The Minefield

By ABC listen

What's The Minefield about?

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 Minefield episodes:

04.17.2024
What’s fueling the tension between the courts and the media?
There has been an odd confluence of events over the past couple weeks that has managed to intensify the sense of a conflict between two of our most important democratic institutions: the law and the media.
04.10.2024
What would the moral obligation to avoid civilian deaths look like in Gaza?
Does the failure on the part of Israel to enable the provision of humanitarian aid or to do everything in its power to prevent civilian casualties suggest “a blameworthy indifference to Palestinian lives”?
04.08.2024
PRESENTS — Ideas, "Our Bodies, Our Cells"
This isn't a bonus episode of The Minefield. Instead, we wanted to introduce you to a podcast we think of as a kind of kindred spirit to ours. Given the rapid increase in the number of podcasts over the last...
04.03.2024
Ramadan — the rediscovery of society
It is important to remember that Thoreau’s motivation for withdrawing was neither escapism nor apolitical quietism. The fact that he departed on 4 July signals an invitation to discover a different way of living together.
03.27.2024
Ramadan — the importance of friendship
If Thoreau regards withdrawal and solitude as means by which we learn to escape self-deception, then they may well be little more than preparation for the moral demands friends make of one another.
03.20.2024
Ramadan — the discipline of solitude
Solitude is neither alone-ness nor idleness. It is strenuous and takes practice. Solitude does not simply happen in the way that isolation or loneliness does — it must be inhabited.
03.13.2024
Ramadan — 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?
03.06.2024
Q+A on “the wisdom of crowds”
Waleed Aly, Scott Stephens and philosopher Stephanie Collins field questions from a live studio audience on crowd-behaviour, conformity and the importance of dissent.
02.28.2024
How much credence should we give to “the wisdom of crowds”?
Ever since Plato, “crowds” have been associated with irrationality, emotivism, conformism, short-term thinking, and herd-like behaviour. But what if it turns out that crowds are collectively more intelligent than their individual members?
02.21.2024
When is it right to call some act – or someone – “evil”?
What are we trying to convey when we reach for a word like “evil”? Is it something about a person’s actions or character? Is it what they do or the manner in which they do it?
02.14.2024
From Beyoncé to Taylor Swift — 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...
02.07.2024
What is the harm in “deepfakes” — and what are they doing to democracy?
Over the last 18 months, enormously powerful generative AI tools have been placed in the hands of anyone who wants them; as a consequence, the internet and our social media feeds have been inundated with wholly or partially synthetic content.
01.31.2024
How can trust be cultivated in a time of pervasive suspicion?
Because it is sustained by nothing more substantial than a weave of trusted institutions, shared habits and moral commitments, democracies are highly susceptible to the corrosive effects of distrust; Jedediah Purdy joins Waleed and Scott to discuss the necessary conditions...
01.24.2024
What do we lose by succumbing to conspiracy-mindedness?
Ours is a time when institutional distrust, digital disinformation and mutual suspicion have become pervasive — but can democracy withstand epistemic and social fragmentation of this kind?
01.17.2024
In a screen saturated age, is literacy under threat?
Professor Maryanne Wolf joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens to discuss whether we are entering an age of widespread moral illiteracy — an incapacity to engage in the processes that make up the habit of deep reading.
01.10.2024
What do we lose when we lose the capacity for boredom?
It is fair to say that boredom is a distinctly modern terror. But, as Stan Grant discusses with Waleed and Scott, what if existential boredom points us to our deeper need?
01.03.2024
Goya’s “Saturn” and its moral challenge
Spanish painter Francisco de Goya’s depiction of Saturn eating his son is a haunting portrait of lust and the fear of one’s own finitude. Christos Tsiolkas joins Waleed and Scott to look into that darkness, and discover what looks back.
12.27.2023
Politics, farce ... and Fawlty Towers
Now that John Cleese has announced that the iconic series will return, it’s worth examining what made Fawlty Towers a masterpiece — and whether its interaction with the political climate of the 1970s had anything to do with it.
12.20.2023
What are playlists doing to our ability to listen to music?
Platforms like Spotify have transformed the way people listen to music through their use of recommendation algorithms and customised playlists designed to cater to either a particular activity or a particular mood.
12.13.2023
Dickens’s philosophy of generosity: Revisiting “A Christmas Carol”, 180 years on
Australian novelist Briohny Doyle joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens to examine Charles Dickens’s unforgettable tale of misanthropy and remorse, and discover how its aesthetic techniques and ethical vision continue to speak to us today.
12.06.2023
How much should we expect from the state?
What is a state for? How does its nature, actions, and limits differ from other corporate bodies? Is the relationship of a state to its citizens fundamentally that of a service provider to its clients?
11.29.2023
Should drivers of electric vehicles be taxed more to use the roads?
If we are not careful, the use of incentives to encourage people to purchase electric vehicles could backfire by offending our sense of fairness.
11.22.2023
What is social cohesion, what cultivates it, and what undermines it?
The latest Mapping Social Cohesion report from the Scanlon Foundation paints a complex picture that helps us understand the conditions within which social cohesion is able to strengthen, and those factors which cause it to become brittle and even break...
11.15.2023
What is the moral case for a ceasefire in Gaza?
Calls for an end to the devastation of Gaza, and the death and displacement of its residents, reached a crescendo on Remembrance Day. While the moral case is compelling, it raises questions that are complex and consequential.
11.08.2023
What’s behind the anger? On Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”
Nearly a century after its publication, Australian novelist Charlotte Wood joins Waleed and Scott to discuss what Virginia Woolf’s essay tell us about egotism, contempt, creative freedom and the possibility of moral transformation.
11.01.2023
Do we know what the result of the Voice referendum means?
Because referenda are zero-sum contests, the message they convey is paradoxically both obscure and unambiguous — which is to say, their meaning is open to interpretation and unintentionally harsh.
10.25.2023
Is it time to reconsider Australia’s bipartisan commitment to “stopping the boats”?
Australia recently marked ten years since the introduction of Operation Sovereign Borders — a policy whereby refugees entering Australian waters by boat were met with unwavering, military-led deterrence.
10.18.2023
Some deaths matter more to us than others — but should they?
The civilian massacres in Israel on 7 October and the devastation inflicted on residents of Gaza both make claims on our humanity, on our capacity to recognise and respond to the deaths of others — but some find these claims mutually...
10.11.2023
Can young people stay politically engaged without becoming disillusioned with democracy?
One of the great paradoxes of democracy is that those who will have to bear the consequences of the political decisions we make now have little-to-no say in the decision-making process itself.
10.04.2023
Travel is bad for the climate — but what if it’s also bad for us?
Most of us are aware of the environmental costs associated with international tourism. But have we considered whether travel enhances or diminishes our moral lives?
09.27.2023
What’s the point of blame? When is it right to forgive?
Blame and forgiveness are two of the most natural responses to wrongdoing — and yet, increasingly, these responses are viewed with a degree of suspicion, if not outright hostility, due to the myriad ways they can go wrong.
09.20.2023
Can democracy withstand the strategic use of online confusion?
Is there any way of retrieving the deliberative conditions under which democratic life is possible, when the social media cacophony makes hearing one another so hard?
09.13.2023
In a critical age, are we losing the ability to say why we love what we love?
We’ve reached the point in mass culture, to say nothing of the “higher culture” of academia, when criticism is the norm. To the point that we increasingly define ourselves by what we hate.
09.06.2023
Facing the darkness: The moral challenge of Goya’s “Saturn devouring his son” (1823)
Spanish painter Francisco de Goya’s depiction of Saturn eating his son is a haunting portrait of lust and the fear of one’s own finitude. Christos Tsiolkas joins Waleed and Scott to look into that darkness, and discover what looks back.
08.30.2023
When is a referendum an unethical way of resolving a political question?
Now that the PM has announced the date of the referendum, it’s worth remembering that the zero-sum nature of referenda can unleash the kind of bruising rhetoric that does lasting damage to a political community, no matter the outcome.
08.23.2023
Should climate change make us rethink the ethics of nuclear energy?
Opposition leader Peter Dutton has recently reintroduced the prospect of nuclear power as part of Australia’s commitment to decarbonisation. But what is behind the push for nuclear, and does it make sense in a nation like this?
08.16.2023
1 May 1956: Was Elizabeth Anscombe right to charge Harry Truman with murder?
When Oxford University proposed to confer an honorary degree on the man who ordered an atomic bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe condemned the decision as “shar[ing] in the guilt of a bad action by...
08.09.2023
8 September 1974: Was Gerald Ford right to pardon Richard Nixon?
When US President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon of his crimes, did he thereby place the presidency above the law — or did he understand a hard reality about democratic politics that should inform the multiple prosecutions of Donald Trump?
08.02.2023
Is there any benefit to boredom?
It is fair to say that boredom is a distinctly modern terror. But, as Stan Grant discusses with Waleed and Scott, what if existential boredom points us to our deeper need?
07.26.2023
Does AI pose a threat to human life — and if so, what kind?
Are the doomsday scenarios associated with Artificial “Super” Intelligence distracting us from the ways that the pervasive use of AI is already corrupting our use of language and the transmission of knowledge?
07.19.2023
Are cluster munitions a “lesser evil” in the war in Ukraine?
Earlier this month, US President Joe Biden made the surprising decision to supply Ukraine with cluster munitions. Does the threat posed by Russia outweigh the moral considerations that place such weapons beyond the pale for many other nations?
07.12.2023
Why do we distance ourselves from our age?
Western culture’s association of ageing with decline and obsolescence fuels (and is fuelled by) a desire to dissociate ourselves from our age — but such forms of subtle and overt ageism express contempt for something that is essentially human.
07.05.2023
What does it take to address a “wicked problem” like political corruption?
The newly formed National Anti-Corruption Commission faces both unrealistic expectations and a potentially fraught political climate. Professor A.J. Brown joins Waleed and Scott to discuss how it can restore popular faith in democratic politics.
06.28.2023
What are playlists doing to our ability to listen to music?
Platforms like Spotify have transformed the way people listen to music through their use of recommendation algorithms and customised playlists designed to cater to either a particular activity or a particular mood.
06.21.2023
How to respond responsibly to the “cost of living crisis”?
The tendency over the past four decades has been for governments to try to shield their populations from energy shocks and their associated “cost of living” crises — but is such a response truly sustainable?
06.14.2023
Does the Voice to Parliament undermine Australia’s political traditions?
The proposed Voice to Parliament is particularly susceptible to two arguments: that it violates the principle of equal citizenship; and that it will enshrine a divisive form of “identity politics” in Australian public life. Whether these arguments hold depends on...
06.07.2023
“Succession” — from tyranny to tragedy
The final season of HBO’s prestige television series Succession confirms that the various characters’ willingness to betray, deceive, manipulate and enact an unrelenting cruelty upon one another has all but assured that, in the end, everyone loses.
05.31.2023
Are Labor’s “stage three” tax cuts unjust and unethical?
It’s been a long time since a policy adopted by the federal government has presented such a knot of party-political, parliamentary, social and ethical problems — Professor Miranda Stewart joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens to try to untangle it.
05.24.2023
Is Stan Grant’s decision the result of a broken media?
At the end of Monday’s Q+A, Wiradjuri man and journalist Stan Grant stated: “We in the media must ask if we are truly honouring a world worth living in.” Why aren’t more taking him seriously?
05.17.2023
What is the human cost of success? Revisiting HBO’s Succession
As the fourth and final series of the HBO television show “Succession” approaches its finale, Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens revisit the first three seasons. Why does this show matter? What does it tell us, despite its opulence and obscenity,...

What's The Minefield about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

The Minefield episodes:

What’s fueling the tension between the courts and the media?

What would the moral obligation to avoid civilian deaths look like in Gaza?

PRESENTS — Ideas, "Our Bodies, Our Cells"

Ramadan — the rediscovery of society

Ramadan — the importance of friendship

Ramadan — the discipline of solitude

Ramadan — the necessity of withdrawing

Q+A on “the wisdom of crowds”

How much credence should we give to “the wisdom of crowds”?

When is it right to call some act – or someone – “evil”?

From Beyoncé to Taylor Swift — what’s behind the mass appeal of live music events?

What is the harm in “deepfakes” — and what are they doing to democracy?

How can trust be cultivated in a time of pervasive suspicion?

What do we lose by succumbing to conspiracy-mindedness?

In a screen saturated age, is literacy under threat?

What do we lose when we lose the capacity for boredom?

Goya’s “Saturn” and its moral challenge

Politics, farce ... and Fawlty Towers

What are playlists doing to our ability to listen to music?

Dickens’s philosophy of generosity: Revisiting “A Christmas Carol”, 180 years on

How much should we expect from the state?

Should drivers of electric vehicles be taxed more to use the roads?

What is social cohesion, what cultivates it, and what undermines it?

What is the moral case for a ceasefire in Gaza?

What’s behind the anger? On Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”

Do we know what the result of the Voice referendum means?

Is it time to reconsider Australia’s bipartisan commitment to “stopping the boats”?

Some deaths matter more to us than others — but should they?

Can young people stay politically engaged without becoming disillusioned with democracy?

Travel is bad for the climate — but what if it’s also bad for us?

What’s the point of blame? When is it right to forgive?

Can democracy withstand the strategic use of online confusion?

In a critical age, are we losing the ability to say why we love what we love?

Facing the darkness: The moral challenge of Goya’s “Saturn devouring his son” (1823)

When is a referendum an unethical way of resolving a political question?

Should climate change make us rethink the ethics of nuclear energy?

1 May 1956: Was Elizabeth Anscombe right to charge Harry Truman with murder?

8 September 1974: Was Gerald Ford right to pardon Richard Nixon?

Is there any benefit to boredom?

Does AI pose a threat to human life — and if so, what kind?

Are cluster munitions a “lesser evil” in the war in Ukraine?

Why do we distance ourselves from our age?

What does it take to address a “wicked problem” like political corruption?

What are playlists doing to our ability to listen to music?

How to respond responsibly to the “cost of living crisis”?

Does the Voice to Parliament undermine Australia’s political traditions?

“Succession” — from tyranny to tragedy

Are Labor’s “stage three” tax cuts unjust and unethical?

Is Stan Grant’s decision the result of a broken media?

What is the human cost of success? Revisiting HBO’s Succession