The Minefield

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In a world marked by wicked social problems, The Minefield helps you negotiate the ethical dilemmas, contradictory claims and unacknowledged complicities of modern life.

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The School of Sport: Madison de Rozario and the importance of pride

Within certain religious traditions, pride is a “special sin” because it involves an overestimation of one’s self — making oneself a little “god” in one’s own eyes. But Aristotle did not regard pride as such to be a vice, only its unwarranted or unmerited expressions. The important thing for Aristotle was not to seek recognition or adulation from just anyone. Instead, we should try to do things that make us proud of the person we have become — and that elicit pride from those we respect and admire. Many people are (rightly) turned off by arrogant or contemptuous or boastful athletes. But the ability to be proud of oneself — the person I’ve become, what it took for me to get here, that I’ve honoured the faith my mentors placed in me, to say nothing of the time and effort of the team around me — is surely inseparable from athletic achievement. From true greatness.

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The School of Sport: Why does sport bring out the worst in some athletes?

Over the next five weeks, we are going to be exploring a series of profound moral dilemmas with some of Australia’s most accomplished athletes. How has their life in elite competition prepared them to wrestle with challenges so many of us have faced ourselves? Has sporting excellence succeeded in bringing out the best in them? If so, what can that teach the rest of us? But before we examine the best, it seems only fitting that we first acknowledge the worst. In their frequent displays of superiority, and in their demand for adulation — even “worship” — elite athletes mark themselves as a class apart. More than billionaires, music stars and monarchs, it is athletes who seem to live among us like gods: bigger, faster, stronger than the rest of us. Should we be surprised, then, when these athletes do not want to be bound by the normal laws of human behaviour? After all, the arenas they inhabit are governed by rules of their own, and their conduct in these arenas evokes older, mythic, more violent times: a time of combatants, aggressors, warriors, giants, titans. Is it any wonder that so many elite athletes — given their physical supremacy, the vast sums of money at their disposal, and the ready throng of worshippers that surround them — should be peculiarly susceptible to the arch-vices, the seven deadly sins?

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Is Australia breaking?

One of Australia's greatest strengths has been the remarkable diversity of its multicultural society. But is this also a potential source of weakness? In this live recording at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens, along with guest Stan Grant, explore the internal and external forces that risk undermining our sense of social unity. This episode was first broadcast on 08 September 2024.

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What's behind the mass appeal of live music events?

It is worth reflecting, not just on what is singular about Taylor Swift at this particular cultural moment — why she attracts both the loyalty and the animus that she does — but on what it is about live music events that now draw millions of people to them. This episode was first broadcast on 18 February 2024.

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The ethics of "Groundhog Day"

During the pandemic, there was a sudden renewal of interest in Harold Ramis's 1993 film "Groundhog Day" — especially its bleaker aspects. But this missed its sophistication and humanity, to say nothing of its acute depiction of moral growth. This episode was first broadcast on 05 May 2024.

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Are we losing a sense of "the common"?

Because our lives are increasingly tailor-made, we are constantly seeking ways of distinguishing ourselves from others. What is being lost through it all is our sense of a humanity whose inherent vulnerability to misfortune, malfeasance and violence makes us dependent on one another. This episode was first broadcast on 07 July 2024.

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The necessity of withdrawing

Are periodic bouts of withdrawal from life’s urgent demands and heated debates necessary to regain a sense of our shared humanity, and to renew the commitments that sustain the moral life? This episode was first broadcast on 17 March 2024.

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What are we doing when we give gifts?

Poised as we are at the brink of our great annual festival of shopping, wrapping, giving and exchanging, we can sometimes forget just how ethically complicated the act of “gift-giving” is. In fact, those who recoil at the idea of receiving the “charity” of others, as well as those who are suspicious of the clandestine giving of gifts and doing of favours —suggesting a corrupt quid pro quo — are more attuned to this ethical complexity than those who take an unseemly delight in the prospect of “out-gifting” another. In its best forms, we like to think of gift-giving as an expression of a sense of gratitude that the other person is in the world, and that we get to share the world with them. What is meant to be communicated by such gifts, then, is the simple acknowledgement of their preciousness to us, and that our lives our bound together. Should gift-giving elicit a kind of reciprocity? After all, as Marcel Mauss recognised, gifts create forms of obligation, even indebtedness. So just as there is an ethics of gift giving, there is also an art to gift receiving. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “He is a good man, who can receive a gift well”.

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مشاهدة الكل (٣٨٥)

Waleed Aly

مضيف(ة)

In a world marked by wicked social problems, The Minefield helps you negotiate the ethical dilemmas, contradictory claims and unacknowledged complicities of modern life.