At a time when the Australian community seems to be so deeply divided along multiple faultlines, there was something somewhat heartening about being able to share a common outrage. That’s only word that captures the depth of public response that greeted a now infamous video in which two nurses at Bankstown Hospital seemed to express extreme anti-Israeli/antisemitic sentiments and allegedly boasted about killing Israeli patients in their care.

While some have used the video to exacerbate tensions within Australian society, the broader response points to a recognition of the sacred obligation of heath workers to attend to the vulnerable bodies in their care. It is an obligation that was reaffirmed immediately and forcefully after the video came to light.

The Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation led the way:

“We know that health and peace are deeply connected — one cannot exist without the other. Through our commitment to care, compassion, and justice, we continue to uphold these values and stand against all forms of violence, hatred, and discrimination. Our strength lies in our unity, and we must always uphold the principles of respect, kindness, and understanding toward one another regardless of background, faith, or identity.”

And then there is Mike Freelander, a paediatrician and the federal Labor member for the NSW seat of Macarthur:

“We health professionals have an obligation to care, treat and protect our patients’ health and this is an obligation we take immensely seriously. This is a sacred responsibility that is universal, no matter which God we pray to or none.”

And finally, Jamal Rifi, a Lebanese Australian doctor, who said:

“No health practitioner should ever treat anyone differently based on their religion, culture or nationality. We treat them as human beings.”

It is hard to remember a time when shared institutions (such as hospitals and the courts) and shared commitments (the obligation to care for patients, or the dignity of the accused) have been more important. Their moral significance lay in their indiscriminacy. When hate speech and other forms of discrimination occur in such institutions, it can damage the faith we have in the institutions themselves.

In 2016, the Western Bulldogs made an improbable run to the AFL Grand Final. The seventh-place team would beat the minor premiers, the Sydney Swans, and end a six-decade drought. But their longest serving player, the erstwhile captain and heart-and-soul of the team, Bob Murphy, would not take the field. In the third round, a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament had ended the 17-year veteran’s season.

After their triumph, Murphy watched his teammates walk up to the dais, one by one, to receive their premiership medal. He felt elation, and pride, at his team’s success. But there was an undeniable separation between him and them. As he wrote in his memoir, Leather Soul:

“The Dogs sat atop the football mountain as famous victors and I was part of that, but the 22 players on the field had just become football immortals. There was a clear line between the 22 who played and the rest of us. That’s just how it is in our game.”

The secret to the Bulldogs’ success was “team over individual” — and no one embodied that ethos more than Bob Murphy. He tried to console himself that it couldn’t be any different after their Grand Final victory.

But then the Bulldogs’ coach, Luke Beveridge, said into the microphone, “I’d like to call Bob Murphy to the stand …”

What did this experience teach Murphy about the emotional cords that bind teams together, about the importance of shared stories, about the centrality of connection?

There are few jobs in professional sports that are more important, and more unforgiving, than that of coach. Their most significant work is invisible to the fans. When things go wrong, the coach is usually the first to be blamed. When the team is enjoying success, it is the players that typically reap the accolades.

Coaches can make or break a club. They can transform mid-tier teams to genuine contenders, and they can utterly “lose the locker room”.

But the weight of responsibility that many coaches feel is not just the expectation to win. It’s the cultivation of a winning culture — creating the kind of environment that encourages players to sacrifice for one another, and strengthening the bonds that enabling them to withstand the dangers of failure and success.

Athletes would seem to be the embodiments of strength, discipline, autonomy, self-reliance. Of all people, we would expect them to be invulnerable to the moments of self-doubt and weakness that afflict the rest of us.

And yet, particularly after serious injuries or during long periods of convalescence and rehabilitation, many athletes experience intensified forms of the vulnerability — the dependency upon others, the dis-ability, even — that are essential to the human condition.

So what can the experience of physical limitation on the part of elite athletes tell us about what Alasdair MacIntyre calls “the virtues of acknowledged dependence”?

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.

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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