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.

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?

Now that vaccines are enjoying widespread coverage among wealthy nations, and with the recent emergence of the Omicron variant and rapidly rising rates of infection in the United States and throughout Europe, many states have begun implementing domestic booster campaigns. But this presents thorny ethical problems involving vaccine distribution and global equity.

In a time when so many opinions are clamouring for views in our debauched attention economy, “sh*t-stirring” has become an irresistible strategy to get oneself noticed. But it does so at a cost, not least to the reputational cost of those who practice it — including moral philosophers. So what is the difference between “sh*t-stirring” and something like virtuous provocation?