The youth are rising. Will we listen?
When we settled on Town Hall as the venue for the Festival of Dangerous Ideas (FODI) 2020, my first instinct was to consider a choir. The venue lends itself to this so perfectly and the image of a choir – a group of unified voices – struck me as an excellent symbol for the activism that is defining our times.
I attended Spinifex Gum in Melbourne last year, and instantly knew that this was the choral work for the festival this year. The music and voices were incredibly beautiful but what struck me most was the authenticity of the young women in Marliya Choir. The song cycle created by Felix Riebel and Lyn Gardner for Marliya Choir embarks on a truly emotional journey through anger, sadness, indignation and hope.
A microcosm of a much larger phenomenon, Marliya’s work shows us that within these groups of unified voices the power of youth is palpable.
Every city, suburb and school has their own Greta Thurnbergs: young people acutely aware of the dangerous reality we are now living in, who are facing the future knowing that without immediate and significant change their future selves will risk incredible hardship.
In 2012, FODI presented a session with Shiv Malik and Ed Howker on the coming inter-generational war, and it seems this war has well and truly begun. While a few years ago the provocations were mostly around economic power, the stakes have quickly risen. Now power, the environment, quality of life, and the future of the planet are all firmly on the table. This has escalated faster than our speakers in 2012 were predicting.
For a decade now the FODI stage has been a place for discussing uncomfortable truths. And it doesn’t get more uncomfortable than thinking about the future world and systems the young will inherit.
What value do we place on a world we won’t be participating in?
Our speakers alongside Marliya Choir will be tackling big issues from their perspective: mental health, gender, climate change, indigenous incarceration, and governance.
First Nation Youth Activist Dujuan Hoosan, School Strike for Climate’s Daisy Jeffery, TEDx speaker Audrey Mason-Hyde , mental health advocate Seethal Bency and journalist Dylan Storer add their voices to this choir of young Australians asking us to pay attention.
Aged from 12 to 21, their courage in stepping up to speak in such a large forum is to be commended and supported.
With a further FODI twist, you get to choose how much you wish to pay for this session. You choose how important you think it is to listen to our youth. What value do you put on the opinions of the young compared to our established pundits?
Unforgivable is a new commission, combining the music from the incredible Spinifex Gum show I saw, with new songs from the choir and some of the boldest young Australian leaders, all coming together to share their hopes and fears about the future.
It is an invitation to come and to listen. To consider if you share the same vision of the future these young leaders see. Unforgivable is an opportunity to see just what’s at stake in the war that is raging between young and old.
These are not tomorrow’s leaders, these young people are trying to lead now.
Tickets to Unforgivable, at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas on Saturday 4 April are on sale now.
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BY Danielle Harvey
Danielle Harvey is Festival Director of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. A curator, creative producer and director, Harvey works across live performance, talks, installation, and digital spaces, creating layered programs that connect deeply with audiences.
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.
This is what comes after climate grief
I can’t really lie about this. Like so many other people in the climate community hailing from Australia, I expected the impacts of climate change to come later. I didn’t define ‘later’ as much other than ‘not now, not next year, but some time after that’.
Instead, I watched in horror as Australia burst into flames. As the worst of the fire season passes, a simple question has come to the fore. What made these bushfires so bad?
The Bureau of Meteorology confirms that weather conditions have been tilting in favour of worsening fire for many decades. The ‘Forest Fire Danger Index’, a metric for this, hit records in many parts of Australia, this summer.
The Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub is unequivocal: “Human-caused climate change has resulted in more dangerous weather conditions for bushfires in recent decades for many regions of Australia…These trends are very likely to increase into the future”.
Bushfire has been around for centuries, but the burning of fossil fuels by humans has catalysed and worsened it.
Having moved away from Australia, I didn’t experience the physical impacts of the crisis. Not the air thick with smoke, or the dark brown sky or the bone-dry ground.
But I am permanently plugged into the internet, and the feelings expressed there fed into my feed every day. There was shock at the scale and at the science fictionness of it all. Fire plumes that create their own lightning? It can’t be real.
The world grieved at the loss of human life, the loss of beautiful animals and ecosystems, and the permanent damage to homes and businesses.
Rapidly, that grief pivoted into action. The fundraisers were numerous and effective. Comedian Celeste Barber, who set out to raise an impressive $30,000 AUD, ended up at around $51 million. Erin Riley’s ‘Find a Bed’ program worked tirelessly to help displaced Australians find somewhere to sleep. Australians put their heads down and got to work.
It’s inspiring to be a part of. But that work doesn’t stop with funding. Early estimates on the emissions produced by the fires are deeply unsettling. “Our preliminary estimates show that by now, CO2 emissions from this fire season are as high or higher than the CO2 emissions from all anthropogenic emissions in Australia. So effectively, they are at least doubling this year’s carbon footprint of Australia”, research scientist Pep Canadell told Future Earth.
There is some uncertainty about whether the forests destroyed by the blaze will grow back and suck that released carbon back into the Earth. But it is likely that as fire seasons get worse, the balance of the natural flow of carbon between the ground and the sky will begin to tip in a bad direction.
Like smoke plumes that create their own ‘dry lightning’ that ignite new fires, there is a deep cyclical horror to the emissions of bushfire.
It taps into a horror that is broader and deeper than the immediate threat; something lingers once the last flames flicker out. We begin to feel that the planet’s physical systems are unresponsive. We start to worry that if we stopped emissions, these ‘positive feedbacks’ (a classic scientific misnomer) mean we’re doomed regardless of our actions.
“An epidemic of giving up scares me far more than the predictions of climate scientists”, I told an international news journalist, as we sat in a coffee shop in Oslo. It was pouring rain, and it was warm enough for a single layer and a raincoat – incredibly strange for the city in January.
She seemed surprised. “That scares you?” she asked, bemused. Yes. If we give up, emissions become higher than they would be otherwise, and so we are more exposed to the uncertainties and risks of a planet that starts to warm itself. That is paralysing, to me.
It is scarier than the climate change denial of the 2010s, because it has far greater mass appeal. It’s just as pseudoscientific as denialism. “Climate change isn’t a cliff we fall off, but a slope we slide down”, wrote climate scientist Kate Marvel, in late 2018.
In response to Jonathan Franzen’s awful 2019 essay in which he urges us to give up, Marvel explained why ‘positive feedbacks’ are more reason to work hard to reduce emissions, not less. “It is precisely the fact that we understand the potential driver of doom that changes it from a foregone conclusion to a choice”.
A choice. Just as the immediate horrors of the fires translated into copious and unstoppable fundraising, the longer-term implications of this global shift in our habitat could precipitate aggressive, passionate action to place even more pressure on the small collection of companies and governments that are contributing to our increasing danger.
There are so many uncertainties inherent in the way the planet will respond to a warming atmosphere. I know, with absolute certainty, that if we succumb to paralysis and give up on change, then our exposure to these risks will increase greatly.
We can translate the horror of those dark red months into a massive effort to change the future. Our worst fears will only be realised if we persist with the intensely awful idea that things are so bad that we ought to give up.
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BY Ketan Joshi
Was a speaker at IQ2: It's too soon to ditch fossil fuels. He is a science communicator with over eight years experience across The Monthly, Gizmodo, Cosmos and with the CSIRO.
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.
A burning question about the bushfires
At the height of the calamity that has been the current bushfire season, people demanded to know why large parts of our country were being ravaged by fires of a scale and intensity seldom seen.
In answer, blame has been sheeted home to the mounting effects of climate change, to failures in land management, to our burgeoning population, to the location of our houses, to the pernicious deeds of arsonists…
However, one thing has not made the list, ethical failure.
I suspect that few people have recognised the fires as examples of ethical failure. Yet, that is what they are. The flames were fuelled not just by high temperatures, too little rain and an overabundance of tinder-dry scrub. They were also the product of unthinking custom and practice and the mutation of core values and principles into their ‘shadow forms’.
Bushfires are natural phenomena. However, their scale and frequency are shaped by human decisions. We know this to be true through the evidence of how Indigenous Australians make different decisions – and in doing so – produce different effects.
Our First Nations people know how to control fire and through its careful application help the country to thrive. They have demonstrated (if only we had paid attention) that there was nothing inevitable about the destruction unleashed over the course of this summer. It was always open to us to make different choices which, in turn, would have led to different outcomes.
This is where ethics comes in. It is the branch of philosophy that deals with the character and quality of our decisions; decisions that shape the world. Indeed, constrained only by the laws of nature, the most powerful force on this planet is human choice. It is the task of ethics to help people make better choices by challenging norms that tend to be accepted without question.
This process asks people to go back to basics – to assess the facts of the matter, to challenge assumptions, to make conscious decisions that are informed by core values and principles. Above all, ethics requires people to accept responsibility for their decisions and all that follows.
This catastrophe was not inevitable. It is a product of our choices.
For example, governments of all persuasions are happy to tell us that they have no greater obligation than to keep us safe. It is inconceivable that our politicians would ignore intelligence suggesting that a terrorist attack might be imminent. They would not wait until there was unanimity in the room. Instead, our governments would accept the consensus view of those presenting the intelligence and take preventative action.
So, why have our political leaders ignored the warnings of fire chiefs, defence analysts and climate scientists? Why have they exposed the community to avoidable risks of bushfires? Why have they played Russian Roulette with our future?
It can only be that some part of society’s ‘ethical infrastructure’ is broken.
In the case of the fires, we could have made better decisions. Better decisions – not least in relation to the challenges of global emissions, climate change, how and where we build our homes, etc. – will make a better world in which foreseeable suffering and destruction is avoided. That is one of the gifts of ethics.
Understood in this light, there is nothing intangible about ethics. It permeates our daily lives. It is expressed in phenomena that we can sense and feel.
So, if anyone is looking for a physical manifestation of ethical failure – breathe the smoke-filled air, see the blood-red sky, feel the slap from a wall of heat, hear the roar of the firestorm.
The fires will subside. The rains will come. The seasons will turn. However, we will still be left to decide for the future. Will our leaders have the moral courage to put the public interest before their political fortunes? Will we make the ethical choice and decide for a better world?
It is our task, at The Ethics Centre, to help society do just that.
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BY Simon Longstaff
Simon Longstaff began his working life on Groote Eylandt in the Northern Territory of Australia. He is proud of his kinship ties to the Anindilyakwa people. After a period studying law in Sydney and teaching in Tasmania, he pursued postgraduate studies 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.” Simon is an Adjunct Professor of the Australian Graduate School of Management at UNSW, a Fellow of CPA Australia, the Royal Society of NSW and the Australian Risk Policy Institute.
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.
How to respectfully disagree
We seem to have no trouble hurling opinions at each other. It is easy enough to form into irresistible blocks of righteous indignation. But discussion – why do we find it so hard?
What happened to the serious playfulness that used to allow us to pick apart an argument and respectfully disagree? When did life become ‘all or nothing’, a binary choice between ‘friend or foe’?
Perhaps this is what happens when our politics and our media come to believe they can only thrive on a diet of intense difference. Today, every issue must have its champions and villains. Things that truly matter just overwhelm us with their significance. Perhaps we feel ungainly and unprepared for the ambiguities of modern life and so clutch on to simple certainties.
Today, every issue must have its champions and villains. Perhaps we feel ungainly and unprepared for the ambiguities of modern life and so clutch on to simple certainties.
Indeed, I think this must be it. Most of us have a deep-seated dislike of ambiguity. We easily submit to the siren call of fundamentalists in politics, religion, science, ethics… whatever. They sing to us of a blissful state within which they will decide what needs to be done and release us from every burden except obedience.
But there is a price to pay for certainty. We must pay with our capacity to engage with difference, to respect the integrity of the person who holds a principled position opposed to our own. It is a terrible price we pay.
The late, great cultural theorist and historian Robert Hughes ended his history of Australia, The Fatal Shore, with an observation we would do well to heed.
“The need for absolute goodies and absolute baddies runs deep in us, but it drags history into propaganda and denies the humanity of the dead: their sins, their virtues, their failures. To preserve complexity, and not flatten it under the weight of anachronistic moralising, is part of the historian’s task.”
And so it is for the living. The ‘flat man’ of history is quite unreal. The problem is too many of us behave as if we are surrounded by such creatures. They are the commodities of modern society, the stockpile to be allocated in the most efficient and economical manner.
Each of them has a price because none of them is thought to be of intrinsic value. Their beliefs are labels, their deeds are brands. We do not see the person within. So, we pitch our labels against theirs – never really engaging at a level below the slogan.
It was not always so. It need not be so.
I have learned one of the least productive things one can do is seek to prove to another person they are wrong. Despite knowing this, it is a mistake I often make and always end up wishing I had not.
The moment you set out to prove the error of another person is the moment they stop listening to you. Instead, they put up their defences and begin arranging counter-arguments (or sometimes just block you out).
Far better it is to make the attempt (and it must be a sincere attempt) to take the person and their views entirely seriously. You have to try to get into their shoes, to see the world through their eyes. In many cases people will be surprised by a genuine attempt to understand their perspective. In most cases they will be intrigued and sometimes delighted.
The aim is to follow the person and their arguments to a point where they will go no further in pursuit of their own beliefs. Usually, the moment presents itself when your interlocutor tells you there is a line, a boundary they will not cross. That is when the discussion begins.
At that point, it is reasonable to ask, “Why so far, but no further?” Presented as a case of legitimate interest (and not as a ‘gotcha’ moment) such a question unlocks the possibility of a genuinely illuminating discussion.
To follow this path requires mutual respect. Recognition that people of good will can have serious disagreements without either of them being reduced to a ‘monstrous’ flat man of history. It probably does not help that so much social media is used to blaze emotion or to rant and bully under cover of anonymity. People now say and do online things few would dare if standing face-to-face with another.
It probably does not help that we are becoming desensitised to the pain we cause the invisible victims of a cruel jibe or verbal assault. Nor does it help that the liberty of free speech is no longer understood to be matched by an implied duty of ethical restraint.
I am hoping the concept of respectful disagreement might make a comeback. I am hoping we might relearn the ability to discuss things that really matter – those hot, contentious issues that justifiably inflame passions and drive people to the barricades. I am hoping we can do so with a measure of good will. If there is to be a contest of ideas, then let it be based on discussion.
Then we might discover there are far more bad ideas than there are bad people.
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BY Simon Longstaff
Simon Longstaff began his working life on Groote Eylandt in the Northern Territory of Australia. He is proud of his kinship ties to the Anindilyakwa people. After a period studying law in Sydney and teaching in Tasmania, he pursued postgraduate studies 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.” Simon is an Adjunct Professor of the Australian Graduate School of Management at UNSW, a Fellow of CPA Australia, the Royal Society of NSW and the Australian Risk Policy Institute.
The virtues of Christmas
Christmas is upon us. It’s a time of giving. A time for celebrating with family and love ones. And a time to navigate a number of sticky ethical challenges.
It starts early in the morning; the gifts are distributed, and you unwrap Grandma’s exquisitely wrapped parcel only to reveal a hideous pair of underwear that may have once been in fashion during the great depression. You immediately call on your best poker face, but it may have already betrayed your disappointment. Should you lie and say, ‘thanks Nan, I really love them?’
Next comes the Christmas lunch tirade; you’re seated next to an opinionated uncle you only see once a year at Christmas who, predictably, after too many of his favourite Christmas beverages begins an annual festive diatribe that escalates rapidly from the opinionated to the offensive. Do you speak your mind?
Finally, the inevitable clash with your mother in law; she cannot help being critical about everything surrounding the festivities. The inevitable flare-up will happen after clearing away lunch, which you like to refer to it as the annual arm wrestle, a well-worn conflict over everything from how to stack the dishwasher to how the kids can and cannot play. This year will no doubt be worse as you are hosting the event. Do you stand your ground?
Most of us ask “What should I do?” when we think about ethics. However, we can approach it another way by asking, “What kind of person should I be?” Philosophical thinkers in this tradition turn to virtue ethics for the answers.
While it’s one thing to ask what kind of person should I be, it’s another thing to know how to live as that person. For Aristotle the answer to both of these questions is to act virtuously. Acting as though we already possess the best virtues is how we develop a virtuous character.
And if ever there was a time to test out the virtues of our character, it’s Christmas.
Virtue ethics, unlike other approaches, does not provide specific rules for addressing ethical questions. Instead, good actions are those that a person of good character would display. Aristotle, one of the most influential philosophers in this tradition, developed a comprehensive system of virtue ethics.
Let’s take a look at how it can help us navigate the minefield of Christmas’ annual dilemmas.
The underwear from Grandma? If asking what should you do, you might take a lead from consequentialism. You could simply smile and say ‘I love it Grandma’. After all, she meant well, a white lie makes her happy, keeps the economy ticking and doesn’t rock the family emotional boat. It produces the best overall outcome.
Other philosophers might suggest a different approach. Those in the deontological tradition, such as Immanuel Kant would argue that lying of any kind is unethical, even those white lies that are intended to spare someone’s feelings.
Unlike other approaches to ethics, virtue ethics does not rely on rules to guide action. While ‘do not lie,’ is a rule, ‘being honest’ is a virtue.
However, a virtue, on its own, doesn’t tell us too much that is helpful because virtues are interrelated, you can’t have one virtue without having others. To have a virtue is to be a particular type of person with a particular mindset and outlook on life. They are what’s called a ‘multi-track disposition’ – they go all the way down.
Honesty is not the only virtue at stake here. Acting virtuously requires us to calibrate between virtues. Because Grandma has the best intentions, she will no doubt take your honesty to heart. Honestly speaking your mind could be selfish at one extreme, and while a white lie at the other end might be considered selfless. What sits between these extremes Aristotle called the Golden Mean.
What would a fair person do? They might tell Grandma that they appreciate the thought but would like to do justice to her intentions by exchanging the gift for something that they will like, wear and remember Grandma every time they put it on.
So, let’s see what virtue ethics can teach us about managing that outspoken uncle. Imagine that dessert is now served and your uncle has flipped the switch to obnoxious. You try and avoid engaging with his tirades every year, but this year he is particularly offensive. His views are not only a dampener on the festive feels, but several members of the family are visibly hurt and upset by some of his more extreme views.
All families have their patterns that play out when people come together and the pre-determined roles we all play are difficult to shift.
What would we do if we were already a virtuous person? By imagining what a virtuous character would do in this situation we can start to practically explore how to become the best version of ourselves.
In the virtue ethics approach imagination is important in helping to shift unthinking and prescribed patterns of behaviours. What would we do if we were already a virtuous person? By imagining what a virtuous character would do in this situation we can start to practically explore how to become the best version of ourselves.
A virtuous person might ask themselves ‘how would I like to be treated if I were them?’ This particular uncle may not have many opportunities in their daily life to be heard. In many of the virtue ethics traditions compassion is a cardinal virtue. Exercising the virtue of compassion allows us to not only avoid rushing to judgement, but also gives us space to disarm the triggers that usually fire off in response to his toxic views.
The virtue of temperance – self-control and restraint – also helps here. While his views may trigger you strongly, appealing to logic with counterarguments will most likely not be effective.
It is almost impossible to change a person’s strongly held views with counter-logic. Paraphrasing back the points and emotions they are expressing not only lets them know their experience matters but also provides a circuit breaker by reflecting back their views. Research suggests that engaging in this way can make someone feel more understood and, as a result, less defensive or difficult.
When unsure about what the best virtue looks like in practice, virtue ethics suggests looking to someone of good character for direction by imagining how they would act in the same situation. Moral exemplars are an important feature of virtue ethics. Ethics is messy and no decision procedure provides a precise algorithm which will tell us definitively what to do when faced with difficult choices. Moral exemplars are people in our world who possess the best form of the virtues. Knowing what to do is not simply a matter of internalising a rule; for Aristotle virtue ethics it is about doing the right thing at the right time, in the right way and for the right reason. Moral exemplars help show us the way.
So, when it comes to the inevitable clash with your mother in law, imagine what someone you admire most would do. A moral exemplar might act intentionally with the virtues of humility, grace and generosity, showing her that what is important in hosting Christmas is not the power struggle to control the day but respecting differences and others’ boundaries. They might find ways to include some of her traditions in the day.
The development of character is at the heart of virtue ethics. We develop that character throughout our life through the virtues and in doing so we make wise choices.
This Christmas people may be looking at you to be that person.
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BY John Neil
As Director of Education and Innovation at The Ethics Centre, John collaborates closely with a talented team of specialists and subject matter experts to shape the tools, frameworks, and programs that drive our work forward. He brings a rich and varied background as a consultant, lecturer, and researcher, with expertise spanning ethics, cultural studies, sustainability, and innovation. This multidisciplinary perspective allows him to introduce fresh, thought-provoking approaches that energise and inspire our initiatives. John has partnered with some of Australia’s largest organisations across diverse industries, to place ethics at the heart of organisational life. His work focuses on education, cultural alignment, and leadership development to foster meaningful and lasting impact.
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.
Violence and technology: a shared fate
Don’t be distracted by the exploding sheds, steamrolled silverware and factory pressed field of poppies.
Many of the best works in Cornelia Parker’s exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) are small and unassuming. They are the quiet pieces that ask us to contemplate the nature of the technology we use in acts of violence.
A small pile of dust, some short leads of wire, a child’s doll split in two. These found object artworks – sculptures, just not those carved into marble or clay – are less about the state you see them in, but the journey they have taken.
On closer inspection (and with a little gallery guidance) we find intentional transformations of objects often associated with brutal violence: a gun, its bullets, the blade of a guillotine.
But don’t be alarmed. There is a dark sense of humour at play here. The disemboweled doll, a ginger-haired child in his newsboy cap and overalls, has a cartoon quality to his expression that echoes less of screams of pain than the shock of a bee sting. The boy has been severed at the waist by a guillotine. The very same guillotine that beheaded the infamous Queen of France, Marie Antoinette.
We understand a guillotine as a tool of violence and power, designed to distribute French revolutionary justice at speed to behead the head of state. Here Parker has used the same tool that once transformed European history, to split a stuffed toy of Oliver Twist. Its title suggests a shared fate, that this piece of technology link the iconic Dickensian poor boy and the poster woman for opulence.
Shared Fate (Oliver), Cornelia Parker (2008)
The works on display in the gallery often ask us to consider what these tools of violence are used for, and our role in using them.
Sawn Up Sawn Off Shotgun (2015) has a similar tale of transformation. The story goes: a factory manufactured a shotgun, a criminal cut off its barrel to make it deadlier. He used it to murder an innocent person. It was collected as evidence by police to convict the man, before being decommissioned by being cut into smaller segments. It sits lifeless in front of us now in this quartered state.
In what way was the gun designed to kill? How did the modifications by each person impact its deadliness? And how does its use reflect on the ethics and values of those who designed, manufactured and modified this once-deadly artefact? It’s a neat example that calls to mind some of The Ethics Centre’s the principles for the ethics of design.
The design of the original shotgun, manufactured and distributed legally, embodied a set of values. Options include: the ‘good’ of farmers protecting their livestock from predators or the ‘good’ sporting competition using firearms. However, it was also a feature of the shotgun that beyond shooting ducks and foxes, it had the capacity to take a human life including during the commission of crimes. To what extent was that violent possibility actively noted and considered? Did the designer and manufacturer take any steps to protect against unintended uses?
Of course, we know also that the shotgun was modified and used beyond its intended purpose. By cutting off the barrel, the gun was deliberately modified to aid concealment and increase its deadly effect at close range. Whatever values might have been explicit in the original design are subverted by the modification where the explicit aim becomes to maim and kill in confined spaces.
This is what we consider the post-phenomenology of technology. We describe this in Ethics by Design: Principles for Good Technology as “…when a hitman picks up a firearm, he sets the purpose of the gun as a murder weapon. However, he also uses the gun to constitute himself as a murderer.”
We are told that the user in this case used this shotgun for just that purpose and in doing so made himself a murderer.
In its final transformation the design is changed once more. Using the same means as the criminal, cutting the shotgun again, the police officers have rendered it effectively useless. It no longer possesses the affordances of a weapon: no trigger to pull, no barrel to aim. It is a disembodied mess of its former designs, purpose and values. Here then the police constitute themselves as peace-keepers, because by destroying the deadly weapon they embody law and order.
Embryo Firearms (1995) Cornelia Parker.
If you take away from this the mantra that ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’ then there is another piece we are challenged to consider. Embryo Firearms (1995) presents two solid lumps of metal in the crude shape of pistols. At this point in their manufacturing they are absolutely harmless, resembling the type of gun you might cut from wood as a prop. These ‘guns’ are mere symbols – no more dangerous than any other lump of metal of equivalent heft.
We are informed though that this metal was intended to become a Colt firearm; one of millions produced each year.
The fact that any resulting weapon of this production process could be used for multiple purposes does not mean that it is ethically ‘neutral’. While guns themselves don’t have agency or intentions, their design and function shapes the user’s agency and open up a range of possible value-laden activities.
In their embryonic state these handguns provide as much agency as any slab of metal. We know at some point though, as the barrel is hollowed out, the firing pin is placed and the trigger is pulled, a tool of violent potential is born.
Transformation of intended design and purpose is taking place throughout Cornelia Parker’s works. Bullets are reduced to metal threads used to create geometric patterns, murder weapons are reduced to harmless dust via chemical precipitation, and our expectations about technology, art and violence are flipped on their heads.
The Ethics Centre is presenting The Ethics of Art and Violence a special event inspired by the work of acclaimed British artist Cornelia Parker currently on exhibition at the MCA. For more about the event click here.
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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.
Five dangerous ideas to ponder over the break
If you’re gifted with downtime this holiday season, we’ve curated some big ideas for you to read, watch or listen to. These top picks will challenge your thinking over the holiday break.
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The lost the art disagreement
In his keynote at the last Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Stephen Fry told us that “a Grand Canyon has opened up in our world and the crack grows wider every day. As it widens, enemies speak more and more incontinently about the other side.” Within this great fissure lies the lost art of disagreement. Hear how Fry suggests we begin to navigate through a world of seemingly opposing ideas.
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Curb immigration, curb growth
Our cities are overcrowded, and our ecosystems are degrading at a rapid rate. Is population growth to blame? This year’s first IQ2 Debate: Curb Immigration, heard from environmental scientist Dr Jonathan Sobels, journalist Satyajet Marar, counter terrorism expert Dr Anne Aly and urban planner Professor Nicole Gurran. Watch the debate and hear their perspective on issues from urban planning and government policy, to environmental impacts and economic advantages.
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An age of anger
Anarchy, resentment and the urge to smash the system seem to be spreading. What caused us to become so angry? How can we understand and navigate interactions with those who are? Author and academic Pankaj Mishra explains why society seems to be so quick to become outraged, and how transformative thinking might solve the epidemic.
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Politics and populism
We are seeing a rise of nationalism, racism and authoritarian regimes across the world. Will democracy survive the new decade? At last year’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas Niall Ferguson contemplated the future of populist movements. Pankaj Mishra, Angela Nagle and Tim Soutphommasane joined a panel to explore if freedom is just too heavy a burden in the new world in the ‘Rehearsal for Fascism’.
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Masculinity is not so fragile
Following the fallout of the #MeToo movement, many men feel that masculinity is unfairly under attack. David Leser, Zac Seidler, Raewyn Connell and Cath Lumby joined our IQ2 debate: Masculinity is it really so fragile, to share their views on modern masculinity and unpack the dangers or virtues of male normative behaviour.
The Festival of Dangerous Ideas returns in 2020, bringing a host of big thinkers and new perspectives to the dangerous issues we face. Gift vouchers are on sale now.
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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.
Joker broke the key rule of comic book movies: it made the audience think
Todd Phillip’s Joker has left audiences around the world outraged, moved and confused with its rewriting of the comic book lore surrounding The Joker.
The film tells the story of Arthur Fleck, a downtrodden man with an unspecified mental illness and an uncontrollable tendency to burst out laughing – whose treatment by society leads him down the path of moral nihilism and violence until he becomes the infamous Clown Prince of Crime.
It has received its share of controversy. Joker won the prestigious Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, is receiving early Oscar Buzz and has clocked over $850 million in the worldwide box office.
It’s also been heavily criticised for being overly sympathetic to the perpetrators of mass violence. Many critics Fleck’s turn from reserved, alienated performing clown to theatrical mass murderer as analogy for the lives of a number of real-world mass shooters.
Couple this with Joker’s depiction of systemic social forces, not individual people, as the true villains of our time, and it can be argued that the film offers an apology for people who use violence – often against women and people of colour – as a way of expressing their dissatisfaction with a world that hasn’t given them what they want.
The film is shot from Fleck’s perspective, and therefore casts huge doubt on what is real and what’s just happening in Fleck’s mind. Not long after watching it, I found myself trying to piece it all together. Did the climactic final act actually happen?
The genius and mischief of unreliable narrator motifs – think of Inception for example – is that we find ourselves looking for a definitive reading, but none exists. Not even the director is able to close the debate – theirs is just another interpretation.
Interestingly, the unreliable narrator question in Joker serves as a handy metaphor for broader confusion about the ethics and politics of the film. If the critical commentary and public discourse are anything to go by, the film left audiences confused not only about the reality of the story, but about its morality as well.
And here’s the central rub with Joker as a political and ethical challenge. It’s rife with ambiguity. What does it stand for? Who is the villain and who – if anybody – is the hero? Are we meant to empathise with Fleck or judge him? Should we join the masses in being furious at the uber-rich and uber-callous Thomas Wayne, or should we be concerned at the accelerating rate of violence?
Just like we don’t know for sure what was in Fleck’s mind and what really happened in the film, it’s hard to know what the film wants us to think about the events of Joker.
Warner Bros themselves tried to pre-load people’s expectations of the film by saying “make no mistake: neither the fictional character Joker, nor the film, is an endorsement of real-world violence of any kind. It is not the intention of the film, the filmmakers or the studio to hold this character up as a hero.”
Despite this effort, most viewers will have arrived at the film with pre-conceived ideas, because the critical conversations around Joker have been relentless. From the first trailers released and a leaked script, people have been speculating about the political effects it would have. Some critics – even some who think the film has artistic merit – wonder if it should have been made.
There is something interesting going on here. On the one hand, we have people experiencing Joker in wildly different ways. On the other hand, we have critics – and the film developers – moulding people’s views of the film before they’ve even seen it.
Then we have the film itself, which is concerned with how easy it is for people to get swept up in movements. How quickly agency can be taken away. And how recklessly people can fight to reclaim that agency.
In Joker, Fleck is entirely without agency. He can’t control his random outbursts of laughter, he can’t make himself understood to his stand-up audiences and even as he begins to embrace his Joker identity, many of the systemic impacts of his actions aren’t through his design. When Fleck does try to seize some agency over his life, he – like the lower-class Gothamites who burn their city in violent riots – does so recklessly, callously and irresponsibly.
Zooming out to the discourse around the film, you can see life mirroring art. Audiences have been systematically deprived of the agency they need to form their own views around the film.
This happened well before the first trailer dropped. Arguably, it began with the rise of comic book movies more generally.
We live in an age where it’s easy to treat films as just another form of content. Just like we binge through streaming services and mindlessly scroll social media feed, we can let films wash over us without ever actively engaging with the material. Sure, we follow the plot and might have a view on whether we enjoyed the film or not, but that’s not the same as allowing a film (or a series, or whatever) to make us think.
The comic book movie is the embodiment of this trend. The heroes and villains are mapped out in advance. We know what will happen and we watch to find out how it will happen. Consider Avengers: Endgame. We knew Thanos would be defeated and that the heroes who had been snapped out of existence would return – after all, a bunch of them already had sequels in the calendar. There’s no moral ambiguity; just a good story.
Of course, that’s fine. The Marvel Cinematic Universe makes up for in fun what it lacks in moral complexity. But Joker is different. Despite appearing in the guise of a comic book film, it’s not a comic book movie at all. It didn’t need to be about the rise of The Joker. What that’s highlighted is how a generation raised on comic book movies have been left unprepared to engage with a film so rife with complexity.
Many are still trying to do so. Like Immanuel Kant encouraged in ‘What is Enlightment?’, they’re daring to think for themselves. Kant saw this enlightenment as liberating – a freedom from intellectual immaturity. But it might also be reckless – particularly if it ends up with people decided that Warner Bros are wrong and Fleck is the hero of the story.
But the best way to guard against this isn’t to avoid films like Joker, or to be too heavy-handed in how people interpret the film. It’s to create more space in our content consumption for things that are more than just fairy floss for our brains. To put the Iron Mans and Flashes of the world in their proper place and find some balance so that we can enjoy the fun for what it is without dulling our senses when something more complex comes along.
The Ethics Centre is presenting a panel discussion on The Ethics of Art and Violence at the MCA on 12 February. Tickets on sale now. For further information click here.
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BY Matthew Beard
Matt is a moral philosopher with a background in applied and military ethics. In 2016, Matt won the Australasian Association of Philosophy prize for media engagement. Formerly a fellow at The Ethics Centre, Matt is currently host on ABC’s Short & Curly podcast and the Vincent Fairfax Fellowship Program Director.
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.
Explainer: Getting to know Richard Branson's B Team
If you ever dreamed of rubbing shoulders with the brightest shining stars of business, you probably couldn’t turn down an invitation to join Richard Branson’s B Team.
The team of luminaries was launched by the Virgin Group founder in 2013 to power a movement to use business to build a better world.
Its goals
The B Team aims to “confront the crisis of conformity in leadership”.
“We need bold and brave leaders, willing and able to transform their own practices by embracing purpose-driven and holistic leadership, with humanity at the heart, aligned with the principles of sustainability, equality and accountability,” according to its website.
“Plan A – where business has been motivated primarily by profit – is no longer an option. We knew this when we came together in 2013. United in the belief that the private sector can, and must, redefine both its responsibilities and its own terms of success, we imagined a ‘Plan B’ – for concerted, positive action to ensure business becomes a driving force for social, environmental and economic benefit.
“We are focused on driving action to achieve this vision by starting ‘at home’ in our own companies, taking collective action to scale systemic solutions and using our voice where we can make a difference.”
Membership
Aside from Branson himself, who has charisma to burn, his hand-picked team of leaders include:
- Co-founder and former Puma chair, Jochen Zeitz
- Chairman & CEO of Kering, François-Henri Pinault
- Chairman Emeritus, Tata Sons, Ratan Tata
- Chairman, Yunus Centre, Professor Muhammad Yunus
- General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation Sharan Burrow
- President and CEO, Mastercard, Ajay Banga
- Founder and CEO of Thrive Global, Arianna Huffington
- Former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Dow Chemical and DowDuPont, Andrew Liveris
Its influence
Branson is a master of marketing, and has long cultivated an image of a fun-loving, brilliant, rule-breaking entrepreneur with a socially-responsible heart. He has launched around 400 companies and has become one of the world’s most influential leaders, with a personal wealth estimated at $7.7 billion.
A stay at his luxury resort Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands is the modern-day equivalent of Charlie Bucket’s “golden ticket” to the chocolate factory (from the Roald Dahl children’s book). It was, for instance, the first holiday destination for the Obama family after they left the White House in 2017.
Branson has long harnessed his star power to humanitarian ventures and he has now provided B Team “vehicles” for others to do the same.
Its projects
The B Team has three causes:
Climate: committing to a just transition to net-zero emissions by 2050.
Workplace equality: creating working environments that recognise and respect the human rights and talents of all people.
Governance: raising the bar on what good governance looks like – and keeping accountability, sustainability and equality at the centre of these efforts.
Recent achievements
At the UN Climate Action Summit in September, B Team Leader and Allianz CEO Oliver Bäte led a group of 12 asset owners with $A3.5 trillion in assets under management in committing to net-zero emissions by 2050—a target aligned with a pathway to 1.5°C warming – and helping companies within their portfolios to achieve the same goal. They join the 87 companies who also made this commitment.
In 2015, The B Team was instrumental in ensuring that a commitment to net-zero emissions by 2050 was included in the text of the Paris Agreement.
In Australia
The local arm of the B Team launched in October 2018 and includes Branson, Sharan Burrow as vice-chair, ANZ Bank chair David Gonski as co-chair, and Chief Executive Women director Lynette Mayne as co-chair. Other members are:
- Scentre Group CEO Peter Allan
- Suncorp Group CEO Michael Cameron
- Former Chairman and CEO of Dow Chemical, Andrew Liveris
- CEO of MLC, Geoff Lloyd
- CEO of Mirvac Susan Lloyd Hurwitz
- Australian Council for International Development president Sam Mostyn
- Chairman of the Light Warrior Group Radek Sali
- Executive Chairman of Carnival Australia Ann Sherry
- EnergyAustralia managing director Catherine Tanna.
MLC’s Lloyd says the group aims to use the power of its influence to make the conversations “go viral”.
“It is about a core group of leaders who will represent those principles and drive those initiatives and connect through to the global B Team. We are trying to create a conversation and lead that conversation through the individuals in those businesses that are part of it.
“The principles are really all there to help leaders lead their businesses and provide a course, if you like, direction, some guidance as to how we should think very differently about work.
“There is a community expectation that business is there to do good.”
The 100% Human project
This initiative brings together more than 150 organisations around the world to shape and identify the elements that define a 100% Human organisation: respect, equality, growth, belonging and purpose. The aim is to recruit to the cause one million companies globally.
100% Human has been collecting examples of innovative thinking in its published Experiments Collection, which provides details of around 200 workplace initiatives, which are trying out new ways of working. These “experiments” include: providing opportunities for refugees and migrants; championing diversity, inclusion and belonging; and supporting employees’ mental health and wellbeing.
The initiative was launched in Australia in June, 2019 with the five principles of: strategically planning for technology, creating career growth opportunities, focusing on the whole person, establishing support networks, and being publicly accountable.
The former CEO of Perpetual Ltd, Lloyd joined MLC Wealth a year ago to engineer its separation from the National Australia Bank. He says he introduced some of 100% Human’s leadership philosophies to Perpetual in 2015 and is now using them to help develop a new, individual workplace culture at MLC.
“At MLC, we’re reviewing all of our people processes and policies and aligning our culture towards that of allowing people to be 100% human at work,” he says. “So, that’s from our leave policies, our carer leave, our flexibility, the way in which we lead ourselves, the way in which our leadership team really do express, and understand that our team have complex lives and needs.”
This article was originally written for The Ethics Alliance. Find out more about this corporate membership program. Already a member? Log in to the membership portal for more content and tools here.
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BY The Ethics Alliance
The Ethics Alliance is a community of organisations sharing insights and learning together, to find a better way of doing business. The Alliance is an initiative of The Ethics Centre.
BY Cris
Pay up: income inequity breeds resentment
Public outrage over multi-million dollar CEO salaries will never go away when employees are underpaid. It offends our sense of fairness and the increasingly threadbare notion of Australia as an egalitarian nation.
This point is not lost on many who read about Woolworths’ admission it underpaid nearly 6,000 staff over ten years by a total $300 million.
The supermarket chain had failed to account for the actual hours that staff were working, with out-of-business-hours work patterns attracting penalty rates, which were not being added to their salaries.
Other companies which have been caught out with similar underpayments include Qantas, ABC, Commonwealth Bank, Bunnings, Super Retail Group and Michael Hill Jewellers.
While some business leaders laid blame on the complexity of modern awards, Fair Work Ombudsman, Sandra Parker said employers were at fault with “ineffective governance combined with complacency and carelessness toward employee entitlements”.
Human resources leader, Alec Bashinsky, was succinct in his response: “This is 101 stuff and not acceptable in any scenario”. For 14 years, Bashinsky was Asia Pacific talent leader for Deloitte, which employed more than 3,000 people in Australia alone.
Revelations such as the underpayments just add more fuel to the conflagration of distrust and anger, which has led to the rise of anti-establishment political movements around the world.
In Australia, it builds on a mountain of evidence of businesses behaving badly, following revelations of the deliberate underpayments and worker exploitation in the franchising sector and the litany of unethical decision-making unearthed in the recent Royal Commission into financial services.
CEO’s get richer, worker pay stagnates
While company reputations have been trashed over the past couple of years, business leaders have continued to prosper. Company boards responded to public resentment over CEO salaries by reducing the pay of incoming CEO’s… while handing out the second-biggest bonuses of the past 18 years.
Thanks to those bonuses, the median realised pay for an ASX100 CEO reached $4.5m in the last financial year, according to a report by the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors.
Leaders whose companies were directly involved in recent scandals have been punished. Big bank CEO’s saw their remuneration fall over the past year. However, total remuneration for top 50 CEO’s increased by 4 per cent on average, compared to general wage growth at 2.2 per cent, according to the Australian Financial Review.
Macquarie Bank’s Shemara Wikramanayake was the highest paid with $18 million, followed by Goodman Group’s Gregory Goodman with $12.8 million.
Labor MP and economist, Andrew Leigh says the growing gap between the leaders and the led poses a threat to the Australian ethic of egalitarianism.
“Australia is a country where we don’t have private areas on the beaches, we like to say ‘mate’ rather than ‘sir’, we sit in the front seat of taxis and we don’t stand up when the prime minister enters the room,” says Leigh, who is also Deputy Chairman of the Parliamentary Economics Committee.
Former chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Allan Fels, has written: “The increase in pay levels for CEO’s has occurred at a time when public trust in business is at a low ebb and wages growth in the broader economy can best be described as anaemic”.
The rising levels of income inequality create serious social harm, according to the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS).
Someone in the highest one per cent now earns more in a fortnight than someone in the lowest 5 per cent earns in an entire year.
“Excessive inequality in any society is harmful. When people with low incomes and wealth are left behind, they struggle to reach a socially acceptable living standard and to participate in society. This causes divisions in our society,” according to ACOSS, after the release of its Inequality in Australia report in July.
“Too much inequality is also bad for the economy. When resources and power are concentrated in fewer hands, or people are too impoverished to participate effectively in the paid workforce, or acquire the skills to do so, economic growth is diminished.”
Reining in the excesses
Investors have a mechanism to act if they believe boards have been overly-generous in executive remuneration. In 2018, 12 companies in the ASX200 had shareholders vote down board remuneration reports in a “first strike” action. A further seven were close to experiencing a first strike.
According to the “two-strike rule”, if subsequent remuneration reports are voted down by at least 25 per cent of shareholders, the board positions may be subject to a spill motion. At this point, no company has experienced a board spill as a result of this rule.
The two-strike rule came into effect in 2011 after a Productivity Commission Inquiry into Executive Remuneration found that executive pay went up over 250 per cent from 1993 to 2007.
Labor went into the last Federal election with a policy aimed at encouraging more moderation in executive pay, requiring companies to publish the ratio of the CEO remuneration to the median workers’ pay.
At present, ASX-listed companies have to publish their policies for determining the nature and amount of remuneration paid to key management personnel. However, without a requirement to divulge what the median worker is paid, a ratio cannot be calculated.
The United Kingdom and the United States have both introduced new regulation to require their biggest listed companies to divulge and justify the difference between executive salaries and average annual pay for their employees.
This is going to put more pressure on CEO salaries as the public gets a clear picture. Research in the US shows, for instance, that the average person thinks the pay ratio is 30:1 when the average is actually closer to 300:1.
Those disclosures can have material impacts on a business. The US city of Portland has imposed a 10 per cent tax surcharge on companies with top executives making more than 100 times what their median worker is paid and a 20 per cent surcharge if pay gaps exceed 250 to one.
Leigh says the top 50 CEO’s in Australia are now earning packages at a ratio of around 150 or 200 of median wages in their organisations.
“Those ratios are truly out of whack. If you go back to the 1950s, and 1960s, workers at Australia’s largest firms could earn in a decade what the CEO earned in a year.
“Now, it would take multiple careers for workers in many firms to earn what the CEO earns in a year.”
Setting a fair pay formula
When you have these two issues running concurrently – ever-rising CEO pay and underpayment of workers – it seems appropriate to take a new look at what fair pay looks like.
Some companies have tried to ensure fairness by setting CEO pay as a multiple of the salary of an organisation’s lowest-paid worker.
Mondragon is a Spanish co-op famous for its egalitarian principles. Its CEO is paid nine times more than what its lowest-paid worker earns. In comparison, the CEO of an average FTSE 100 company is paid 129 times what their lowest-paid worker earns.
Mondragon is not well-known in Australia, but is a vast global enterprise, employing more than 75,000 people in 35 countries and with sales of more than Euro12 billion per year – equivalent to Kellogg or Visa.
US ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s took inspiration from Mondragon, setting a five-to-one salary ratio when it started in 1985.
Writing in their book Ben Jerry’s Double Dip: How to Run a Values Led Business and Make Money Too, the founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield say: “The compressed salary ratio dealt with an issue that’s at the core of people’s concerns about business and their alienation from their jobs: the people at the bottom of the ladder, the people who do all the actual physical work, are paid very poorly compared to the people at the top of the ladder.
“When we started our business, we were the people at the bottom. That’s whom we identified with. So we were happy to put into place a system whereby anytime the people on the top of the organisation wanted to give themselves a raise, they’d have to give the people on the bottom a raise as well.”
Ben & Jerry’s kept that arrangement in place for 16 years but, when Cohen wanted to retire, attracting a replacement CEO meant raising the rate to a seven-to-one ratio.
“ … as the company grew, the salary ratio became problematic. Some people in upper-level management believed that we couldn’t afford to raise everyone’s salaries, and the salary ratio was, therefore, limiting the offers we could make to the top people we could recruit,” wrote the founders in 1998.
“Other people – Ben included – thought money wasn’t the problem, and that we’d always had problems with our recruitment process. Ben points out frequently that eliminating the salary ratio, which we did in 1995, has not eliminated our recruiting problems.”
The New Zealand Shareholders Association has also called (in 2014) for CEO base pay to be capped at no more than 20 times the average wage.
Fairness is important to us
Leigh, who wrote a book Battlers and Billionaires on inequality, says people naturally benchmark themselves against those around them: “That is how we figure out what we are worth”.
The point is that people care less about the dollar figure they are paid than they do about how it compares to others. If they think it is unfair, their attitude at work and motivation suffers.
“People work less hard when they feel they have not been adequately recognised within the firm,” says Leigh.
Pay transparency – making salaries public knowledge – can be a two-edged sword. People further down the “pecking order” feel worse when they see how others are paid more. However, people should be able to find out where they stand and what they need to do to climb the salary ladder.
“If you are running a firm where the pay structure is only sustainable because you are keeping it secret, then you are walking on eggshells. Ultimately, good managers should be able to be transparent with their staff. Secrecy shouldn’t be a way of doing business,” says Leigh.
“If you are playing football with David Beckham, you don’t begrudge the fact that David Beckham is pulling in a higher salary package than you. The problem arises when there are inequities that aren’t related to performance.
“People are comfortable with the fact that a full-time worker will earn more than a part-time worker, that someone who has another 20 years’ experience gets rewarded for that experience. But, if you are being paid more just because you are family friends with the CEO or you share the same race as the CEO or the same gender, then that is not fair.
“So pay transparency can produce fairer workplaces.”
This article was originally written for The Ethics Alliance. Find out more about this corporate membership program. Already a member? Log in to the membership portal for more content and tools here.
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BY Fiona Smith
Fiona Smith is a freelance journalist who writes about people, workplaces and social equity. Follow her on Twitter @fionaatwork