining each of their worst qualities. Which deviant are you?
Logan Roy: The Happy Capitalist
Image: HBO
As Peter Singer noted, capitalism thrives on individuation; the idea that we are made up of communities of one, and that it is always better to sacrifice the well-being of others in order to get ahead. And how better to sum up that belief that you should, at all times, consider yourself the number one priority than the behaviour of Logan Roy? Logan has no loyalty – he will hurt whoever he needs to hurt. He is one of the few purely, uncomplicatedly immoral characters of the show, being openly unremorseful. He is, as Aristotle would put it, in total vicious alignment – he feels no urge to do the right thing, and his behaviours line up perfectly with his moral universe, of which he is the centre.
Kendall Roy: The Coward
Image: HBO
Speaking of alignment, the character in Succession whose behaviours are most out-of-sync with their desires is Kendall Roy. Unlike Logan, he is not without remorse. Time and time again, he repents – one of the most affecting moments of the recent season was the man on his hands and knees, saying, in a voice of exhaustion, that he has tried. He suffers from a tension that we all feel, one between moral behaviour and immoral behaviour. He wants to be courageous – that is how he sees himself. But his base level desires, many of which he hasn’t even analysed within himself, are in constant conflict with the globalised outlook he has on his moral character. There is a gulf between how he considers himself in the abstract, and how he actually acts, moment by moment.
The problem, in essence, is that Kendall moves too fast. His decisions come too quick, and they are guided by his misplaced desires to appease his father and to feed into the pre-existing drama of the family. Iris Murdoch once wrote that we should train ourselves to live a moral life, habituating good action so we can unthinkingly help others when the time comes. When the time comes for Kendall, as it does with insistent regularity, he unthinkingly makes the wrong choice, sacrificing his own systems of values to appease a man who considers him less than dirt. That’s cowardice in its purest form.
Roman Roy: The Casually Cruel
Image: HBO
When we think of evil, we tend to imagine oversized portraits of crooked megalomaniacs, stealing candy from babies and kicking the backsides of puppies. But as philosopher Hannah Arendt tells us, evil need not be enacted by larger-than-life villains. Indeed, Arendt believed that vicious behaviour can be performed in a myriad of tiny ways by the most unassuming of individuals. That is Roman Roy to a tee.
Through the series, Roman appears to be nothing more than a happy-go-lucky hedonist, a man filled to the brim with pleasures, who enjoys the finer things in life. But that happiness also extends to the vicious behaviour of himself and of others. He loves suffering and rejoices in the chaos of his family life. His horrors are pulled off with a smiling face, as though they are nothing but briefly disarming attractions, as inconsequential as a county fair.
Shiv Roy: The Manipulator
Image: HBO
It was Immanuel Kant who once wrote that we should always treat those around us as ends in themselves, never as means. Kant thought it one of the great immoralities capable of being enacted by human beings for us to see those around us tools, whose internal lives we need never to consider. After all, for Kant, human beings are the creators of value – there is no goodness intrinsic in the world, and it exists only in the eye of the beholder. Try telling that to Shiv Roy. Shiv sees those around her as mere means of getting what she wants, to be used and discarded on a whim – even her husband is one more bridge to be shockingly burnt after she has crossed it.
Not that Shiv is without redemption. Kant also believed that there is always good will: an iron-wrought and rational understanding of the correct thing to do in any moral situation. His was a virtue ethics founded on principles, and Shiv does, despite herself, have those. Take, for instance, her complicated introduction to the world of politics in season three. She is offered what Peter Singer would call the ultimate choice – the option of winning the race against her siblings for her father’s affections, if she endorses a particularly slimy Republican candidate for President. There are, to our surprise – and maybe even to hers – lines that Shiv will not cross. Turns out even the most manipulative of us can find there are things that we simply will not do.
Cousin Greg: The False Innocent
Image: HBO
Innocence can have an intrinsic value: it can be good for itself, in itself. But Cousin Greg, Succession’s scheming dope, uses his innocence instrumentally. He presents himself as being the dumbest person in the room, forever in the process of duping others with his blandness. But there is nothing innocent to the way he acts.
His is a vice that comes from its very duplicitousness – he presents himself one way, as though he never quite understands the situation, and then acts very differently in another. It’s proof, if any more was needed, that virtues can be a disguise that we can drape ourselves in the illusion of good behaviour, for nothing but our own benefit.
Tom Wambsgans: The Sycophant
Image: HBO
Loyalty is a morally neutral character trait. It can be virtuous, as when we are loyal to our friends, and it can be vicious, as when we unbendingly act in accordance with an evil benefactor. Tom Wambsgans started Succession as one more foot soldier, a buffoon kicked around by forces much greater than him: no wonder he found a twisted kind of kinship with Cousin Greg, another duplicitous fool. But his loyalty to Logan – his unwavering belief that the sole purpose of his life was to be in the good books of the elder Roy – eventually transformed him into something much more nefarious.
Tom is unwavering in his belief system, utterly obsessed with power, and firmly of the opinion, contra to the writings of Michel Foucault, that it only moves in one direction. Tom wants total power, and he wants it totally. He does not consider, as Foucault did, that the person over whom we hold power also holds power over us. If all of history is a boot stomping on a human face, then that’s Logan’s spit-shined boot, and Tom’s smugly smiling face.
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BY Joseph Earp
Joseph Earp is a poet, journalist and philosophy student. He is currently undertaking his PhD at the University of Sydney, studying the work of David Hume.
How can we travel more ethically?
I used to be an inveterate traveller – so much so that I would take, on average, a minimum of two flights per week. That is no longer the case.
I have trouble recalling the last time I was on an aeroplane. That will change this week, when I board a flight for Tasmania – my third attempt, in two years, to join family there. So, is this the beginning of a return to a life of endless travel – both at home and abroad? Or will a trip to the airport continue to be a relatively rare experience?
Of course, such questions apply to all modes of transport – whether they be by road, rail, air or sea. Perhaps we have become conditioned to think that the answers lie in the hands of public health officials and government ministers who, between them, can stop us in our tracks.
However, every journey begins with us – with a personal decision to travel. So, what should we take into account when making such a decision?
Perhaps one of the most important considerations is to do with who bears the burden of our decision. A 2018 article published in Nature Climate Change estimated that tourism contributes to 8% of the world’s climate emissions, with those emissions likely to grow at the rate of 4% per annum. Of these emissions, 49% were attributable to transport alone. And this was just tourism.
One also needs to add to this the emissions of people, like me, largely travelling for reasons of work rather than leisure. One of the effects of the current global pandemic has been to reduce, to a massive degree, the level of emissions caused by travel. This is welcome news to those most likely to be affected by predicted changes caused by anthropogenic warming – notably those living on low-lying islands and others whose lives (and livelihoods) are at risk of devastating harm.
Yet, it’s easy enough to find advertisements enticing us to travel to the very same low-lying islands whose economies rely on tourism. The paradoxes don’t end there. Another criticism of tourism is that it tends to commodify the cultures of those most visited – and in some cases does so to the point of corruption. Those who mount this criticism argue that we should value the diversity of ‘pristine’ cultures in the same way that we value pristine diversity in nature. Retaining one’s culture free from influences from the wider world is not necessarily the choice that people living within those cultures would make for themselves. Some hold fast to an unsullied form of life. Others are keen to share their experience with the world – not only as a source of income, but also out of a very human sense of curiosity and a desire to share the human experience.
To make matters even more complex, not all travel is for reasons of leisure or work. It is sometimes driven by necessity or a sense of obligation to others, such as when joining a loved one who is sick or dying, or to attend a family ceremony. Even those obliged to travel have, of late, been asked to ‘think twice’ or, in some cases, had the decision taken out of their hands due to border closures that have allowed few (if any) exemptions. And even those few exemptions tend to have been offered only to the very rich, powerful or popular.
This might seem to suggest that we should calibrate our decisions about travel according to its purpose. If one can achieve the same outcome by other means (such as using a video conference rather than meeting in person), then that should be the preferred option. However, I have discovered that this approach only gets you so far (excuse the pun). Some meetings only really work if people are in the same room – especially if the issues require nuanced judgement and there are some obligations (like those owed to a sick or dying relative) that can only be discharged in person.
Despite this, the causes of climate change or life-threatening viruses don’t have any regard for our motives for travelling. A virus can just as easily hitch a ride with a person rushing to the side of an ailing parent as a person off to relax on a beach. All other things being equal, they have the same impact on the environment.
Given this, how should we approach the ethical dimension of travel?
First, I think we need to be ‘mindful travellers’. That is, we should not simply ‘get up and go’ just because we can. We need to think about the implications of our doing so – including the unintended, adverse consequences of whatever decision we make.
Second, we should seek to minimise the unintended, adverse consequences. For example, can we choose a mode of travel that has minimal negative impact? It is this kind of question driving people to explore new forms of low-carbon transport options.
Third, can we mitigate unintended harm – for example, by purchasing offsets (for carbon) or looking to support Indigenous cultures where we might encounter them?
Finally, can we maximise the good that might be done by our travelling?
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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.”
Why you should care about where you keep your money
Most of us try to do the right things in life.
From a young age we’re taught to treat people and the environment with respect, being conscious of the impact our actions have on the world around us. We’re often told of the importance of minimising single-use plastics or buying fair-trade products and, for some, these can be really important ways to spend our money consciously.
While we can spend our money on things that resonate with our personal values and the type of world we want to see in the future, we also need to consider the impact that the banks we support are having. As a conscious consumer, sometimes we can forget one simple thing that can make a bigger difference in this world than most of our other monetary choices – our bank.
From the factory our shoes were made in, to the houses we want to buy and the energy that powers them. Everything in this world costs money. But where does this money come from? Most finance tends to come from banks, and other financial institutions. And it’s your choice of financial institution that actually influences where that money goes.
Sometimes we can feel as though we don’t have the power to change things, that we are part of a larger system and people in positions of power behave in a way that conflicts with our own values and principles. As individuals, we can make a difference.
Where we choose to put our money matters. And as Liza Minnelli so eloquently puts it – money makes the world go round.
Most of us probably still have the same bank account we had as a kid. There seems to be this combination of taboo and apathy that makes talking about money, frankly, a bit awkward. However, it shouldn’t be and it’s a conversation that we should have more openly. We have choice and agency when it comes to where we bank and finding an institution that aligns with our values and principles is really important.
There’s something tragic and ironic as a conscious consumer when we spend so much effort to live a more sustainable life only to have our bank, and inadvertently our money, undo all our hard work by funding, for example, a battery hen farm. It’s a moral contradiction that is very real and needs our attention.
To illustrate this point more clearly, a recent survey by the Lowy Institute found that roughly 6 in 10 Australians believe climate change is a very serious issue that needs to be dealt with. Despite this majority opinion, Australian banks have lent more than $44B to the fossil fuel industry since the 2015 Paris Agreement (to limit global warming to 1.5C), with more than $8.9B coming in 2020 alone. Overlay the fact that the four major banks in Australia hold more than 80% market share and we can immediately see that there’s a strong moral contradiction at play.
As we become more aware of the issues that are important to us it’s important to ask the question – is the money in my bank contributing to the problem or helping to solve it?
Banks can create a lot of good, but they can also create a lot of bad. For example, they can use their customer’s money (our money) and the interest paid to them on loans to help move young people with disabilities out of nursing homes and into purpose-built disability accommodation. And equally, they can just as easily provide funding to gambling companies to open new facilities.
There are plenty of examples on both sides and it can be complicated and difficult to find out what your institutions is doing (and it’s most likely a combination of both). But we do have the power to ask. There are also websites like MarketForces.org.au and Dontbankonthebomb.com that provide information that can assist in our decision-making.
We all need to realise the responsibility and opportunity that we have as customers of these large financial institutions. They need our money and our loyalty to operate at the scale they desire. We can use our power as customers to hold them to account and to drive change that positively effects people and the environment.
If there’s one thought to leave you with, it’s that what you choose to do with your money will have an impact on what the world looks like in 20-years. Where are you going to put your money?
Jack Thompson is a Banking and Finance Oath Young Ambassador. If you’re interested in taking the Oath visit www.bfo.org
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BY Jack Thompson
Jack is a purpose driven marketer currently working in finance [and proud pawrent to two groodles]. He is also a Banking and Finance Oath Young Ambassador.
Of what does the machine dream? The Wire and collectivism
This week, a group of more than a dozen Rohingya refugees launched a civil suit against Facebook, alleging that the social media giant was responsible for spreading hate speech.
The victims of an ongoing military crackdown in Myanmar, the refugees claimed not merely that Facebook allowed users to express their anti-Rohingya views, but that Facebook radicalised users – that, in essence, the platform changed beliefs, rather than merely providing a conduit to express them.
The suit is, in many ways, the first of a kind. It targets the manner in which systems – whether they be social media giants, video streaming sites like YouTube, or the myriad of bureaucracies that we all engage with in one way or another almost every day – warp and change beliefs.
But what if the suit underestimates the power of these systems? What if it’s not merely that social and financial enterprises alter beliefs, but that these enterprises have belief sets entirely of their own? More and more, as capitalism continues to ratify itself, we are finding ourselves swept up in communities that operate on the basis of desires that are distinct from the views of any one member of those communities. We are all part of a great, groaning machinery – and it doesn’t want what we want.
Pawns in a Game
There is a key sequence in David Simon’s critically adored television series The Wire that sums up this perspective perfectly. In it, three young men, all of them members of a rickety enterprise of crime, find themselves playing chess. The least experienced man does not understand the game – how, he wants to know, does he get to become the king? He doesn’t, the most experienced man explains. Everyone is who they are.
Still, the younger man wants to know, what about the pawns? Surely when they reach the other side of the board, and get swapped out for queens, they have made it – they have beat the system. No, the experienced man explains. “The pawns get capped quick,” he says, simply.
There is a deep, sad irony to the scene: the three men are all pawns. They have no way of beating the system. They will not even live to become queens. When one of them dies a few episodes later, shot to death by his friend, there is a grim finality to the murder. He did, as expected, get capped quick.
This is the focus of The Wire – the observation that members of any community are expendable when weighed against the desires of that community. The game of chess is bigger than any of the pawns could imagine, a system with its own rules that they are merely contingent parts of. And so it goes with the business of crime.
Not only crime, either. The genius of The Wire is the way that it draws parallels between those who operate outside the law, and those who uphold it. The cops who spend the series cracking down on the drug trade are also pawns, in their way: lowly members of a system that they are utterly unable to change. No matter what side of the law that you fall on, you will find yourself submerged in bureaucracy, The Wire says – in the machinations of a vast system of power relations with a goal to constantly perpetuate itself, at your expense.
These are the systems that Sigmund Freud wrote of in his seminal work, Civilization and Its Discontents. For Freud, there is an essential disconnect between the desires of individuals and the desires of the social communities that they unwillingly become a part of. There are things at foot that are bigger than any of us.
Bureaucracies are not the sum total of the desires and beliefs of the members of those bureaucracies. These systems have a life – a value set – entirely of their own.
Image: HBO
The Game Never Changes
If that is the case, then how does change occur? The Wire offers only dispiriting answers. The show’s idealists – renegade cop Jimmy McNulty, rogue crime boss Omar Little – either find themselves subsumed by the system that lords over them or eliminated. There is a hopelessness to their rebellion. They uselessly throw themselves into the path of a giant piece of machinery, hoping that their mangled bodies slow the inevitable march of progress.
It doesn’t work. Those who thrive are those who give themselves over entirely to the system, who align their values perfectly with the values of their community and embrace their own insignificance. Snoop, the show’s most hideous and intimidating villain, is a happy pawn, one who has never once considered changing the rules of the game that will send her too into an early, dismal grave.
But what if we all stop playing? That is the solution that The Wire never considers. If these systems, whether they be criminal or judicial, are to be changed, then it requires a different kind of collectivism. We are all part of many communities, not just one. If we remember this – if we understand that we have the power and solidarity that comes from being a member of a particular class, a particular race, a particular gender – then we can fight collective power with collective power. The solution isn’t to get the pawn to the other side of the board. It’s to tip the board over.
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BY Joseph Earp
Joseph Earp is a poet, journalist and philosophy student. He is currently undertaking his PhD at the University of Sydney, studying the work of David Hume.
Big Thinker: Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel (1937-present) is an American philosopher whose work has spanned ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics (the nature of what exists) and, most famously, philosophy of the mind.
An academic philosopher accessible to the general public, an atheist who doubts the materialist theory of evolution – Thomas Nagel is a considered nuanced professor with a rebellious streak.
Born in Belgrade Yugoslavia (present day Serbia) to German Jewish refugees, Nagel grew up in and around New York. Studying first at Cornell University, then the University of Oxford, he completed his PhD at Harvard University under John Rawls, one of the most influential and respected philosophers of the last century. Nagel has taught at New York University for the last four decades.
Subjectivity and Objectivity
A key theme throughout Nagel’s work has been the exploration of the tension between an individual’s subjective view, and how that view exists in an objective world, something he pursues alongside a persistent questioning of mainstream orthodox theories.
Nagel’s most famous work, What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (1974), explores the tension between subjective (personal, internal) and objective (neutral, external) viewpoints by considering human consciousness and arguing the subjective experience cannot be fully explained by the physical aspects of the brain:
“…every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view.”
Nagel’s The View From Nowhere (1986) offers both a robust defence and cutting critique of objectivity, in a book described by the Oxford philosopher Mark Kenny as an ideal starting point for the “intelligent novice [to get] an idea of the subject matter of philosophy”. Nagel takes aim at the objective views that assume everything in the universe is reducible to physical elements.
Nagel’s position in Mind and Cosmos (2012) is that non-physical elements, like consciousness, rationality and morality, are fundamental features of the universe and can’t be explained by physical matter. He argues that because (Materialist Neo-) Darwinian theory assumes everything arises from the physical, its theory of nature and life cannot be entirely correct.
The backlash to Mind and Cosmos from those aligned with the scientific establishment was fierce. However, H. Allen Orr, the American evolutionary geneticist, did acknowledge that it is not obvious how consciousness could have originated out of “mere objects” (though he too was largely critical of the book).
And though Nagel is best known for his work in the area of philosophy of the mind, and his exploration of subjective and objective viewpoints, he has made substantial contributions to other domains of philosophy.
Ethics
His first book, The Possibility of Altruism (1970), considered the possibility of objective moral judgments and he has since written on topics such as moral luck, moral dilemmas, war and inequality.
Nagel has analysed the philosophy of taxation, an area largely overlooked by philosophers. The Myth of Ownership (2002), co-written with the Australian philosopher Liam Murphy, questions the prevailing mainstream view that individuals have full property rights over their pre-tax income.
“There is no market without government and no government without taxes … [in] the absence of a legal system [there are] … none of the institutions that make possible the existence of almost all contemporary forms of income and wealth.”
Nagel has a Doctor of Laws (hons.) from Harvard University, has published in various law journals, and in 1987 co-founded with Ronald Dworkin (the famous legal scholar) New York University’s Colloquium in Legal, Political, and Social Philosophy, described as “the hottest thing in town” and “the centerpiece and poster child of the intellectual renaissance at NYU”. The colloquium is still running today.
Alongside his substantial contributions to academic philosophy, Nagel has written numerous book reviews, public interest articles and one of the best introductions to philosophy. In his book what does it all mean?: a very short introduction to philosophy (1987), Nagel leads the reader through various methods of answering fundamental questions like: Can we have free will? What is morality? What is the meaning of life?
The book is less a list of answers, and more an exploration of various approaches, along with the limitations of each. Nagel asks us not to take common ideas and theories for granted, but to critique and analyse them, and develop our own positions. This is an approach Thomas Nagel has taken throughout his career.
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BY Joshua Pearl
Joshua Pearl is the head of Energy Transition at Iberdrola Australia. Josh has previously worked in government and political and corporate advisory. Josh studied economics and finance at the University of New South Wales and philosophy and economics at the London School of Economics.
Did Australia’s lockdown leave certain parts of the population vulnerable?
The pandemic has increased the duty we have to other members of our communities.
Different groups of people have different interests, but balancing these interests can cause conflict and friction.
Given Australia’s hard lockdown stance, many people could not wait to lift the restrictions and return to their daily routines. However, in relieving people from these restrictions, we also leave vulnerable populations exposed.
Who do we have a more significant duty towards?
There were discussions around school kids and their right to access education, conversations about teen and adult mental health, and calls to vaccinate the elderly. However, a group that was affected by all these considerations and needed further contemplation was ignored – those with disabilities.
While we are interested in protecting all people, if we do not ensure the safety of the most vulnerable in a population, we fail – we blatantly show that we do not value their needs in conjunction with evaluating a safe society.
The Ethics Centre’s Dr. Simon Longstaff stated recently on Q&A that ‘it is unforgivable that we have to have this conversation … where the most vulnerable members of our community have been left exposed. We should not … expect those people with … vulnerabilities to bear the burden of what we would prefer to do.’
While mental health costs of lockdowns are in favour of opening, Dr. Longstaff warned that ‘we as a society are going to have to accept that those who become infected and die will be something we have to wear on our own conscience.’
Phase 1A of Australia’s vaccine rollout, was initiated in February with the intention of targeting essential healthcare workers and those most vulnerable, such as the elderly and those with disabilities. However, in June only 1 in 5 people with a disability had been vaccinated, and less than 50% of support workers had received both doses of a vaccine. Yet, there was a dramatic increase in October to 70% of individuals being vaccinated.
The marked uptake was likely due to lockdown measures being lifted, as many people wanted the vaccine but could not receive it due to lack of accessibility.
In order to receive a vaccination, people had to contact their GP or later on could book one online.
On the face of it, these distribution procedures seem reasonable but there were significant problems that severely limited access. Having to make a GP appointment simply to obtain a vaccination referral was an unnecessary step that made it particularly difficult for those with disabilities, many of whom are dependent upon others to assist them.
Further, despite being a part of Phase 1A, many people with a disability could not receive the vaccine until lockdown had been lifted and support networks were reinstated. There was no follow-up, reassurance, or support to ensure that those who wanted to receive the vaccine could promptly do so. Therefore, as vaccine distribution moved from one phase to the next, it left an increasing number of those with disabilities behind.
Secondly, for similar reasons, internet access is more difficult for many of those with disabilities and the Department of Health website was not particularly user-friendly. It did not include larger, more legible text or have text to speech which would have helped those with limited sight or those who have trouble reading. Additionally, the high demand for vaccination meant that timeslots were severely limited and if they were available, they were usually inconvenient.
This was especially problematic for those with disabilities because it was not always clear which facilities were equipped with accessible features. To obtain informed consent, centres would need to have staff who are able to understand sign-language and provide information leaflets in braille. Much of this burden of providing additional support and care fell on already stretched family members and carers who, because of lockdown, may already have been working from home and home-schooling children.
What should Australia have done?
First and foremost, the relevant authorities should have ensured that almost 90%+ of each phase was vaccinated before moving to the next phase. In doing so, they would have needed to provide adequate support for those in Phase 1A and set up additional measures as required.
- Vaccine facilities should have been situated close to care facilities.
- Carers and parents should have been able to book their vaccines with individuals.
- Vaccine facilities ought to have implemented “safe” times or locations whereby those with disabilities could show up with no appointment.
What is perhaps irreconcilable is that while these requests/services were prepared during the pandemic, they were simply unavailable due to lack of federal organisation. There are many hospitals around Australia that have rehabilitation medical departments, all of which have specialised members and facilities. Despite notifying the government that they have experience and the equipment to convert into vaccination sites for those living with disabilities, they were not used.
The distribution of the vaccine in Australia was not organised in a manner that was empathetic to individuals living with a disability. I agree with the Royal Commission and Dr Longstaff that ending lockdown and opening without first ensuring high vaccination rates in this vulnerable community was unconscionable and unforgivable.
The lockdown was organised in a manner that did not respect the needs of particular populations. It once again highlights the inequity that people with disabilities face and places the responsibility of any harm to these individuals squarely on society. It was our duty to protect one another from harm during the pandemic, and we have failed a significant group within Australia’s population.
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BY Mehhma Malhi
Mehhma recently graduated from NYU having majored in Philosophy and minoring in Politics, Bioethics, and Art. She is now continuing her study at Columbia University and pursuing a Masters of Science in Bioethics. She is interested in refocusing the news to discuss why and how people form their personal opinions.
Big Thinker: David Hume
There are few philosophers whose work has ranged over such vast territory as David Hume (1711—1776).
If you’ve ever felt underappreciated in your time, let the story of David Hume console you: despite being one of the most original and profound thinkers of his or any era, the Scottish philosopher never held an academic post. Indeed, he described his magnum opus, A Treatise of Human Nature, as falling “stillborn from the press.” When he was recognized at all during his lifetime, it was primarily as a historian – his multi-volume work on the history of the British monarchy was heralded in France, while in his native country, he was branded a heretic and a pariah for his atheistic views.
Yet, in the many years since his passing, Hume has been retroactively recognised as one the most important writers of the Early Modern era. His works, which touch on everything from ethics, religion, metaphysics, economics, politics and history, continue to inspire fierce debate and admiration in equal measure. It’s not hard to see why. The years haven’t cooled off the bracing inventiveness of Hume’s writing one bit – he is as frenetic, wide-ranging and profound as he ever was.
Empathy
The foundation of Hume’s ethical system is his emphasis on empathy, sometimes referred to as “fellow-feeling” in his writing. Hume believed that we are constantly being shaped and influenced by those around us, via both an imaginative, perspective-taking form of empathy – putting ourselves in other’s shoes – and a “mechanical” form of empathy, now called emotional contagion.
Ever walked into a room of laughing people and found yourself smiling, even though you don’t know what’s being laughed at? That’s emotional contagion, a means by which we unconsciously pick up on the emotional states of those around us.
Hume emphasised these forms of fellow-feeling as the means by which we navigate our surroundings and make ethical decisions. No individual is disconnected from the world – no one is able to move through life without the emotional states of their friends, lovers, family members and even strangers getting under their skin. So, when we act, it is rarely in a self-interested manner – we are too tied up with others to ever behave in a way that serves only ourselves.
The Nature of the Self
Hume is also known for his controversial views on the self. For Hume, there is no stable, internalised marker of identity – no unchanging “me”. When Hume tried to search inside himself for the steady and constant “David Hume” he had heard so much about, he found only sensations – the feeling of being too hot, of being hungry. The sense of self that others seemed so certain of seemed utterly artificial to him, a tool of mental processing that could just as easily be dispatched.
Hume was no fool – he knew that agents have “character traits” and often behave in dependable ways. We all have that funny friend who reliably cracks a joke, the morose friend who sees the worst in everything. But Hume didn’t think that these character traits were evidence of stable identities. He considered them more like trends, habits towards certain behaviours formed over the course of a lifetime.
Such a view had profound impacts on Hume’s ethics, and fell in line with his arguments concerning empathy. After all, if there is no self – if the line between you and I is much blurrier than either of us initially imagined – then what could be seen as selfish behaviours actually become selfless ones. Doing something for you also means doing something for me, and vice versa.
On Hume’s view, we are much less autonomous, sure, forever buffeted around by a world of agents whose emotional states we can’t help but catch, no sense of stable identity to fall back on. But we’re also closer to others; more tied up in a complex social web of relationships, changing every day.
Moral Motivation
Prior to Hume, the most common picture of moral motivation – one initially drawn by Plato – was of rationality as a carriage driver, whipping and controlling the horses of desire. According to this picture, we act after we decide what is logical, and our desires then fall into place – we think through our problems, rather than feeling through them.
Hume, by contrast, argued that the inverse was true. In his ethical system, it is desire that drives the carriage, and logic is its servant. We are only ever motivated by these irrational appetites, Hume tells us – we are victims of our wants, not of our mind at its most rational.
Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.
At the time, this was seen as a shocking inversion. But much of modern psychology bears Hume out. Consider the work of Sigmund Freud, who understood human behaviour as guided by a roiling and uncontrollable id. Or consider the situation where you know the “right” thing to do, but act in a way inconsistent with that rational belief – hating a successful friend and acting to sabotage them, even when on some level you understand that jealousy is ugly.
There are some who might find Hume’s ethics somewhat depressing. After all, it is not pleasant to imagine yourself as little more than a constantly changing series of emotions, many of which you catch from others – and often without even wanting to. But there is great beauty to be found in his ethical system too. Hume believed he lived in a world in which human beings are not isolated, but deeply bound up with each other, driven by their desires and acting in ways that profoundly affect even total strangers.
Given we are so often told our world is only growing more disconnected, belief in the possibility to shape those around you – and therefore the world – has a certain beauty all of its own.
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BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
The self and the other: Squid Game's ultimate choice
In the world of Netflix’s smash hit Squid Game, a collection of desperate people must make a terrible choice: they can either keep living their lives, which are filled with debt and suffering, or they can submit to the titular competition, a series of contests based on children’s games. If they win these contests, their debts will be absolved. If they lose, they will die.
*Spoiler warning for Squid Game
The Australian philosopher Peter Singer would call this an “ultimate choice.” Although on the surface, it is a decision as to whether or not to live with debt, in a much deeper sense, it’s a decision about how to live. The very foundational beliefs of Squid Game’s frantic characters are being challenged. What matters to these people? What do they want out of life? And, just as importantly, how far will they go to get it?
The State of Nature
Squid Game depicts a world of pure barbarism: guided by their desperation, its characters form alliances only when it is mutually beneficial to them, and are often as quick to betray one another. In episode three, for instance, Sang-woo uses insider knowledge of the next contest to get himself ahead, concealing from his supposed allies that he is already aware of what is about to occur.
True acts of kindness sometimes flash through like fish glimpsed at the bottom of a river – consider Hwang Jun-ho, whose participation in the world of Squid Game is guided by the love of his brother – but such moments of empathy are few and far between.
The depiction of such a blood-thirsty, self-interested world is one the philosopher Thomas Hobbes played upon in his construction of the “state of nature.” According to Hobbes, human beings who exist in this state live in a way that is “nasty, brutish, and short.” In such a primal state, one without government, there is no centralised means of understanding or enforcing what is right and wrong, and self-interest is the name of the game.
“So long a man is in the condition of mere nature, (which is a condition of war,)” Hobbes wrote, “private appetite is the measure of good and evil.”
Hobbes believed that the only way to avoid this state of nature was to submit to a governing force – to hand oneself over to a power that could create and enforce a set of rules, known as the social contract. The world of Squid Game contains such a governing force, the shadowy world of the VIPs, who run the games for their own amusement.
But rather than guiding the games’ participants out of the state of nature, the VIPs further deepen and enforce it. The rules that they develop are explicitly designed to keep the desperate players in a world of confusion and barbarism, where self-interest is rewarded, and chaos is the name of the game. The lives of the participants are nasty, brutish, and short, and their spurning of ethics in favour of desperate attempts to get ahead is actively rewarded by a system that runs, above all else, on violence.
Image: Netflix
The suspension of the moral code
This system, vicious as it is, pushes ordinary people to extraordinary lengths. The characters of Squid Game are, for the most part, simply and vividly drawn – they are defined above all else by their desire to absolve their debts and live freely. That one desire is all it takes for them to suspend the usual moral code that most of us live by, and to act in frequently horrific ways.
Even Sang-Woo, one of the more honorable characters in the show, ends up making deeply immoral choices, culminating in his decision to hurl the glassmaker off a platform in a final act of desperation. He has no stable set of ethics – his code is shaped by a system that thrives on horror and pushes human beings to consider their fellow brethren as little more than tools to be used and discarded at whim.
In this way, Squid Game offers a gleefully cruel riposte to the notion of virtue ethics. Its characters do not act in consistent, moral ways, as virtue ethics imagines that agents do. Although it takes a combination of financial ruin and a system deliberately designed to sow mistrust and horror for them to abandon their usual moral principles, it still brings up some uncomfortable questions about how easily we might abandon our ethics in the real world.
With a kind of horrifying elegance, the show also reveals just how fragile our notion of solidarity can be. We might want to believe that there are bonds between ourselves and even total strangers that cannot be broken – a kind of communal well-spring of trust that stops abject violence from breaking out. But dangle the mere proposition of a debt-free life in front of people willing to do anything to save themselves and their families, and this sense of community breaks horribly down. The show’s participants are alienated not only from their own moral code, but from each other. They are strangers in the deepest sense of the term, the simple, child-like games of the show’s title obliterating any sense of shared humanity.
But can these participants be blamed for their actions? Derek Parfit, the English philosopher, would argue not. It was he who developed the notion of “blameless immorality”, conditions under which people can be forced into vicious actions for which they are not culpable. The heroes of Squid Game are propping up a system that perpetuates further horror, certainly, but their autonomy has been radically diminished. They are little more than puppets, guided by powers outside of their control, their actions no longer their own.
Image: Netflix
Ethics Versus Self-Interest: The False Choice
Squid Game rests on the principle that self-interest and ethics are at loggerheads with one another – that choosing to do good for others leads necessarily to a sacrifice for oneself. Yet, it’s worth analysing this supposed dichotomy between self-interest and a good, ethical life.
Certainly, the notion that helping others requires us to sacrifice something for ourselves is an old, pervasive myth – it’s why we can view do-gooders as suckers, wasting time on the help of others instead of getting ahead. As Singer notes, such a view was particularly prevalent in the ‘80s with the rise of Wall Street, a world where duping the market – and even your supposed friends – had considerable benefits.
Act immorally – lie, cheat and steal – and you too could become a power player, with more wealth than you dreamed of.
But is there really such a distinction between being self-interested and acting ethically? Could it not be that this is merely an old capitalist myth, designed to perpetuate a system that thrives on “othering” and isolation? After all, viewing our interests as separate from those around us requires us to believe that we are sealed off from the social world, that there is some kind of line to be drawn between behaviours that are meaningfully “ours” and those that belong to others.
In actual fact, it is worth moving away from such an individualist notion of the self, and towards a more communal one. As it happens, the characters of Squid Game are actively hurt by the ways that they are forced to view themselves as alienated from their fellow competitors. It benefits only the show’s mysterious villains, explicitly capitalist and murderous sociopaths, for the heroes of Squid Game to believe in the line between what will help them, and what will help their friends. When, in the penultimate episode, Gi-hun suggests to Sae-byeok that they team up against Sang-Woo, Gi-hun makes the fatal mistake of believing that she has anything to gain through Sang-Woo’s misfortunes.
Such a move away from individuation is not easy. Indeed, Squid Game has a breathtaking nihilism to it –there is no easy way for the characters to escape this deep alienation from one another. The system does not permit it. In the words of Audre Lorde:
“…the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
As philosopher Mark Fisher once wrote in his explication of capitalist realism (the notion that capitalism has pervaded every aspect of human life and is now essentially inescapable), even the ways in which Squid Game’s doomed characters attempt to overthrow their bonds are subsumed as part of those very bonds themselves.
Just as anti-capitalism becomes tainted by capitalism, the means of overthrowing the system sold as one more product, the characters of Squid Game have no recourse by which to escape the individuation that they are fatally trapped in. Their very attempts to connect with one another are undermined by the rules of each game, like the marble game, where voluntarily made pairs are then forced to kill each other.
Squid Game is thus a word of warning. In its terror and violence, it is a reminder to always strive for community, away from individuation and towards a system in which we see fellow agents as more alike us than not. Hope might not be possible for the show’s protagonists, whose very rebellion is neutered at every turn. But, if we resist the moral alienation and deep individuation thrust upon us by capitalism, it might be possible for us.
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BY Joseph Earp
Joseph Earp is a poet, journalist and philosophy student. He is currently undertaking his PhD at the University of Sydney, studying the work of David Hume.
Ethics Explainer: Autonomy
Autonomy is the capacity to form beliefs and desires that are authentic and in our best interests, and then act on them.
What is it that makes a person autonomous? Intuitively, it feels like a person with a gun held to their head is likely to have less autonomy than a person enjoying a meandering walk, peacefully making a choice between the coastal track or the inland trail. But what exactly are the conditions which determine someone’s autonomy?
Is autonomy just a measure of how free a person is to make choices? How might a person’s upbringing influence their autonomy, and their subsequent capacity to act freely? Exploring the concept of autonomy can help us better understand the decisions people make, especially those we might disagree with.
The definition debate
Autonomy, broadly speaking, refers to a person’s capacity to adequately self-govern their beliefs and actions. All people are in some way influenced by powers outside of themselves, through laws, their upbringing, and other influences. Philosophers aim to distinguish the degree to which various conditions impact our understanding of someone’s autonomy.
There remain many competing theories of autonomy.
These debates are relevant to a whole host of important social concerns that hinge on someone’s independent decision-making capability. This often results in people using autonomy as a means of justifying or rebuking particular behaviours. For example, “Her boss made her do it, so I don’t blame her” and “She is capable of leaving her boyfriend, so it’s her decision to keep suffering the abuse” are both statements that indirectly assess the autonomy of the subject in question.
In the first case, an employee is deemed to lack the autonomy to do otherwise and is therefore taken to not be blameworthy. In the latter case, the opposite conclusion is reached. In both, an assessment of the subject’s relative autonomy determines how their actions are evaluated by an onlooker.
Autonomy often appears to be synonymous with freedom, but the two concepts come apart in important ways.
Autonomy and freedom
There are numerous accounts of both concepts, so in some cases there is overlap, but for the most part autonomy and freedom can be distinguished.
Freedom tends to broader and more overt. It usually speaks to constraints on our ability to act on our desires. This is sometimes also referred to as negative freedom. Autonomy speaks to the independence and authenticity of the desires themselves, which directly inform the acts that we choose to take. This is has lots in common with positive freedom.
For example, we can imagine a person who has the freedom to vote for any party in an election, but was raised and surrounded solely by passionate social conservatives. As a member of a liberal democracy, they have the freedom to vote differently from the rest of their family and friends, but they have never felt comfortable researching other political viewpoints, and greatly fear social rejection.
If autonomy is the capacity a person has to self-govern their beliefs and decisions, this voter’s capacity to self-govern would be considered limited or undermined (to some degree) by social, cultural and psychological factors.
Relational theories of autonomy focus on the ways we relate to others and how they can affect our self-conceptions and ability to deliberate and reason independently.
Relational theories of autonomy were originally proposed by feminist philosophers, aiming to provide a less individualistic way of thinking about autonomy. In the above case, the voter is taken to lack autonomy due to their limited exposure to differing perspectives and fear of ostracism. In other words, the way they relate to people around them has limited their capacity to reflect on their own beliefs, values and principles.
One relational approach to autonomy focuses on this capacity for internal reflection. This approach is part of what is known as the ‘procedural theory of relational autonomy’. If the woman in the abusive relationship is capable of critical reflection, she is thought to be autonomous regardless of her decision.
However, competing theories of autonomy argue that this capacity isn’t enough. These theories say that there are a range of external factors that can shape, warp and limit our decision-making abilities, and failing to take these into account is failing to fully grasp autonomy. These factors can include things like upbringing, indoctrination, lack of diverse experiences, poor mental health, addiction, etc., which all affect the independence of our desires in various ways.
Critics of this view might argue that a conception of autonomy is that is broad makes it difficult to determine whether a person is blameworthy or culpable for their actions, as no individual remains untouched by social and cultural influences. Given this, some philosophers reject the idea that we need to determine the particular conditions which render a person’s actions truly ‘their own’.
Maybe autonomy is best thought of as merely one important part of a larger picture. Establishing a more comprehensively equitable society could lessen the pressure on debates around what is required for autonomous action. Doing so might allow for a broadening of the debate, focusing instead on whether particular choices are compatible with the maintenance of desirable societies, rather than tirelessly examining whether or not the choices a person makes are wholly their own.
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The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Do organisations and employees have to value the same things?
You’re at your desk when a complaint comes in about a comment by a senior employee on their social media account.
The post had nothing to do with their job, yet the complainant was able to track the person down at work – helped by the fact the same photo appeared on both the employee’s personal account and your company’s website.
What should you do? How do you reconcile the employee’s right to express their personal views with the need to protect your organisation’s good name?
At a recent gathering of The Ethics Alliance, members agreed that such dilemmas are increasingly common.
It’s a complex and rapidly shifting environment. Organisations are or are expected to be driven by purpose, one which considers society as a whole in its pursuit of success and can lose community trust if they fail to satisfy their multiple stakeholders. In parallel employers encourage diversity and inclusion, while asking staff to be authentic and “bring your whole self to work”. Tensions will inevitably arise.
In today’s organisations, people need to do more than just comply with rules – they are often required to make judgment calls. This became more formalised in the early 2000s when codes of conduct started being replaced by codes of ethics.
This stems partly because of the rapid rate of change in business: products and services can be replicated so quickly that companies are known not so much for what they make, but for what they “mean” and how they behave.
So what happens when differing values between individual and organisational values play out through social media?
One key insight shared at the Ethics Alliance gathering is that both risk and responsibility are greater for people who are more senior in the hierarchy. There was a consensus that clear policies are crucial, but that there is no one-size-fits-all solution, incidents need to be seen through multiple lenses and considered on a case-by-case basis.
For example, an organisation has an obligation to protect staff who speak out on its behalf from trolling, and to recognise that just as corporate values evolve, so too do the personal values of individuals. And if a complaint is judged to be trivial or mischievous, a representative might offer an apology on behalf of the organisation but not even inform the person targeted, because that would be neither necessary nor helpful. In such a grey area, flexibility is vital.
Law firm Gilbert + Tobin’s social media policy prohibits posts that are illegal, are derogatory of G+T, its employees or clients, or constitute serious misconduct such as disclosure of confidential information. As well, staff must not publish or post material that may reasonably be considered offensive, obscene, defamatory, threatening, harassing, bullying, discriminatory, hateful, racist, sexist or homophobic.
The policy has flexibility built in. Anna Sparkes, Chief People Officer says that if a post could be associated with Gilbert + Tobin, the poster must add a disclaimer stating that their views do not represent those of the firm. And if a complaint were received, the outcome would depend on the actions, whether the individual could be identified as being an employee, and whether there was a direct breach of the social media policy.
For property investment fund Charter Hall, if a senior executive has views that do not accord with major tenants or investors, there is the potential to affect the business. This is true of many organisations.
Charter Hall’s Head of People Emma Stewart says: “If I sign a contract that says, I’m signing up for this, knowing that I’m agreeing to not bring the brand and reputation of the organization into disrepute, then unfortunately or fortunately I’ve got to accept that that may come with some compromises, and I’ve got to be okay with that if I’m prepared to continue the employment arrangement.”
Organisations also need to be aware that if the compromise is too great within the workplace, the employee may be at risk of “moral injury”. Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, the foundational voice on the subject, describes it as “the soul wound inflicted by doing something that violates one’s own ethics, ideals, or attachments”.
In such a case, both the organisation and the individual may need to decide whether the relationship is tenable. For the employee, prolonged pressure to act in ways that feel inauthentic and not aligned with personal values may also affect their ability to perform well in other aspects of their job. For both psychological safety and practical reasons, it may be better to part ways.
Tim Costello, the Director of Ethical Voice and former CEO of World Vision Australia, shares these concerns about “the interdependence and the extraordinary shared vulnerability between a corporate reputation and an employee’s own convictions”.
“You’re so entwined. It’s got really tricky in my own mind now,” he said.
Tim also feels the online world has hampered his ability to tailor a speech to a particular audience. “It has profoundly limited free speech.”
And he laments the loss of “that private area where you work out where you’re at, rock on rock, stone on stone, sharpen and revise”.
“I’m an extrovert, I process things aloud,” he said. “Anything can be tweeted in real time while you’re talking, before you’ve even finished your point.”
Ideas about social media and the public expression of values are being put to the test with a federal government bill suggesting changes to governance standard three in the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission Regulation 2013 to expand the scope of impermissible activities that registered charities must not engage in or promote others to engage in.
Consequences are that charities will be stripped of their Deductible Gift Recipient status if an employee or volunteer commits a minor offence.
For example, a charity could lose DGR status if a staffer put up a social media post in support of a rally that turned violent, or if a volunteer put stickers on private property.
While it is widely understood that the proposed law is aimed at environmental groups, Tim Costello says the bill is “legislative over-reach” that would stifle all organisations’ ability to do advocacy.
Certainly, such a law would impose a “one size fits all” approach to a varied sector and a huge range of behaviours when multiple lenses are vital.
For organisations navigating these waters, it is essential first to clarify what they stand for and then to communicate these values to all stakeholders, particularly employees. When it comes to resolving problems, policies on social media and other out-of-work-hours behaviour provide a strong foundation, but complex situations require a flexible approach. Today’s solutions may need to be adapted to work in the evolving world tomorrow.
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