Even for a nation obsessed with the concept of “freedom” — or perhaps it would be better to say, concepts, not all of them easily reconciled, some of them utterly incommensurable — the prominence it was given during the recent Democratic National Convention was arresting.

It was as though the Democratic Party vaulted the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush alike — both of which used “freedom” as a mantra, a talisman, a point of vital differentiation over against communism and terrorism — and return to the muscular wartime rhetoric of Franklin Roosevelt, with his vision of domestic or civic freedom.

But are these competing visions of freedom not doomed to remain in an untenable tension without a mediating or underlying conception of freedom’s nature and limits?

In democracies with a history of racial injustice, are “colourblindness” and recognition of a “common humanity” — which were at the heart of the moral philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. — desirable as expressions of our commitment to justice as equality?

On 30 May 2024, after two days of deliberation following a five-week trial and hearing the testimony of 22 witnesses, a jury of 12 New Yorkers found former President Donald Trump guilty of 34 felony charges. But do the facts of the case brought against him, and the overriding fact it was brought in an election year, present insurmountable political risks?

Because of the pervasiveness of contempt, we no longer see those with whom we radically disagree as members of a common moral community, and therefore as participants in a shared political project.

Ukraine has enjoyed remarkable military success against Russian invaders — thanks, in no small part, to the financial support and weaponry provided by Western nations. In response, President Vladimir Putin has raised the possibility of nuclear retaliation. Does such a prospect change the moral calculus of the West’s support of and solidarity with Ukraine?

Are the more deleterious tendencies of economy and culture moulding sport after its own image?

In a time when everything is politicised, it is worth noting that so many people have such evident affection for a figure who stood above the political fray. Does democratic politics require apolitical institutions in order to be healthy?

Over the last century, we’ve seen the profound longing for a way of life that has seemingly been “lost” — or, more insidiously, “stolen” — be weaponised by cunning politicians and turned against members of a political community. But should nostalgia simply be dismissed?

For many people, burning-out is taken as proof of our dedication to our jobs. Have we finally reached the point where we can re-envision the relationship between work and life?

For the last two weeks, Australian political coverage has been consumed by a series of decisions undertaken by the former Prime Minister. What made them so serious? How far should we go to ensure they can't happen again?

Democracies assume that there will be a high level of disagreement among its members. But what happens when those disagreements become incommensurable, when the parties become unintelligible to one another?

Perhaps no “moral emotion” in our time is more reviled than shame. It is regarded, certainly in the West, as uniquely destructive to a healthy sense of self, as psychologically damaging and socially abusive, and to be avoided at all costs. Professor Owen Flanagan joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens to discuss whether shame has been given a bad rap, and why we might need more of it.

In his speech to the Garma Festival, PM Anthony Albanese put it to the nation that constitutionally enshrining a First Nations Voice would not undermine Australia’s national identity, but more fully express it. Professor Tim Soutphommasane joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens to discuss the nature and moral limits of patriotism, and whether it can co-exist with an appropriate sense of national remorse, even shame.

The results of the recent European Parliament elections have only fuelled the growing concern across the member nations of the European Union that far-right, radical right, Eurosceptic and otherwise anti-immigrant parties are, once again, on the rise.

Amazon recently unveiled its plans for an update to Alexa that will enable the device to sound like someone you love — even someone who has died. Professor Yolande Strengers joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens to unpack why this is such a bad idea, and how to understand the ethical limits of our relationship with technology.

Following the ignominious resignation of Boris Johnson, the Tories are looking for a new leader — and the UK a new Prime Minister. The cast of contenders is the most diverse we’ve seen, but that hasn’t yielded a notably different political vision. Why? ANU political scientist Marija Taflaga joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens to discuss the significance of and constraints on diversity in political representation.

Democratic politics is more than a matter of power. It is predicated on the possibility of discovering common ground through practices of mutual recognition, exchange, attentiveness, and understanding.

In Jane Austen’s novel Emma, we find an abiding concern with the demands, not just of propriety, but of morality, an attentiveness to the dangers of self-deception, and vivid reminders of the importance of friendship to progress in the moral life.

Far too much debate today is more like a play of competing monologues, or self-promotion designed to perform for one’s tribe. Should we give up on the fantasy of persuasion through argumentation and cascading theses altogether?

Julian Assange’s defenders claim that the free speech protections afforded to news organisations should apply to Assange as well — and that his impending extradition to the US therefore poses a threat to democracy. Professor Katharine Gelber joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens to discuss whether the free speech argument holds.

While political comedy has long been a distinguishing feature of truly democratic cultures, one of the more notable shifts over the past two decades has been the merger of comedy into political commentary. What has this done to the conditions of our common life?

Five years after the historic gathering at the red centre, Anthony Albanese used his election night victory speech to “commit to the Uluru Statement from the Heart in full”. Professor Megan Davis joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens on The Minefield to discuss some of the obstacles that stand in the way of a constitutional referendum, and how a First Nations Voice might transform the moral fabric of our politics.

Social media platforms have been the objects of unrelenting public and political scrutiny over the past decade. Rather less attention has been paid to their more benign cousins — so called “crowd-funding platforms” like GoFundMe. Until now. For what happens when one person’s worthy cause is another’s moral abomination?

Does the 2022 federal election tell us anything about the future of Australian democracy? We know that the Coalition was resoundingly defeated. But does Australia’s new patchwork parliament hold out a surprising model for how some of the inherent limits of representative politics can be overcome?

Apple Music recently released its list of the “100 Best Albums”. It was, without question, a clever marketing technique — but one that raises the problem of whether it’s appropriate to rank works of high human achievement in the first place.

There is an inescapable conflict that any policy meant to address housing affordability must contend with: in order to make home-ownership more achievable for some, the value of houses must decrease — thereby offending the way we have been urged to see houses as an instrument of financial accumulation. Professor Victoria Ong ViforJ joins The Minefield to discuss whether there is a solution.

We live in a time when “hot” emotions prevail. It could be that an alternative sentiment, in some ethically complex circumstances, is ambivalence — which is to say, a willingness to withhold judgment, to linger in the interval between two options.

By turning the Solomon Islands into a federal election “issue”, Australia has emphasised the national security implications of their agreement with China. PM Manasseh Sogavare has, in response, asserted their right to “manage our sovereign affairs”. ANU’s Terence Wood joins The Minefield to discuss the tension between security and sovereignty, and what it all means for Solomon Island’s democratic culture.

Few of life’s activities are as morally complicated as eating. If food has become, in our time, a source of nourishment for what Iris Murdoch calls the “fat relentless ego”, what might it mean to transform food into a means of achieving companionability with others?

There are habits of seeing which can corrupt our moral lives, or clutter our vision, or defile our imaginations. Just as there is a “contemptuous gaze”, as Iris Murdoch puts it, there are also “eyes tempered by grace”. So what might it mean to undergo a “fast for the eyes” in order to see the world more clearly?

Of all the ways we interact with the world and with the moral reality of other persons, none is as fundamental as speech. In a time when we are saturated with words, what might it mean to purify our language?

What if the impediments to moral growth are not purely or even primarily external to us? During the month of Ramadan, we explore the inner tension between our tendency toward egotism, craving, and self-deception, and the task of cultivating the virtues of humility, self-restraint, and moral clarity.

There is no doubt that emotions like anger can be a proper response to the persistence of injustice or inequality or prejudice or cruelty in the world. But it can also be exhausting and insatiable in its desire for retribution, or to impose one’s will upon the world. Should we, then, seek to renounce anger?

The question of whether the franchise should be extended to children has become an increasingly pressing topic in political theory. But why would we want them to vote? Is it in the interests of political equality? It is to achieve a specific outcome — say, more future-oriented, climate friendly policies? Or is it to cultivate the necessary democratic virtues?

It is hardly surprising that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been met by fierce, swift, and unified opposition on the part of the West and their allies — who have offered strategic support to the Ukrainian military, and isolated Russia through an unprecedented regime of economic, diplomatic, and cultural sanctions. What might this mean for international responses to other such atrocities elsewhere?

At a time when so many eyes are on international courts, is their apparent failure to protect civilians in Gaza — or to punish the perpetrators of 7 October — further damaging an already shaky public confidence in the concept of international law?

Lying has become so commonplace in politics that it has almost become expected — if not quite accepted. Many politicians who are notoriously promiscuous with the truth even remain relatively popular. Whereas few things infuriate voters like hypocrisy. Should hypocrisy bother us as much as it does? Should we be quite as blasé about political lying as we seem to be?

Works of art, both high and low, can inform and inflect a moral vision of the world. It makes sense to approach works of art with an attentiveness to the light they shed on our lives and our life together. But does this still apply to the award-winning HBO series “Succession”, with its evident delight in cruelty, cunning, and almost virtuosic vulgarity?

Two years ago Scott Morrison raised the drawbridge, effectively sealing “Fortress Australia” off from the rest of the world. What effect has the act of separating Australian citizens and residents from the world and from each other had on our sense of national life, identity, and solidarity? “We” may be “all in this together” — but who, exactly, can be said to count among this “we”?

The debate over the Religious Discrimination Bill has exposed a tension at the heart of the liberal vision of a pluralistic society, in which citizens commit to living together despite their profound disagreement over matters of highest importance. What happens when disagreement becomes a cause of harm?

The practice of compulsory voting, along with the two other pillars of Australia’s electoral system — preferential voting and non-partisan election administration — have kept Australian democracy remarkably stable over the past hundred years. But just how much can we rely on these formal elements of Australian democracy to safeguard Australia’s democratic culture?

The misuse of moral language in public debate is nothing new. But in our social-media saturated age, this misuse has taken on a distinct and rather perfidious form. Morally weighted language is regularly used to grant excessive or abusive claims, and personal or categorical insults, an air of moral seriousness. This kind of language marks the end of conversation. Are we better off without it?

Over the past two months, the conduct of two prominent figures have evoked fierce expressions of public emotion. What explains the intensity of feeling? Have these emotions distorted the public’s judgment, or have they granted that judgment a certain moral clarity?

It’s become a sad commonplace in our time to hear the lines along which democratic societies are now divided. What is often absent, however, is mention of class. Why? Do Korean films like Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, or Hwang Dong-hyuk’s smash hit Squid Game, have anything to teach us? Atlantic staff writer George Packer joins us.

How might we avoid bad faith quotations, served up in vain interests, and locate ourselves, our hearers, our readers, in a community of mutual interest and intellectual wonder — not so much using quotations, as exposing ourselves to their provocation?

They seem innocuous, but since their invention more than two decades ago, emojis have come to permeate our forms of online communication. Indeed, they are the perfect expression of what communication has become in a social-media saturated age.

It’s 18 months since the technology company OpenAI made its wildly popular interface with an advanced large language model — GPT-4 — available to the public. What has ChatGPT done to the habits of thought and consideration that produce distinctly human expression?

Over the last year, there have been a number of high-profile cases where journalists have either landed themselves in legal trouble, or have sparked fierce backlash, due to their conduct on social media. This raises complex problems, not just for the public’s perception of journalists, their impartiality and credibility, but also of the news organisations to which they belong.

Opinion writing plays a disproportionate role in our media eco-system: it drives online traffic, fuels emotion, feeds the forces of polarisation, and promotes an incapacity to understand one another. But is there a different way to think about opinion?

One of the most notable cultural changes to have taken place over the past two decades is the emergence of “prestige television” — which is to say, television as the visual equivalent of literature, and with similar ambitions. What has this shift done to our moral sensibilities, or to our understanding of the shape and demands and limits and possibilities of the moral life?